I said, "fjord" not "fnord"....

Tempting, eh?

My good friend David Blanc disappears every year around May and returns to Le Burgaud in mid-September.  He Summers in the beautifully-situated town of Tadoussac, Québec, where he operates a small business, Kayak Aventure, guiding people on visits to the Saguenay fjord of the mighty St. Lawrence River.

David

David fell in love with this place after a visit in May, 2010 and returned that very same Summer in order to follow a training program with the Fédération Québécoise du Canot et du Kayak in order to become a certified guide.  He began working immediately.  David was eventually offered the the opportunity to purchase a part of the business and has been his own boss for the last two years.

David is a good friend, but he's also someone I'd trust with my life out on the estuary, where weather conditions can deteriorate rapidly.  He's got the courage, presence of mind and general common sense required to make the good decisions that could save your life.

Getting a glimpse of a surfacing whale, magnificent though it is, isn't worth your life now, is it?  Not to dwell on the dangers, it's actually quite safe, but in the wrong hands you could find yourself in unpleasant circumstances.

Photos of the fjord are amazing, and David tells me stories of a raucous season with plenty of opportunities to rave up in the local tavern, or merely chill out under the stars in the small coastal village (permanent pop. circa 800). Tadoussac is still considered to be located in the wilderness.

Tadoussac as seen from the St. Lawrence

So, this is basically a plug.  If you're looking for a fun outdoor vacation in a place which is geographically close to the US but culturally bears a strong imprint of French culture, why not go north, young man?

David also said it was OK to let you know that if you tell him you learned about his enterprise on this website, he'd be willing to offer a little discount.  So, go for it!

The English version of the Kayak Aventure website:

http://www.kayakaventure.com/presentation-english/

Oh, yeah.  Ask him about the time he sailed from France to Thailand and he and the crew outwitted Somali pirates in the waters off the Horn of Africa.  Great story!

Bloop!

A couple of posts back I listed a bunch of mysterious sounds recorded by the NOAA in the world's oceans. I’d like to focus in on one of them a little more closely: the mysterious “Bloop” -- one of six recorded sounds that the NOAA has made public. The mystery sounds were recorded by an array of underwater sound sensors originally set up to track Soviet subs -- but they picked up plenty of other sounds, too, like whales and earthquakes. They also picked up a few sounds that are unidentified -- sounds like the “Bloop”, which you can hear (sped up to 16x speed) by clicking on this link.

So what’s so special about the mysterious Bloop? Three things:

1. It’s alive! Everyone -- every article -- agrees that it is biological in origin! ^[1]

2. It’s the biggest animal on Earth! Even a blue whale can't bloop so loud!

3. And nobody knows what it is!

That’s so cool that I’m going to repeat myself: The biggest animal on the planet is out there in the depths of the oceans, and nobody knows what the hell it is! Some have speculated that it is a giant squid, but CNN quotes marine biologist Phil Lobel from Boston University, whose specialties include “fish bioacoustics”, as saying, "Cephalopods have no gas-filled sac, so they have no way to make that type of noise".

We love a beautiful mystery, and this, folks, is a big one…

Amazingly, however, I stumbled across the answer to this mystery while reading comics with my kids on the very day that I drafted this here post. According to Namor,^[2] "The largest living thing in all the world [is] ... Giganto!" Check it out, and quake in your boots, humanity:







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Footnotes:

^[1] Except for a few that don't. Bah. That guy probably gets his jollies from telling kids why there ain't no Santa. Probably tells widows there ain't no god, too.

^[2] See page 15 of The Fantastic Four, Volume 1 # 4 (page 93 of the 2005 Omnibus), drawn by King Kirby!