Yes, Kim, I’ve been regularly carrying a throw bag for the last 15 years or so myself. I don’t always carry a bailer (often but not always) or hand pump. I do always carry a large sponge.
People with experience bring the right equipment. I always bring throw ropes, and two for whitewater.
Seat cushions are legal for use as a type IV throw able device in Alabama per state regs.
Vessels less than 4.9 meters (16 feet) in length will have aboard a type I, II, III, or V personal flotation device for each person. Vessels 4.9 meters (16 feet) and over in length shall have aboard a type I, II, III, or V personal flotation device for each person and at least one type IV on board as a throwable device.
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A thing to note with a Type V PFD is that they must be worn to meet the USCG’s carriage requirements, not just carried like a Type III. The manual inflation type V is very popular with the SUP set since they started enforcing PFD requirements in Maryland due to its compact design. Most states follow USCG requirements on both coastal and inland waters.
Although a PFD need only be readily accessible, I always wear one when kayaking. No exceptions.
I was trying to quote rs but forgot how to
Whenever I paddle board (rented a couple times) we’d always swim too (not always in purpose). Can’t imagine why someone would choose a type V for that.
Attitudes, regulations, and best practices change.
I think that those who have “corrected” me for having a seat cushion were laboring under the misconception that some may have once had that a type IV throwable is a substitute for a wearable PFD. It isn’t and never was, but that doesn’t make them a useless thing to have. I did however, look them up in the current “boatus.org” site and found out this interesting little tid bit that I don’t recall having seen anywhere before… have youse guys?
Although these devices are often referred to as seat cushions, you should never use it as such. This degrades the foam and reduces the amount of floatation that is provided.
I’ve seen them used as seat cushions for as long as I can remember. Everything changes, I guess.
Speaking of which, I also pulled out my old dusty copy of the first canoeing guide I ever had - a third edition of the American Red Cross “Canoeing” guide. When I was a kid where I came from it was considered the “bible”, the gold standard of safety guides for canoeing. The third addition was from 1965. Its close to four hundred pages long, instructs in boat over boat rescues, all manner of strokes, tripping guidelines, activities for camp instructors, birchbark building information, sail rigging, poling … practically everything you might think of. In all of those four hundred pages there is exactly one paragraph on life jackets. Of all the illustrations there is exactly one of a paddler (poling upstream) wearing a PFD. And in that single paragraph it is recommended life jackets be " carefully tied in the canoe so that they will be readily accessible for wearing whenever turbulent water conditions develop."
What a difference from today! Change happens, progress is possible. Nowadays, we’re doing this on the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway where I usually paddle.
(BTW, a friend and I built that kiosk on the right.)
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You need to assume that non-swimmers will do stupid things. Just caught an article about a family of three, parents plus 8 yr old, who bought a new house with a pool in the yard. The pool had a deep end, 6 or 7 feet.
None of them could swim. All of them went into the pool on a hot day. 8 yr old got into the deep end and over several minutes both parents went in after her. Three fatalities. No one had any flotation aids.
I know this sounds unsympathetic. But the parents had a responsibility for the kid’s safety, and did not execute it.
Good info PJC. I take a flotation cushion with me in addition to wearing a PFD. I use it to change seating positions and in case I see someone struggling in the water. Never thought about degradation of flotation by sitting on it. I used to find them all the time when I paddled on a stretch of the Huron in Ann Arbor that rented canoes. I returned most but kept one…maybe should have kept a couple extra.
I really like the idea of loaner PFD’s. In addition to the great service of making PFD’s available to those that may have forgotten them it really seems that it just makes it so easy for people that they might grab one and use it…it’s like a gentle suggestion with no judgemental people involved.
I think all the tragic stories are good to share.
I was guarding at the YMCA pool last winter when I caught a young man (around 12 years old) jumping sideways off the diving board. His friends were pressuring him to go off the board but when I intervened and pointed out the rule that you must go off the front they told me he couldn’t swim. So he was jumping straight towards the concrete edge of the pool. Nooooooooo.
I hate stories like this - though I agree that there is value in sharing them. Its like the one I mentioned earlier. These things just keep on happening. But we’re a bunch of water rats; its like preaching to the choir.
Alas, panic isn’t just something that happens to a swimmer in trouble. It seems to be a common reaction to people seeing a swimmer in trouble. Where does this idea that swimming is a skill that just magically appears when its needed come from?
Remember all those stories about people learning to swim by the “school of hard knocks” theory? Just throw the kid off the dock and they’ll get it? It just doesn’t work and never has. One has to wonder if non-swimmers in a panic think (if there’s even a second’s thought involved at all) the same about water rescue skills. And it just keeps happening.
That’s perhaps one thing that can to be said in defense of the PFDless days of that old Red Cross manual’s writing… Back then I don’t think anyone even got near a canoe until they’d proven they could swim - and swim pretty darned well.
And even as I write this, with the TV news on over there in the corner, a story is breaking about a nine year old girl who is missing after getting carried away by the flooded Rock River near Janesville. Someone saw her and her brother (I think) getting into trouble while playing in the water at a local park. Apparently a bystander managed to save one of them, if this breaking story is accurate, but lost the girl. Who the heck lets kids that age play unattended in a flooded river in the first place? (And isn’t that exactly what some heartbroken parent is asking themselves this very instant?)
Once again, its fortunate they all didn’t drown… photos of the river show its into the trees and really ripping. The professional divers are deeming the river too dangerous to search right now…
Loss of a child has to be about as great a sorrow as can be experienced in this life. Its more than one heart should ever be forced to bear.
I wonder how much of the swimming thing is really the same as when I was young, just not as visible.
Me and my siblings were not allowed to escape a young age without being competent swimmers. Not necessarily good strokes, but all of us ended up being able to paddle in easy water and get rolled around in some surf without panicking. And yes, taking out a canoe at GS camp was a whole additional layer, including being able to strip off jeans, shirt and a sneaker and turn the jeans into a makeshift life preserver in under a certain time. Forget what the time was but it was a tough standard, took me two tries to pass.
But there were hosts of poorer kids who did not go to GS camp or have access to swimming depth pools who did not learn to swim. I just did not live in a town where they were a large part of the population. We were anything but wealthy, but the open housing acts that changed the white line in suburbs only came thru as I was growing up.
Up in Maine, and on the east end of LI, possibly more fishermen have better swimming ability now than their grandfathers did.
This board is biased to people who have a solid interest in being on the water and at least adequate income to get the long skinny toys and accessories.
I sometimes wonder if it is that unchanged, or if the internet and instant news from everywhere is what has changed.
I think that it is a mainly question of vanity. You can’t show off your magnificent physique as well wearing a type III.
The leaders of an Annapolis kayak touring company refuse to wear a PFD, although they insist that their clients do while on a guided tour of the harbor. They just strap them to their boats. It’s the same company that told their clients that a kayak has absolute right of way over power boats and once had everyone fined $125 each because they didn’t supply whistles after being warned several times…
I grew up “out in the sticks” in Illinois, surrounded by corn farther than the eye could see in every direction. No canoeing summer camps or anything like it. But a neighbor kid and I learned to swim at the YMCA in a town about 35 miles away. There was a graduated series of proficiency tests that culminated in a 'lifesaving" level. We got reasonably good at strokes and could distance swim. By high school we were sneaking out to swim in abandoned limestone/gravel quarries. Most of the kids I learned with were city kids and there was no “white line” that I can recall.
But canoeing was a distinct thing entirely. Though my family went deep into Canada on fishing trips every other year (near what is now Wilderness Caribou Provincial Park) and I did some real wilderness canoeing there, by far the greater part of my paddling was on a river that flowed out of the Chicago suburbs in a pre-EPA era. The river received effluent from a number of small towns which, back then, had municipal septic tanks but no drain fields other than the river itself. I pretty much stayed below the most urbanized areas so I didn’t routinely deal with the very worst of it. It wasn’t really “wild” but if you squinted it was close enough to pretend. It had the virtue of offering the best paddling opportunities anyone in that part of the state had at the time. Or now.
It is much better now; again, change is inevitable, progress possible.
No amount of swimming ability could justify anyone’s voluntarily swimming in that polluted mess. You could get boils just from stepping in it. Taking a gulp of that stuff while swimming was as unthinkable as any thought anyone could actually think. (I once did a paddling trip after which I put the Grumman on top of the car and discovered we’d paddled through something that had dissolved the oxides off the aluminum below the water line.) Still, we island camped for several day’s long trips. There was a post-apocalyptic Huck Finn kind of vibe to it all. As you might guess, I got really good at not tipping or even tracking water into the boat - a practice that I more or less continued for decades after. Boat over boat rescue practice suffered.
I think quite a bit has actually changed, though maybe most kids in the area still learn to swim at the YMCA. Where else? I think there are now some summer camps located on lakes (ponds?) that actually offer paddling instruction, though after over forty years in Wisconsin I haven’t gone back often enough to really pay attention. There are active paddling groups there now, so I guess there is now something available other than pouring over the old Red Cross guide. There is now a “river trail” that runs the length of the river, with dining spots and motels along the route. I know that a few miles from where I used to put in there is now a whitewater park that was built around the edge of a dam (I recall when the dam was built) after twenty-some drownings (mostly fishermen) in the keeper at the bottom. I hear they do swiftwater rescue training there these days. It’s parking lot stands where the grain elevator used to be. I guess its all for the better, yet there is a sense of unreality when I go there now. So I try not to do that.
But I think you’re right. Instant news has changed perceptions. Perhaps we’re more aware of drownings than we used to be.
In cold water everybody is a bad swimmer.
Wear a PFD, dress for immersion practice rescues.
Bring throw ropes. Practice using them.
Wholly crap that’s CRAZY!!! On the ocean??? I paddle still rivers out & into Lake Ontario and I’m lifejacket’d and with a splash cover attached.