Hello and welcome to another episode of The Gray NATO, a loose discussion of travel,

adventure, diving, driving gear, and most certainly watches,

this is episode 194, and it's proudly brought to you by the ever-growing TGM supporter crew.

We thank you all so much for your continued support, and if you'd to support the show please visit the gray nato dot com for more details

Jason how are we doing today? Oh, I'm doing really well. It's a pleasant enough

if a bit chilly early summer day I guess I'm being optimistic in that but

Yeah, it's feeling good spending a lot of time outside the days are long I mean what what what can be what can be bad about that?

Yeah, this is the first one back for me after, I mean literally the first one back for me after

what's generally considered kind of the kickoff of the summer here in Canada, which is a Victoria Day

weekend. It's kind of similar in some ways to our memorial day weekend,

which is next weekend.

So we had some nice summer temperatures here in the city

and then up at the cottage this weekend,

but also some pretty insane storms, and we've had warm and cold kind of come and go so I'm going to go for a nice bike right after this recording it's nice and sunny out I'm looking forward to a little bit of vitamin D. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I got out this past weekend. It wasn't we've got our long weekend coming up, but I finally got out in the water. I didn't kayak at all last year. I realized water was kind of low all summer, so I didn't kayak at all last year I realized water was kind of low all summer so I didn't do any creek paddling but Saturday morning I just threw the kayak on the defender and drove down to this lake near our house and paddled around a bit.

It was pretty incredible, you know, you think of kind of urban adventures

as being pretty tame.

And I was out on the water kind of paddling along the shoreline and out of the corner of my eye I see a very large bird with that familiar flash of white that was a bald eagle and we get them around here but but this was a truly like you know

discovery channel Nat Geo kind of experience because it swooped down no more than

30 feet in front of where I was on the water, swooped down right in front of my boat and scooped up a fish right in front of me and then

flew back up to the tree just above me and then proceeded to just tear the fish apart and eat it.

And I was like, I mean, that's why you get out, you know, that's, to me it was, it was such a magic experience and I still get goosebumps thinking about it because it's, you know, I mean, it's no better, it's no worse than taking a trip to some far-flung place and going on safari and watching

you know an apex predator track down a gazelle or something like that it was

...