All thing Greenlandic Tuesday, December 19, 2006

So I've put the finishing touches to the first completed section of "This is the Sea 3" - it's about Greenland-style rolling featuring Cheri Perry and Freya Hoffmeister. I'm really excited about it because it's got some fantastic shots in it, including various angles of Cheri doing the straight jacket roll, and of course Freya doing her famous handstand in the kayak. Cheri starts it off by talking about how the different traditional rolls developed, which is through Greenlanders going out in their kayaks to hunt seals and being capsized while sorting out their hunting equipment or while they were entangled in their hunting line. Rolling up from a compromising position was often a matter of life or death. So I decided I'd like to use a few photographs of Greenlandic hunters to show what Cheri was talking about and a few people put me onto a fabulous resource. The Danish Polar centre has a wonderful collection of old photographs from Greenland including loads of kayaking images. I even found the one on the cover of Harvey Golden's new book!

You can browe the photos for free at www.arktiskebilleder.dk The database is in Danish only but Kirsten Klüver from the Polar Centre gave me some great tips. if you look for kajakker you will have all kayak-photos, starting with the oldest. You can limit the search by writing kajakker fangst (kayaks hunting), but you might miss some relevant photos. Or just search for kajak to bring up even more photos. I'm using 4 photos form here in the DVD and I struggled to chose which ones because there are so many fascinating shots. If you want to use the photos for anything then Kirsten can send you them at full resolution for a small fee ( depending on what you want to use if for). You can email Kirsten at
Needless to say these are 2 of the images she sent me ( although I didn't use either of these!)

So while I'm on the Greenland theme, in 2007 Cackle TV will be the first place in the UK where you can buy to Harvey Golden's new book, "Kayaks of Greenland" .

The book is a complete look at the history and development of the Greenlandic Kayak from 1600 - 2000. Harvey is shipping a limited number over to Wales so if anyone on this side of the pond wants one then send me an email. I'll put them on the website when they arrive but if you want to save on postage, I'll have the books with me at the Outdoor Show in Birmingham in March and the Anglesey Symopsium in May (the 580page book crammed with diagrams, photos and information is pretty heavy!!)

So this blog post is not about me for once!! If I carry on like this I'll turn into Derrick!?