Sixth Annual Vajosuo Beer Ride

November means mostly depressing weather and darkness in Southern Finland, in addition to the annual beer ride to Vajosuo. This mountain biking event was now to take place for the sixthtime. The concept is still simple: Ride the bikes for a few hours on very demanding trails, stay at the Vajosuo shelter for the night drinking beer and eating and then ride for another few hours in the morning after a few hours of sleep.

Aquarius Sea Lion kayak initial review

I'm really not interested in doing product reviews, since the web is already flooded with them. They are usually also of rather poor quality, since people use them to draw traffic to their websites, without having a long enough experience with the products being reviewed. Since this blog is maintained on a pure hobby basis, I have no need to resort to that trick and hence have only done the occasional first impression post. My new kayak, which is of a brand rather unknown outside Eastern Europe, has however generated some requests to review it, so I'm doing an initial review post about it.

Vigu First Aid Course

A week before the Mammoth March I participated in the four day Vigu Outdoor First Aid course, which gives the Red Cross First Aid 2 equivalent certification needed by Finnish law for providers of outdoor program services, e.g guiding.

The Mammoth March 2014

It was again time for the Mammoth March, in my opinion the best cycling event of the year. The idea is to navigate from checkpoint to checkpoint starting in the evening when it is already dark. There are several different distances and you can go either by bike or by foot. We naturally chose the longest bike distance with 25 checkpoints and 170 km (the theoretical best route for runners). Our group consisted of the usual gang, which was complemented by Tommi a year ago or so. Matti opted to run this year as well, and managed to get through the 100 km course. Hence our team, MTB-Turku All Night Long, consisted of me, Toni, Jarkko and Tommi.

Food course and Vigu 20 year anniversary party

It was time for another Vigu (Wilderness Guide) course, this time the food course. This was not a course about how to spice up your freeze-dried food on a Trangia, but rather how to make really good food for paying customers, when you have access to good ingredients. We were also told to enjoy the feeling of being hungry before the course, since there would be no opportunity for that during the course.

First paddle

I had planned to go with Vigu course mate Anna on a kayaking overnighter to celebrate her finishing her new kayak, which she built entirely herself. For different reasons, the overnighter was changed into a day trip, but as an added bonus I had a new kayak myself, bought the day before.

A late summer kayaking weekend

I really got into kayaking again this summer after a long break, so it felt natural to join the local paddling club, Saaristomeren Melojat, to get in touch with more people doing kayaking. The club arranges trips and courses and an interesting one that also fit my schedule was to take place in the middle of September. I got in touch with Kristian, who arranged the trip and he interviewed me by phone to see how I would fit into the trip. A useful thing for a guide to do, though the final truth is revealed on water. The trip promised fall weather, paddling in the darkness and maybe bigger waves.