Kerry Kelts loved everything about lake sediments, from muddy hands during coring operations to the smell of ink from freshly published scienti¢c papers about lakes. His contributions to the science are well known and documented. Impressed with the treatment that marine sediment cores received both on board drilling ships (he was aboard the Glomar Challenger in 1978 at DSDP site 480 when the hydraulic piston core was ¢rst deployed) and in marine laboratories, Kerry determined to create an facility on land for equivalent treatment of lake cores. He established, equipped, manned, and promoted the core laboratory at the Limnological Research Center at the University of Minnesota, where he served as director. He placed great value on basic ‘initial core descriptions’ (ICDs), including logging, photography, physical description, smear slide analyses, and more. He advocated careful, project-wide sampling protocols and the ‘sampling parties’ that ensued. He promoted detailed geochemical and mineralogical analyses and, although he left the biological components of lake sediments to others, he never underestimated their value. But Kerry was perhaps happiest when tinkering with coring gear: rafts, A-frames, winches, piston mechanisms, core-catchers. He was constantly redesigning existing corers, including the venerable Kullenberg and Livingstone corers, and designing new ones, such as the Multi-Use Coring Kit (MUCK). ‘Lighter, simpler, better’ were his bywords. Although his declining health prevented him from active involvement in the international efforts toward a lake-drilling initiative, he kept a close eye on proceedings. These included many meetings and workshops among groups such as IGBP-PAGES (International Geosphere^Biosphere Programme) and ICDP (International Continental Drilling Program) for the development of a lake-sediment drilling system. Our initial attempts to design a lake-drilling system suffered from the attempt to serve all drilling needs in all lakes; it quickly ran into a predictable ¢nancial stone wall. Many of us, including Kerry, began to rethink the options. We guessed that in the majority of lakes, the upper 200 m of sediment, in contrast with the easily accessible upper 20 m, would serve to address most of the important paleoclimate questions articulated by groups such as PAGES. This concept was a perfect place for Kerry’s ‘lighter, simpler, better’ philosophy. With his penchant for puns and acronyms, Kerry began to call the proposed system GLAD 20^200 (Global LAke Drilling, 20^200 m). In September 1998, Kerry hosted a critical meeting at the University of Minnesota, at which the 20^200 concept was presented to engineers from DOSECC (Drilling Observation, and Sampling of the Earth’s Continental Crust). The meet