An interesting tale: http://blog.redalderranch.com/?p=89 Here's a good example showing how important it is to always maintain your independence of judgment. If your knowledge, intuition, experience, gut tell you not to go, then don't go.

Good point, Strange Magic, and yes, a very interesting tale, indeed.

I posted the following comments about that report on the Red Alder Ranch blog:

"Mark, there’s a wealth of information in your well-written and thoughtful report, and you have my admiration and respect for your willingness to share this mishap with the rest of the paddling community. Your personal account sounds absolutely harrowing, and it’s a testament to your skill, tenacity, and mental strength that you were able to stay in your boat under circumstances that would have sent most paddlers swimming. Ditto your commitment to the welfare of the the paddlers in the water who needed your help.

One thing I’ve learned to greatly respect over the years is intuition; the feelings of misgiving you experienced about the choice of location for the class. Far from being “flaky”, intuition is an instantaneous emotional response that’s firmly based on prior knowledge and experience, and it always deserves a full hearing. Unfortunately, that kind of insight is easy to overlook or dismiss at the time because it doesn’t come in through the front door screaming and yelling; it’s easily drowned out in the heat of the moment.

While you’re right that it was a big mistake not to air your intuitive feelings of misgiving when they arose, don’t beat yourself up about it. We all make mistakes, we live and hopefully learn, and you’re in really good company when it comes to that kind of error of omission. I think what’s really worth focusing on as you and the Lumpy Waters Symposium move forward is how the initial decision was made to hold a surf class in a river mouth on a strong ebb tide. Were you the only one who had reservations about the venue?"


Carl, I think there's more to ponder in that incident report than a failure to maintain independence of judgement and listen to one's intuitive feelings of misgiving.

The larger, as yet unanswered, question involves the process by which that inappropriate location was vetted and chosen as a surf class venue for a sea kayaking symposium, which, in educational terms, is an order of magnitude above your local clinic, workshop, class, course etc.

Moulton, it seems clear from the posts of the various participants that the dynamics of outgoing flow (ebbing tide and/or river current) vs. incoming waves/swell were unknown to many of the paddlers. This is another example of the widespread lack of knowledge of the essentials of seamanship that I addressed in my SK Letter on the Storm Islands incident. Most general-purpose sea kayaking manuals, and virtually every book or treatise on boat handling, reading the sea, etc. makes careful note of the dangers of transiting inlets and river mouths on the ebb, yet I've encountered few paddlers who have read a sea kayaking manual, let alone something like Chapman's. It seems kayakers these days rely upon videos and/or group paddles or whatever they pick up on the Internet for their basic store of knowledge of sea kayaking. Given the puny nature of our vessels and of our ability to successfully power them through turbulent seas, sea kayakers must be the best-educated, most knowledgable boaters on the water. We've got to know this stuff!

Morely says he had no local knowledge. These estuarine surf zones are a complex dynamic of amplified waves, alongshore currents, sanbars, doubtful egress if swimming, and generally difficult conditions when control is lost. A simple look at a chart or Google satellite should be revealing enough. While Moulton and others raise some good points about vetting symposia venues, communication and instructor ratios as well as ignoring one's gut feelings, the seamanship aspects and lack of proper curtailing to the conditions probable can't be rationalized away. If ever Carl had a right to be smug, it is now (but I know he is primarily concerned about the welfare of our sport and lifestyle). BTW, seas don't have to be big and powerful to bear grief to the unprepared.

The Netarts situation also illustrates the compounding effect of lack of either/both general and specific knowledge on the part of instructors about the conditions to be encountered, and that selfsame lack of the ability to trust one's own judgement in the face of gnawing doubts--to say "NO!", in thunder, when asked if one wanted to go out into those conditions. But incoming sea kayakers, most of them, have no background of previous study of the marine environment to prepare them to say "NO!", and must rely upon the judgement of the instructors instead--a dubious proposition as we have seen. That's why I'd dearly love to see a fundamental change in the way sea kayaking is presented to the public--away from being yet another form of outdoor recreation like mountain biking, cross-country skiing, surfing, etc., but rather (as I tiresomely repeat) as being the most basic, primitive form of marine boating and thus having to rely upon being the best-informed and educated boaters on the water.

In my own case, I had read, many times over, Dowd's Sea Kayaking, Hutchinson's Sea Canoeing, and Ramwell's Sea Touring before I ever put my first kayak onto tidewater. Contact with Chuck Sutherland and ANorAK here in the Northeast had convinced me that this was a serious business and required serious study and preparation, and I think Moulton can say that he shares a similar but even stronger background. How one begins is so very important.

I remember back in the very early 80's when Paul Caffyn was out here for a symposium and made a comment that stuck with me for decads; he was somewhat shocked and/or amused that in his dealings with event participants questions kept coming up like, "I didn't realize headlands were such a navigational challenge" and other such ignorances. When he reflected upon the inside passage route and other inland water routes, he understood a bit better why there were some marine features that local paddlers just didn't have on their list of hazards. But still, he rather thought some of these things were basic knowlege for all sea kayakers.

Having followed the report and all the post-event discussions on the red alder ranch blogsite, I think that the reporting and commenting has been just about the best, most-informative, useful discussion of a specific sea kayaking incident that I can remember.

Agreed...just read Morely's report. Nice these guys are willing to share. Morely writes with excellent detail - expected from a former law enforcment officer. Still, events unfolded almost to the precise order and complexity one would anticipate given the venue and paddlers involved. Anyone of Morely's calibre as a paddler can be at higher risk of an incident occuring when those compentencies are superimposed over a group of intermediate paddlers. It's too easy to think control can be maintained; unfortunately the ocean trumps our imperious delusions even if that hubris isn't intentionally foisted on the situation. The sea will always be the teacher and we the students despite what our qualifications might read.

Deplorable then erudite. Having read the material, I ate a mint cliff bar and slept. Dreaming I was starting a top loader washer in the Laundromat. The machine didn’t run. I opened the top finding a large white fish ! Incroyable.
The next washer over began turning. I called for the manager but Nollman and Gronseth or Scott walked over, then I spotted Eugene Fishinski sitting at a desk, who got up then I woke up. In Pescadero.
Whew.
Leading me to ask you, are rough water rescue training sessions counter productive for instructor’s aims and goals?

Have you mates seen Jonathan Walpole's 11/23 comments on the red alder blog re the Lumpy Waters / Netarts Bay incident. This is a man after your own heart, Strange Magic. Well, all of our hearts, really, but yours in particular.

http://blog.redalderranch.com/?p=89

Strange Magic, no confirmation is ever needed with respect to your advocacy of the importance of good, competent seamanship, but if any were needed, this incident would work just fine as an example.

You're spot-on about beginnings. I really learned a lot from Chuck and others, and also from reading, but I learned a great deal more from my old kayak partner, Brian Price. He was a consummate seaman. I was truly fortunate to have good mentors when I began sea kayaking, and I'm real clear on the fact that there was a time when I didn't know an inlet from a shimlet. .

You make an excellent point about the apparent paucity of reading and the reliance on YouTube and other Internet sources for information. It sometimes appears to me that every idiot who ever set foot in a sea kayak somehow felt compelled to go home and promptly make a worthless how-to video. Great for the ego, but lousy for the sport. Not a real surprise, I guess. We live in an age in which millions of people go online and waste time telling their 2,564 friends that they screwed up and put their underwear on backwards again.

We can do better than that. Books and magazine articles aside, I think there's been too little emphasis on alerting paddlers to the primary objective dangers in sea kayaking. We do an excellent job of selling fun in the sun, but when it comes to selling safety, well, not so much. I think we would to well to consider spending fifteen or twenty minutes at the start of every single sea kayaking class on a quick review of the main hazards. Would that scare people away from sea kayaking? I doubt it, and I have a rather good example to back up my case.

When I was teaching whitewater canoeing classes back in the day, the American Red Cross produced an extraordinary safety film called "The Uncalculated Risk". The entire film was devoted exclusively to spelling out the many ways in which you could get yourself killed on a river. It pulled no punches, and nothing was sugar-coated or glossed over. The film opened with some peppy banjo music and a happy scene of people paddling down a beautiful river. Suddenly, there's a capsize and people are thrown into the rapidly moving water. A person waist-deep tries to stand up and gain his footing, but his foot gets caught between a couple of rocks on the river bottom, and as fast as you can snap your fingers, he's whipped over backwards by the force of the water and drowned. A classic foot entrapment, it's an accident that's taken a lot of lives on whitewater rivers over the years. The scene was very well done, graphic, and scary, and the film went on to warn paddlers about other hazards like strainers, hydraulics, pins, low-head dam "drowning machines", and yes, even cold water.

For years, I showed that film on the opening day of every flatwater and whitewater canoeing class I taught. Hundreds of students saw it, and not a single one of them was ever scared away from the sport by the honest, accurate and realistic depiction of whitewater hazards. To the contrary, they felt reassured and empowered, because they now understood the key hazards, and what to do to avoid them. Good luck trying to find that film today; it's vanished along with two more really good films that expanded on the original.

Nordkappman, your discussion of the illusion of control hit a big nail on the head for me. If there's a more challenging place than open water to attempt herding cats, I don't know of it. I've taught and led trips in a number of outdoor situations, and none of them comes even close to sea kayaking in terms of the group management problems that arise whenever the going gets rough. You can call a huddle, hunker down, and yell to each other in a blizzard on Rainier, but good luck trying that trick on open water. At Netarts, two gruelling, harrowing hours in a nasty surf zone failed to accomplish what a couple of surf skis managed to do in minutes. That should serve as both a humbling and cautionary lesson for our sport.

That should be jet skis, not surf skis. Too little edit time on the forum clock.

Moulton, I did read Walpole's comments, and recommended them to our local Jersey Shore message board viewers within our discussion there of the incident. Another paddler had come upon reference to the Netarts Bay story, and started a thread on our board.

I couldn't agree more with your comments on the phenomenon of instant expertise via YouTube or the Internet. A trivial example is the sort of boat review that tells you that they've just gotten their ......., and have just come back inside after a two-hour paddle to report that it's just the best boat in the whole world. But, leaving the topic of boat reviews to one side (it's a tricky area), the whole subject of whose advice to follow in sea kayaking is an important one. I've not read any recently-published sea kayaking manuals, but the gurus of yesteryear, Dowd and Hutchinson especially, were excellent on sea-sense, reading the water, weather, etc. (while rotten-lousy on cold water attire!), and one could get a good sense of how things stood for a kayaker out there on open water from reading 3 or 4 such manuals (along with Chapman's, say, and Burch's fantastic Fundamentals of Kayak Navigation, a treasure-trove of paddling information!) The ANorAK people with whom I paddled generally were pretty well informed about seamanship, thanks to the stress that Chuck put on the notion that sea kayaking was a serious business, and the examples that you and Brian set in your Chesapeake crossings, and that Chuck set in the many trips he led. Nowadays it's "Hey, I can do this--I saw it/read it on the Internet!"

Similar discussion on our local CPA board, Carl. The speed with which information flows internationally in the "digital age" is really amazing. Why, I remember when we used to use phones that were physically attached to the wall and a really big innovation was... longer cords between the phone and the receiver! Also when the only mail was Snail...

That was so long ago that it's becoming retro cool. My younger daughter just got a bluetooth set for her iPhone - and get this: it's black and the exact shape and size of a 60's era phone receiver. As you might expect, she has to manually hold it up to her ear....

Phones attached to the wall. Yes we have one at our holiday place. works while the cordless phone recharges. I actually saw one the other day, wooden box (the size that took 2 - 1.5 volt 6+ inch high batteries) not sure if it had a rotary dial, think it had the little crank for winding out Morse code on a party line... didn't check whether for antique value or as a working phone.

You all mention feeding out information. How / what do you do about those who don't access information or won't listen when warned? We've had 4 drownings this year (small country, high number), 3 were foreigners, one a local. Two together had PFDs and communications but still died due to stupid decisions and ridiculous equipment (kid's kayak, one paddle and a gale on a very cold lake). One on a cold lake, events unknown and the local without a PFD and having to swim ashore despite having a companion who survived.

If they won't listen should one care? Simply call it the Darwin Effect?

As for herding cats, I made that comment last Saturday as we did a crossing with beginners and a 20+ knot wind blowing. Sometimes the beginners have more skills than you expect. These 3 (females) were all outdoors types and gave the appearance that conditions were normal or even that there wasn't a wind blowing causing the expected seas from that wind speed...

Alex