Prior to leaving on this trip, I decided to spring for some new technology to capture our fishing trips. So I bought a Canon XL1 digital video camcorder. To my dismay, the bucks didn't stop there. In order to connect the camera to a PC via a firewire card interface, the software required a minimum of a 200Mhz computer. So I got a new mother board and CPU, and of course the old memory from the old mother board was to slow for the 450Mhz mother board. So I bought 128Meg of new memory. Then I found that 60 minutes of video would consume 18 gigabytes of hard disk space. So I bought a 10 gig hard drive. Now we have almost 3 hours of raw video and I'm busy trying to put it together. So the report will be a bit late.

Incidentally, the Canon XL1 has a lens system that is the same as a SLR camera. I set the lens mode to shutter priority with the shutter speed at 1/1000's of a second. The camera then adjusts the aperture as needed. This results in great stills that can be exported to any image software program.

Note: The Apple QuickTime movie has been deleted (4/12/02). I will be putting up a more up-to-date streaming video movie at a later date.

Canon XL1 Video frame grabs (shot at shutter priority 1/1000 sec): I will add more later, and clean up this site when time permits...

Deformed striper bill: