KAVU Busy Livin'

Crazy World News

Well, if you read our little local worldwide blog here regularly...you are probably familiar with the Futalefu River in Patagonia, Chile.

This week, the nearby Chaiten Volcano has errupted forcing evacuation of the nearby towns of Esquel, Futalefu and Chaiten.

Many of our very close friends here at KAVU are being drastically effected by this-- as the town of Futa is a melting pot of wonderful international characters. Many of which have made the area a seasonal residence in the area. It is very difficult to gauge the destruction, but Sarah and Sven Rane have stepped up to try and provide some relief help. This week, Sven flew down with some mandatory supplies of first aid, dust masks, water filters and funds. He is preparing to help clean up the aftermath of dead livestock, collapsed roofs, and dealing with whatever the ash has done to the surrounding areas. They have started a fund called the Futaleufu Relief Fund and all of the money donated will go directly to the locals, food, animals and supplies for the cleanup. Any help will go a long way there. If you have the urge to donate, please send to: Check payables to: Futaleufu Relief Fund, P.O. Box 2344 Taos, NM 87571.

Inside KAVU News:

Barry has been globe trotting in the name of the KAVU greater good. In an attempt to branch out into some new production facilities he recently visited Peru to meet with some new peeps.

"I have not been to Lima for 10 years and it has changed for the better! The streets are clean with tons of new buildings and most of all it felt more safe than last time I was there. I would now say it is a even a pretty city as they have done an incredible job developing and utilizing their waterfront. The town of Miraflores is right on a big cliff that stretches for miles with shops, parks and paragliding right there. Below the bluffs the waves crash with numerous beaches and surf breaks-- and all this is right in the city." Barry Barr

From Peru, Barry went straight to China and Hong Kong to meet KAVU VP CFO Joe Pinsoneault. It was just a quick trip to make sure all production was running well.

Here at KAVU, we don't accept production delays. We gots to get that product on the shelf no matter what it takes!

Paddling with the Scotts:

There has been some production delays on Baby. Turns out the motor we bought from Germany and spent the last 3 months custom fitting into the truck was a dud. I was a little directionless last week, and KAVU athletes Katy Scott and Scott Ligare called me up to go boating.

I was a little rusty seeing that it was my first time creeking all year--and straight into one of the best/hardest runs in Cali--Big Kimshu Creek.

I was a little intimidated paddling with some of the best paddlers in Cali: Charlie Center, Jared Nocetti, Scott Ligare, Katy Scott, Justin Patt and Ben.

It was off the couch right into the goods. This drop is a no-scouter right below the Put-in and Justin got a little Freestyle.

Big Kimshu is world famous among core kayakers for its big-clean drops one right after another!

This is a normally portaged drop called Triple Drop. Justin and Charlie fired it up leaving the rest of us with our jaws dropped!

I wish I could count the waterfalls in Cali that look just like this one....its called Frenchies--PERFECT!!

On the end of our second day on Big Kimshu I got stuffed under a boulder. 9 stitches later I realized that I'm off the water for at least 10 days.

Looks like I'm headed out to Montana to go Hang Gliding with the Jeffs this week!

Steph, our Northwest Sales Ambassador recently hit up the Hawaiian islands on a reconaissance mission to try and reach out a little KAVU love.

She didn't get much time at home in Seattle when she got back and litterally climbed aboard the company rig and headed to Montana straight away. She was joined by Leah our head product designer.

Leah goes on non-sales related visits a few times a year just to make sure everything is looking good in the shops.

They got to hit a ton of shops throughout Idaho and Montana and stopped off for two days to meet with our designer, Russ Fry. Russ and associate Todd heath are the legends behind our graphic design. They are responsible for our workbooks, website, catalogue, T-shirts, stickers...pretty much everything.

At the end of the trip we had a major reunion in Sandpoint, Idaho! Steph and Leah showed up and we had a KAVU night to remember. Many of our KAVU models and worldwide locals were on the scene including Andy Feuling, Tom Brunner, Joe Mclay, Luke and a special guest appearance from our feature athlete TYLER BRADT!!!

Joe and Tom are the design fabricators for our KAVU sponsored rig: Baby and are in the process of tag-teaming the work to try and get her on the road by June 15th!

Joe has more skills then metal work as you can see.

Tom and Jamie are the hot new item on the sandpoint scene.

Tom is cranking on the trailer Elements trailer.

Joe found an old studebaker hood that we are using to frame a box over the tongue, and that card board box is our fancy new fold out tent on a sliding trey!

IN OTHER NEWS:

The Jeffs just returned from a competition in Arizona.

It in the Casa Grande, Arizona--"The Big House" titled: Santa Cruz Flats HG comp. Try and guess which gliders belong to the Jeffs:

The field was strong including the world #1 pilot, and 17 of the top 20 US pilots in attendance along with a strong Brazilian contingency. The boys put together a string of top ten finishes and Obrien got a first place on the last day of competition. They are confident this will help qualify them for the US Team.

A touch of luck from the little lady....and we wonder how he continues to do so well at all these comps??

Its this combined with hawk like sensory to be able to pick out even the smallest details to keep them in the sky!

We love the Jeffs!

KAVU athlete Alison Teal went straight from Australia to Costa Rica!

As always she was terrorizing the local surf scene and culture. She was back in LA this weekend and heads out to Peru on Tuesday. Yes, we are all very jealous~

Aren, Sarah and Hannah Rane (KAVU lifestyle folks) are starting a recycling program in the Futaleufu valley. They are collecting cans from the local rafting and fishing companies and building things with them! This photo is a 4,000 can kayak rolling pond built to teach the local kids of the valley. They have also employed and taught locals to build with this style, minimizing trash and reusing aluminum in a fragile valley threatened by hydroelectric and gold mines.

New KAVU Team Members~

KAVU Midwest Sales Rep, Bill Gange had a healthy new baby girl. Romie was born on Wed morning tipping the scales at 8lbs 4oz.

We just signed on Gary Garner to the extended local worldwide crew. I met this guy at the Sundance Film Festival, and he is a TOTAL KAVU character. He is the author of the new book Into The Eyes of Madness, and someone has made an animated TV series that will launch soon.

He is CRAZY. Check this out:
Into the Eyes of Madness

Is it Spring or Winter??

The worldwide locals have been throwin down HARD this week, just like last:)

President Barry Barr is on a trip down in Peru with our lovely Sophia. They are trying to drum up some sales down there and work on some production networking. He will be flying straight to China afterwards joined by CEO Joe Pinsoneault to meet with our distributors.

Northwest Ambassador Steph Mason just returned from a little reconnaissance sales trip in Hawaii and then headed straight on a Northwest social visit to dealers around Montana and Idaho. Tough Job she has...

Our legendary young team member Tyler Bradt just put a wrap on his African Revolutions Tour, ending it with a bang on the Murchison Falls section of the White Nile. This is possibly the hardest most dangerous section of river in the world.

As if the most insane whitewater imaginable is not enough:

It has the highest concentration of hippos in the world!

They saw 13 crocodiles and were chased on 5 different occasions by monster 18-25 footers. If all the dangers from the rapids and wildlife still aren't enough, the river right side of the entire stretch is occupied by the Lords Resistance Army (the LRA). They are famous for raiding villages and abuducting children and forcing them to join their rebel military group. On a 2007 expedition in the area, a foreigner was murdered and burned to death.

They met LRA members at the put in before they started the river.

For more photos and stories check out Africa Rev Blog

Meanwhile, on the home front... Montana and Idaho have seen no sign of summer. It still just keeps puking out, and team members like Andy Feuling are still rolling and playing in Pow!

California on the other hand hasn't seen any real snow in months. It was looking like the season of the year before mid february, but it has been like the bahamas down there ever since. Scott Ligare and the crew have been jammin on some early season paddling before all the run-off is gone. Scott is fresh back from India and Africa and still continues to film for KAVU sponsored The Last Descent

The group paddled the South Fork of the Middle Tule River, the East Kaweah, the South Kaweah and then ended the tour on the Kern River. Scott took 6th place at the extreme Brush Creek Race which is part of the annual Kern River Festival. This standing qualified him to compete in the first ever National Extreme Championships in North Carolina.

The tour was not without issues however. The teams' shuttle scooter got a flat tire leaving them stranded in a unfriendly Indian Reservation, one team member split his elbow open after forgetting his pads, a small dent and some scratches apeared on the back bumper of the Dagger Subaru, and worst of all Poison Oak has caused a rash after some deep portaging through the tight Sierra granite.

Sunshine, great paddling and good friends - California is a kayakers heaven.

Stay tuned for Hang Gliding pics of the Jeffs down at an Arizona meet! Both the Jeffs placed in the top ten nearly everyday with tons of long XC flights and some serious air time. One day they were up in the air for over 5 hours!

Tomorrow night in Sandpoint is going to be one for the books!~ Leah and Steph will be stopping by on their way home from the Montana "social tour" and Tyler--fresh off the plane from Africa will be in town for a major reunion. Stay tuned for pics of the debauchery! Over and out

Baby will hit the pavement soon...we hope.

Things are completely out of my hands at this point. Building an entirely custom vehicle has its challenges. Our Electrician, Roy is a mastermind and our Master Tech, Luke is not short of genius. I worked with boys all weekend to attempt to tie things up with the motor and get it on the road this week....but super small things like lack of Argon in the Tyg welder or missing manual from the japanese alternator slowed progress just enough to push it back one more week. Roy cannot come back until next weekend to finish the job that is 98% complete, so Baby will rest for one more week here in Grass Valley California.

She will leave very happy! Check out Roy's electrical system:

Everything you see here safely displayed and organized in this box was formerly a rats nest bolted to the top of the batteries. Now we have three separate electrical systems!

We are definitely excited about our newest addition--the front door to our System Integration Room!

This room is going to be plush when we are done with it, but this is the basic schematic:

With the help of Joe Mclay our custom fabricator, I have sucessfully streamlined our old on the go vegetable oil collection system. With our batch processor, it is possible to use any restaurant as a gas station, and the heat from the engine processes the fuel along the way. Every time I collect waste oil for fuel, I get the exact opposite feeling as when I stick the nozzle in my gas tank and the meter starts ticking. I doesn't even seem real that you can still get this stuff for free. The process is so simple.

Although we like to over-dramatize things with fancy gadgets. You could do this exact same thing with panty hose and rubber bands.

Amazingly, EVERYTHING on the motor is done, we are just tying up a few this and thats before we fire it up.

I can't wait until next weekend as we are running over a month behind schedule. Progress is already being made on Baby's new trailer and I am going to fly out and help facilitate things up in Sandpoint, Idaho. If we are to match Baby's wikid style and finesse with a trailer...we have a lot of work ahead of us in the next couple months before our kick off on June 14th!

Our peeps are ruling it!

Our in house cameraman and stunt car driver Joshua Woods recently won 2nd prize in the Utah Pond Skimming Contest!

Our Big Mountain Skier Caroline has been playing in the endless Utah snow!

She was recently placed in a Ski Utah, advertisement. We can't really understand how she got in that!

The Jeffs are getting ready for a big meet in Arizona!

Rodrigo Just got back from a big expedition in the southern Patagonia in Chile~

He is our Chilean Rockstar from Pucon Chile!

Hippies @ NASA!!

The Elements propaganda is coming right along!

This weekend I went to this crazy party at Nasa's Ames Research Center. They invited me to do a showing of the movie and a presentation alongside many other world renowned forward thinkers and scientists. I got to see a bunch of amazing lectures. It was interesting to see how our new project, Elements is right in line with the latest ideas on problem solving and planning for global warming.

I definitley connected with a couple of the guys, because the Elements promises to spread these ideas to the public, which in many regards is as big as the science itself.

It was such a strange event, in one room world thinkers were talking about answers to real world problems addressing issues like transportation and global warming. This project called Sky Tran is just amazing.

and in the other room...there was a full-on disco-rave with a bunch of young floor spinners.

They had everything from Electric Race Cars to Robots to New-Age Kite boats on display.

I still can't believe they let these hippies into NASA!

Baby Steps to the Elements

Our in house production, Oil and Water is still just killing it. This last weekend over in Ireland, we took home two major awards at the Castlebar film festival: The Peoples Choice & Best Commercial Film. The film is currently on tour with the REEL Paddling Film Festival, Waterwalker Film Festival, Wild & Scenic Film Festival, Kendal Mountain Film Festival, UK Adventure Film Festival and many many more. We have won major awards at nearly every film fest we have entered...and the requests for screenings are pouring in every day! We are still getting a ton of worldwide media attention. Someone just forwarded me this clip from a mag down in New Zealand.

Its really hard to keep up with all this, especially because I'm getting ready to start our next education and film project sponsored by KAVU called ELEMENTS. Please check out the following article from the most recent Piste Off Magazine It paints a great picture as to what we are getting ourselves into here, drawing from the successes of Oil and Water.

As you can see above, we are completely re-building the Baby starting from the inside out.

We figured out that Baby is a cab forward, which means the entire front cab is on a hinge so we cut the top box off and dropped it forward. This made it really damn easy to get the motor in. (retro-fitting it to work with a new transmission, radiator, clutch, accelerator, drive line, air intake, exhaust, etc is the biggest challenge. Our new toyota 6 cylinder turbo diesel is probably the most bad ass motor on the international market. We bought it in Germany and it is going be pretty zippy compared to our old 4 cylinder!

As the engine goes in, we brought in our master fabricator, Joe Mclay. We are streamlining the vegetable oil system like nobody's business. It will be the best on-the-go vegetable oil system in the world allowing us to pull up at any restaurant and fill up with and process waste oil...totally hands clean!

We will be leaving California soon to our second operation where have another shop that has already begun construction of the Elements trailer. We are doing all the exterior modifications to Baby while we are trying to get the new motor running. We even built a fancy new front door that will lead into the systems integration room where the Wind, Solar and Hydro Energies will be converted into unusable power for off the grid presentations, movie showings and live music.

KAVU World News--March Chapter

KAVU athletes are scattered around the world claiming their local worldwide status.

The Scotts (Katie Scott and Scott Ligare) recently finished up the first phase of their project: Asia & Africa.

Check out their new promo video The Last Descent Movie Trailer

Shin Matsuura works for our Japanese Distributor A&F in Tokyo. He is a long time KAVU posse member and knows what KAVU days are all about! He recently reported 4 feet of fresh pow in Niigata, Japan!

Here at KAVU we are always signing new peeps to our roster. We recently accosted Lizzy Asher of New Hampshire sporting some of our latest KAVU goods on location at the Outdoor Retailer. It was a match made in heaven, and we signed her onto the team soon after. The next weekend she made the US national Team!!!! Of course we have to take a little credit:)

Alison Teal has been living in a little hippie camp on the beach in Australia for the last two months. She has reported some great surfing, but she says the wildlife has been one of the highlights!

Between the two Jeffs, it seems like they get nearly every Hang Gliding Cover in the industry! Jeff Shapiro recently did a tow-in flight near Mount Raineer.

On a recent business trip over to China, KAVU founder Barry Barr got some down time chillin at the Great Wall!

Fresh off a kayaking trip to Chile, Benjamin got some sweet days skiing the Myrkdalen area in Norway right before he jetted off for more skiing in Switzerland!

Straight from the Revolutions tour in Madagascar and narrowly avoiding a disaster with cyclone Ivan, the boys landed at the Zambezi.

Not many people have run the Zambezi at this high of a flow! The boys are definitely keepin it real. For more photos and updates check out African Rev Blog

Patrick Stewart (Jean Luke Picard) recently gave a wonderful endorsement of our Oil and Water film: Check it out: Patrick Stewart Liked the Film!

KAVU party at Seattle Raft and Kayak

We joined the party. It was packed wall to wall for all kinds of people that wanted to see the newly released Oil and Water Movie.

Thanks to Tim for hosting the event. Barry was STOKED on the turn-out.

Even Big Al made it out for the premier:

I don't think SRK has ever seen so many people at once.

Afterwards all the KAVUers assembled down town for our weekly get-together.

Even my brother, Damien emerged from the Alaskan Busch for the event.

A KAVU WEEKEND!!

I flew into Seattle last week and was ushered straight into the KAVU weekly all company meeting. In these meetings we always go around the circle and talk about what we are all up to in the various branches.

Barry always kicks it off with inspiring thoughts and words of wisdom~

Then I wisked myself off in the company rig to the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival.

We had a couple film showings of Oil and Water, and a bunch of school visits and presentations.

You might recognize Lucy from KAVU day the movie. She came and helped me sell a few of the newly released Oil and Water Movies to help pay my expenses for being in the area.

HERE AT KAVU WE DON'T WASTE TIME. WHEN WE HAVE A WEEKEND WITH FRIENDS WE HAVE THE TENDENCY TO TRY TO CRAM AS MUCH IN AS WE CAN. HERE IS A CLASSIC KAVU ACCOUNT OF JUST WHAT WE GET UP TO.

WE ATTRACT AND INSPIRE, EVERYWHERE WE GO IS A SNOWBALL OF GOOD FRIENDS AND GOOD TIMES. I'VE DESIGNED THIS DIAGRAM ILLUSTRATING HOW DR. ALEX AND I MADE A WEEKEND PLAN AND IT ERRUPTED INTO SOME KAVU EXPERIENCES OF A LIFETIME! THATS WHAT WE DO..BUSY LIVIIN THE DREAM.

It started on Friday 2/29/08, 11 am. We were driving down East Hasting and couldn't help but stop by East Hastings. We named our first event Cracker Fest, 2008. Free hot dogs for heroin addicts. YIKES!

2/29/08, 12:30 am. A visit to the Vancouver Space Needle.

2/29/08 4pm. Hangin at a local pub in Downtown Vancouver. Janna is Alex's best friend from highschool and Robin is her friend from Vancouver. Alberto was bumbling around outside the Amsterdam cafe on east hastings, so we swooped him up. He didn't speak great English, so it was fun to practice some Spanish.

2/29 6:30 pm. Sweet KAVU sunset

2/29/08 9:30 pm. Sushi

3/1/08 11am. Filmmakers brunch. We got to hang with all the "important" people and the wrap-up brunch of the film festival. Dr. Alex was an embarrassment as always.

3/1 4:30 pm. Grocery shopping for a big night and off to go skiing in Whistler.

3/1 6:30 pm. Checked into the slope-side hotel and straight to the hot tub!

3/1 9pm. Chillin, foot massages and socializing. Anticipating some swooshing the for the next day.

3/1 11:30 pm. Firing it up!

3/2/08 12am-to all hours of the night. Cutting a rug at the disco clubs. Sarah and Ingrid joined us for the debauchery.

3/2/08 9:30 am. Skiing at Blackcolmb. It wasn't exactly a pow day, but we sure acted like it was. David Karr came out to meet up with us for some epics on the mtn.

3/2/08 3pm. We had planned to leave at 2:30 to get up on the mountain. But local ripper Sarah rallyed out to join us and talked us into one last run.

We disassembled late evening in Vancouver, and Janna missed her flight. She didn't care...this weekend is one for the books. KAVU day # 3884. SHA-BAM!@#$