Thule 579XT Canoe Carrier Review

     It really pains me to purchase Thule products, as they have insane markups, for a few pieces of simple tubing, steel brackets, molded plastic parts and straps, although they don’t have much competition – Yakima racks are the only so-called competition, but it’s really more of a duopoly, since they both have insane markups.  I have half a mind to design my own roof rack accessories and sell them, there’s ridiculous margins in it, and they are simple parts to manufacture.  Not only that, the few and far between distributors in Canada seem to think marking up the already high US cost an additional 50% for US MSRPis deserved, just because Canadians are used to paying higher retail prices fr everything without any real reason for it.

   Despite my griping, I did purchase a Thule 579XT kit off of eBay in the US for a somewhat decent price of around $80 last year.  Most people transporting canoes seem to use those foam blocks that sit on your roof and dual tiedowns on the front and the back to secure the canoe, but it just seems a little weird to me to not secure the canoe itself to the roof.  As well, you have to put the blocks in the right places, they scratch your roof, and if they are positioned not quite right and slide of pop out of position, you all of a sudden have a canoe that isn’t really secured all that well.

     I already had a Thule rack, so I found the 579XT and liked the design of it, over other more conventional canoe racks.  The 579XT is an accessory kit, which means you already have to have the base rack mounted to your car, and it’s just the bits and pieces to securing the canoe.  The kit comes with four dual shot plastic molded brackets with a softer grip surface on top where it contacts the canoe gunwales.  The brackets also have wingnut type knobs to prevent the brackets from sliding around and underneath each bracket there is a notch intended for you to route the straps through.  It comes with two of the standard tiedown straps which also have silicone protectors around the buckles.  I must admit is a nice touch and a good feature to have as you need to throw the buckle over the canoe to reach it from the other side when securing it.  There is one catch though, the protectors have to be slid down around the buckle for it to protect your canoe, they slide up the strap in order for you to reach the strap release lever.

     Along with the brackets and the straps, the 579XT comes with two hooks, ropes and two nylon straps with loop ends intended for wrapping around the carry handles on the canoe before hooking the loops with the rope (phew), one on each end.  I personally don’t use all of that, and just hook the front carry handle directly with the hooks on the ratchet buckle, one on each side which reduces the side to side movement of the canoe in high crosswinds.  The two straps on the middle section, looping under the bar on each side allow you to easily tighten the straps very securely and not have to worry about the canoe sliding, foam pads getting loose, etc.  Another thing with this rack system that is a good bonus is that the canoe rides up at least 6 inches higher than using foam blocks.  It also depends on the canoe design itself, some canoes will hang down in front of your windshield quite a bit and obscure a significant amount of your view, some to the point where I wonder if it’s legal to drive the vehicle, but my canoe and rack system with the 579XT doesn’t obstruct my view at all.

   I’d recommend the 579XT as a canoe carrier, if you already own a Thule rack.  I have a dual system on my car that has a single kayak cradle in the middle and the canoe carrier on the sides.  Sometimes I install a Thule Peloton bike rack to one of the sides of the kayak rack as well.  It makes for a strange looking rack but it’s multifunctional.

Elora Gorge Tubing

    Ontario must be proud of the recent commercialization of Elora Gorge tubing, since I see it on Ontario ads they show before movies start nowadays.  Elora Gorge itself is fantastic.  It's a strange world.  Very close to Guelph the City I live in, but at the same time it's rather alien with it's striking scenery.  It's a canyon cut deeply into the local limestone geology which the beginnings of the Grand River flowing through it, on it's way to Lake Erie.  It's walls are almost vertical and you do feel insignificant when you are standing inside the gorge.  There's many caves to explore lining the walls of the gorge.  The water is quite shallow most times of the year, and the flow through the gorge is mainly controlled by the Grand River Conservation Area Shand Dam just upstream of it.
     You can hike along it's perimeter making for a decent day hike, camp at the Elora Gorge Conservation Area, or go tubing through the gorge along the Grand River, which also flows through the conservation area.  I found out today that the commercialization of the tubing part has kinda ruined something that was pretty cool I had experienced in the past. 
     My first encounter with Elora Gorge was 20 years ago.  I myself was in University in Waterloo about a 40 minute drive away, and my friend was going to University of Guelph and invited me out for the weekend as he wanted to go to Elora Gorge.  I had never heard of it before, much less know where it was.  Elora is a 15 minute drive from Guelph.  We got there mid morning and had to go to a local truck tire mounting shop.  We 'purchased' an inflated inner tube for around 20 bucks and I think they gave us something like $10 back at the end of the day of returned the tube to them.   You walked down to the gorge and got to the water through a crack in the cliffs.  From there, you floated down the river alternating between short stretches of class 2-3 rapids and lazy river type of flow where you slowly drift downstream.  To be honest, the tubing is a little overrated, it's fun, something to do, but not super amazing.  Depending on the time of year flow can be a little low and you scraped your butt on some spots.  There is one place where the rapids are pretty gnarly, and you could get out and walk back up past them to run them another time.  Noone wore helmets or PFDs.  Oh and the best part - people brought beer with them down the river.  Some people made their own mini inner tub/cooler just for the beer.  Yeah, pretty awesome.  And noone from the Conservation area gave a crap what you did in the gorge.  The whole affair took an hour or so.   Then you got out and walked back to town carrying the tube, or rolling it along the ground.

     But times have changed, and not for the better, in my opinion.  Today I wanted to go tubing.  It was 27 degrees out.  So me and a couple friends headed out to Elora and got to the Conservation Area.  I've read a bit online how you now are supposed to register with the conservation area to go tubing.  Well, we got to the area at about 2pm and the sign read 'Tubing Equipment Sold Out'.  After researching online, it is common for the tubing equipment to be gone by 10:30 and tough titties, they have no more, you can't go tubing.  And by equipment, they mean you are required to sign a waiver, wear a helmet and a PFD.  And now they also require you to pay for Conservation Area day pass fees, and on top of that, pay for tubing registration fees which they give you a wristband for proof of purchase.  This whole deal now costs $5.50 for entrance fees, $3.00 for tubing fee, plus it's a $25 rental for the tube, helmet and pfd, if you don't own these things.  That amounts to $37.86 after tax each person, way expensive. Just a huge money grab because the conservation area happens to be situated along a good stretch of the gorge to do some tubing. And sorry, it's an absolutely blatant ripoff, period.  It's not worth that much.  There's no arguing about that.  The maintenance of the gorge itself is zilch other than the ridiculous Disneyland style infrastructure they have created a massive galvanized staircase for access to the water which wasn't needed before. The equipment is very cheap.  I'm not sure a helmet is necessary, but a PFD is a good idea to have. I am not sure if it is legal to control access to the waterway and tell you what equipment you need to wear due to the of the Navigable Waterways Act.  And there's also the commercialization and promotion of it.  This means there's huge crowds of people, and people that shouldn't be on the river in the first place are participating in it like kids that are too young, people that can't swim, etc.  It's for teenagers and young adults mainly who have decent swimming skills.  That's really the only kind of person who used to use it.
     So, today I was glad that they had no more equipment left.  Instead, we just walked up the Irvine River.  The Grand River and the Irvine Creek merge at Elora, but both have canyons.  Up that way, there were no people at all.  It was nice and peaceful, we found a slightly deeper swimming hole area to chill out in the water and just hang out, enjoying the beautiful scenery.  And it didn't cost anything.  Sad to say it, but Elora is another place that commercialization and development has ruined a previously cool activity.

Nikon D300S to D600 Transition Comparisons

     So, I’ve been casually using my Nikon D600 a bit lately and have been getting more familiar with it.  I come from a D300S, which I had for maybe 6 years prior to getting the D600.  So now I know enough to do a comparison between the two.  The pros, cons, and some things that jut need adjusting when switching between the two cameras.  I might say, that I never fully used the D300S.  I use a lot of the basic stuff, but not so much the plethora of adjustment in the camera.  In any case, here goes..

Quick comparison of switching to a Nikon D600 from a Nikon D300S:

Pros

- I’ll start with the obvious: better low light performance, and depth of field control on the FX sensor

- Connector doors on the left side are much improved on the D600.  Instead of the one piece rubber door, that is consistently a pint to seal, the D600 has three separate doors with proper hinges.  Yay.

- The D600 has Scene modes, like a point and shoot.  At first I thought it was pretty cheesy and almost offensive to have these on a close to $2000 camera body, but some of the odd ones may come in handy instead of having to fiddle with 5 or more adjustments.

- Custom Menu – the D600 has a menu at the bottom that you can select the popular menu selections you frequently use out of any of the categories to have them all in one menu for quick access.  Yay again.  No longer are the days where I have to scroll though pages of menu items I never or rarely ever use, just to get to the white balance or ISO auto adjustment menus.

- The body is actually lighter for the D600 than D300S.  Although that is offset by the heavier lenses you have to use for full frame sensors.

- The D600 has a better battery latch mechanism than the D600.  It is purpose built with a latch for the battery and a spring to eject the battery, with the door providing only the function of covering the battery..  The D300S has a lower cost design that the door itself is the latch holding in the battery, and the springs are the actual battery contacts.

- Most functions to control the ISO, focus, exposure, white balance, and even size/type of files can be accessed through the rear buttons, holding them and rotating the selectors instead of having to go into the camera menus in the D300S.  That’s awesome.

Cons

- Battery life when left on:  for some reason, the battery seems to drain fast on the D600 when I inadvertently leave the camera on while uploading photos to my computer or whatever.  My D300 seemed to last much longer when this happens.  Leave the D600 on overnight and the battery is dead.  The D300 would only drain a small amount.

- Having to switch battery formats is a bit of a negative, since I had extra batteries for my D300S I could have used.  Although the reason for the format change was to lessen the potential to short the contacts out.  And the new ones have more capacity, so that is a positive to offset the negative.

- I use a Nikon AH-4 handstrap with my camera.  On my D300S, it didn’t interfere with the battery door and battery removal.  On the D600 it does, and I have to rotate the bottom plate out of the way (thankfully don’t have to remove it) to remove the battery.

- The D600 only allows up to a three bracket exposure set for some reason.  Despite the higher inherent dynamic range on the D600, I would much prefer the options on the D300S with up to 9, I don’t know why it can’t have more, it’s only a software change.  On the good side, you can choose a spread up to 2ev on the D600.  The D300S was only 1ev max.

- The controls for light metering pattern, and autofocus have been changed significantly.  I think I prefer the D300S style better, with the hard switches for both, the focus at the top of the back panel and the light metering on the bottom.  Instead, now you have to hold a button down and use the selector wheels to change things.  It’s just not as quick.

- The soft flash button.  The flash doesn’t automatically pop up when the button is pressed for the flash as the D300S had.  On the D600, the flack will pop up when you press the shutter.

- Focus range of field – the D300S has more autofocus points and when choosing a single point focus, has a greater range in the visible field, if I want to focus on something that is near the edge of the field of view.

Other Things

- The zoom in and zoom out buttons for viewing photos are reversed on the D600.  Instead of zooming out, I keep hitting the erase photo lock button instead.

- Bracketing on D300S I needed to trigger each shot by itself.  D600 it does the bracketing sequence automatically, which is probably a good thing, since the photos are in close succession.

- The size/weight of the battery charger.  Seriously, this MH-25 beast of a charger is unnecessarily huge and a terrible design..  I spend a good deal of time lugging around gear to take landscape photography.  A small, lightweight charger would have been more appropriate and useful.  Why design such a large charger for no reason except to impress??









Please excuse the photos, I was feeling lazy/drunk today to produce some decent comparison photos :-)

Outdoor Technology Turtle Shell Bluetooth Speaker

  

   Sometimes I like to listen to music car camping or even sparingly while backcountry camping, while packing up gear, waiting out a storm or just relaxing after a day on the water or trail.  Some would call that blasphemy, but whatever.  I get my fill of quiet time, reflection and solace regardless.  I could use my android phone with headphones or even the speaker, but headphones are restrictive and bothersome and unsocial, while the speaker’s quality is kinda tinny, and has no base.  A better solution is the Outdoor Technology Turtle Shell Bluetooth speaker.

      It can connect to my phone by Bluetooth or direct wire tot e headphone jack, and it amplifies the sound with an onboard battery, amplifier and  dual speakers.  Even better still, it is designed for the outdoors as a rugged piece of equipment, dust and highly water resistant, according to them.  The speaker also has a built in microphone if you want to use it for taking a call.  It is a simple piece of electronics, with a couple button, up and down volumes.  The jacks are the charging jack and the 3.5mm headphone jack.  That’s it.  And an on/off switch that glows different colors if it is charging or in use.  It has a long 7-10 hour playing time from the battery, which seems to be true the time I have used mine, although I haven’t done any scientific studies, it does last long.  I haven’t yet abused it either, so I will see how it goes in the long run.

     The casing is two parts.  The upper angled stealth bomber looking portion is metal, covered in some kind of silicone like coating.  The lower part is molded rubber or Thermoplastic urethane (TPU).  On the bottom are four feet, and a ¼”-20 threded insert, same as the bottom of a camera to mount to things using your favorite camera mount.  It comes with a stow bag, a 3.5mm to 3.5mm patch cable, a wall charger with a usb outlet, and a usb charger cable for use with the wall charger or plugging into a computer.

The sound is pretty big from the small package, the response across all frequencies is good.  Many people remark on how great the bass is.

     My one and only complaint so far with this is their choice for a proprietary connector for the charging, instead of a standard micro USB cable?  Why??  Why would you do that?  All the thing needs is the 5V output from the USB..  might as well use a micro usb like everyone uses nowadays, so I would always have a cable around and access to charge it instead of having to remember to lug the special cable around.  I just can’t think of a single reason to use a special cable connector, instead of using a micro USB.  Everything else about the design seems to have been well thought out.

     This is a great speaker to use outdoors -  at the beach, campsite, or even in your garden or on your patio.  There is a bike mount available for it too.  I have yet to try it while kayaking, strapped to my deck while connected to my phone in a dry bag by bluetooth, but I suspect it would do well.

 

Links:

Outdoor Technology Bluetooth Speakers