BeigeJournal

Sea Kayaker’s Deep Trouble: True Stories and Their Lessons from Sea Kayaker Magazine by by Matt Broze, George Gronseth, and Christopher Cunningham. International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 1997.

This is a collection of accounts of sea kayaker’s bad days (terminally bad, in some cases) and the lessons we can learn from other’s mistakes. As a big believer in learning from the mistakes of others and an eager reader of accident reports of all types, as well as a novice kayaker, I found this book interesting and useful.

Several issues appear repeatedly in the reports, particularly failure to get weather information and failure to dress for immersion. We see that even people who are well prepared can get into trouble, but the accounts of their trouble read very differently from the accounts of the trouble people who set out hoping for the best get into when the best fails to happen. I am amazed at the conditions some people set out in without dry suits or wet suits. Wear your PFD is another lesson we can learn, because it is going to be very hard to put it on if you wait until conditions are so bad that you think maybe you’ll need it.

Signaling potential rescuers is a whole lot easier if you have signaling equipment on your person. This book predates the modern 406 MHz personal locator beacons, but clearly a lot of the people in trouble would have been much better off if they could have had one. Handheld marine VHF radios can also be very handy. You might want to read the directions for your flares before you have to use them at night in a storm.

On the whole, the lessons learned are not that surprising, but it is interesting to see how events unfold in real emergencies. Paddlers would do well to read this book and think about their own practices.