Warm Water

We were at a community center pool for kayak practice last night. It is much nicer to get the basics under you each spring in a nice heated pool than in 40 degree water outside. This is a huge pool but we still had an impressive number of boats in there - seven longer kayaks running from 16 to nearly 18 feet long as well as a surf boat and three whitewater kayaks.

Some of us were practicing for a sports Expo in mid-April, where we'll be demonstrating rescues and strokes. This includes self-rescues, where the paddler gets back into the boat without help, and assisted rescues where the swimmer is helped by a second paddler.

I needed to tune up my rescues and confirm that I still had a roll, which is officially a self-rescue. The guys who had most recently come from training had a couple of tweaks on assisted rescues, something which happens every several months. The big change this time was having the swimmer, the paddler that had capsized, hang onto their cockpit while I emptied the water out of their boat.

People are usually surprised when they see how easy it can be to do an on water rescue. They can be defeated by a boat that doesn't have the water displaced at both ends, like many of the 10 foot little starter boats, or some serious physical infirmity. But with a fully equipped sea kayak or touring boat, a very small person can rescue a quite large one. One of the critical pieces of equipment is a skirt that seals around the cockpit opening to keep water from entering and swamping the boat. The person I'll be paired with for the demos is a tall, big guy, to make this point.

Unfortunately there are rescues where it is harder for a small person to rescue a really large one because of the weight difference. One of them is called a "Hand of God" (HOG) rescue, used to bring up a person who has become unconscious. In a sea kayak, the unconscious paddler is likely to be hanging upside down in their boat because they didn't pull off their skirt before passing out.

Near the end of the session, we got into a lot of HOG rescues. It started when a guy who had just undergone training was challenged to do a HOG on the biggest guy in the group, my demo partner. Then another paddler capsized on purpose and a few of us got into the game. I managed my first successful HOG rescue in a long time and there were some pretty good photo ops. It's not uncommon for the two paddlers to come up hugging each other in this rescue.

A few of us hopped into the whirlpool before hitting the showers. This is fun but we are not young. On the way to the showers I commented to the life guard that anyone looking at this pool session would think that we spent all of our time falling out of boats. Regardless, he still wants to get into a kayak himself.