Bluesky account, SUPdate, and new GPS watch

Well, gee. It has been a while since I've made a blog post. Blogs are so "old internet" now. Gears are churning in my mind, though, and I'm thinking that maybe old internet has some advantages over the extremely algorithm-driven, addictive, doom-scrolling-for-profit, orchestrated-and-manipulated-by-oligarchs-aligned-with-fascists disaster that is "new internet." 

Towards that end I've created an account on supposedly-less-worse-than-facebook-and-twitter/X social media platform "bluesky" - https://bsky.app/profile/jamesgdouglass.bsky.social

Bluesky doesn't allow posts more than 300 words, but that could kind of work out if I put long rants and picture-filled posts here on my blog, and just link to them on bluesky. Unlike facebook, I think bluesky doesn't deprioritize posts linking to outside websites. 

As for personal news, I've been working a lot trying to keep up with my teaching and research responsibilities at FGCU and I haven't been able to do as much watersports as I would like. I am still paddleboarding at least once a week, though, and I've changed paddleboards. Unlike the pre-hurricane-Ian days when I lived in a house with a shed and could store lots of toys, I am now limited to what I can store permanently in my 2009 Chrysler Town & Country mini-van, and one 14' SUP board that I store on top of the kitchen cabinets with a little rack system that probably voids the security deposit on the one-bedroom apartment I live in with Rhonda. 

The 14' SUP I originally had on top of the cabinets was a 23" wide Riviera RP raceboard from 2017. It was really beat up and many-times repaired from injuries sustained even prior to 2022's Hurricane Ian. Anyway, I finally decided to give it away after getting frustrated with how much trouble I had staying on it in the rough water 2024 Key West Classic race. After all, I still had a slower but more seaworthy 14'x27.25" Fanatic Falcon 2014 raceboard collecting dust in my buddy Serge's backyard shipping container storage unit. So the Riviera went away and I'm now exclusively using the big red Fanatic, which is also windsurfable, by the way, because of the mast track I installed in it a long time ago. 

My favorite paddle route is circumnavigating Lover's Key. It's an annoyingly long, trafficky drive from where I live now to Lover's Key, but I know I can always get a dirt parking spot there, and it's free. There's a closer place where I can get in the water (the Estero River), but flat water paddling is comparatively boring, and paddling the wide Fanatic in flat water is kind of sad because it's significantly slower than the narrow Riviera was. If I'm in bumpy water or waves I don't notice that.

Anyway, in December I gave myself a little present to help me motivate and track my watersports and other exercise. It's a "Garmin Instinct Solar" GPS watch. The GPS isn't on all the time- just when you turn it on to track an activity, but it has motion sensors and a heart rate sensor that ARE on all the time, so if I want to see what my heart rate was when I was asleep, or something, I can look at that data via a bluetooth wireless connection between the watch and my smartphone. (Kind of creepy, but whatever.) The heart rate monitor in the watch gets what I think is accurate data when I'm jogging, based on what I know my maximum heart rate is from prior monitoring with chest band HR monitors. However, the HR monitor in the watch gives total garbage data during standup paddling. I don't know if it's because of the different wrist motion, or water conductivity, or what. 

I have yet to try using the watch for "intervals" type workouts of the sort I used to use my "SUP Speedcoach" GPS for, but the watch beeps and buzzes every time I complete a mile, so I can glance at my wrist and see how my pace was for each mile paddled or jogged. If anyone else has some tips for getting the most out of this type of wrist GPS for SUP training, I would love to hear those.