Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/08/26
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On 26 Aug 2006 at 22:04, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote: > Yeah Ted, but did you ever do an Eskimo roll in a kayak while holding > your Leica? > Well, I'm not Ted, it wasn't an Eskimo Roll, it wasn't a kayak, and I wasn't holding the Leica, but I HAVE done a swiftwater capsize in a 20' Old Town canoe with an M4P around my neck.... That was Memorial Day 1997. I was a trainee guide for a river- runner, we were taking a trip down the Rio Grande in Big Bend, and I was paired with a front-seater who said he had a fair bit of canoeing background (apparently all of it flatwater, though; he didn't know JACK about rivers.) We came into one of the cliff turns in Boquillas, got close to the rock wall, and just as I'm swinging the bow over to ride the pillow around the curve, the passenger in the front seat leans WAY out AWAY from the wall as far as he can and goes for a high upstream draw stroke. (He told me later that he was afraid we'd hit the wall.) Well, we were already loaded heavy (the 20 footers carried the heavy stuff; we had the kitchen gear with lots of cast iron dutch ovens and about 40 gallons of water) and the unexpected shift from him dropped the upstream gunwale into the river before I could react.... and the next thing I know I'm looking UP at both the surface of the water and the open side of the canoe about six feet above me...... Needless to say the camera was totally under water for at least a couple of minutes. (Hard to say closer than that; my waterproof watch wasn't.) The film was, obviously, a write off; I rinsed the camera in about a quart of my allocation of clean water and it spent the next three hours sitting on a shaded rock in the 100 degree warmth, at 6% humidity. All the other gear was in the sun (110-115), but I wanted to keep the camera a little cooler. The stuff lashed to the canoe in the river bags and dryboxes was fine, of course, but I was shooting, so I had the camera out. When the clothes and gear dried, we reloaded the canoe, I reloaded the camera, and we went on our way. The rest of the pix from the trip were fine; I just lost the one roll. I keep thinking I should probably send it in for a CLA, but so far everything works normally -- I was using it just this morning. Just from curiosity, how do you manage an Eskimo roll with a Leica in one hand? Unless you've got some unconventional anatomy that'd leave you with only one hand on the paddle and I don't see how you could get the leverage.... -- R. Clayton McKee http://www.rcmckee.com Photojournalist rcmckee@rcmckee.com P O Box 571900 voice/fax 713/783-3502 Houston, TX 77257-1900 cell phone # on request