Time involved
It takes as much time to pick the camera up , wake and shoot a picture as it does to take it out of pfd or where ever else it is stashedand shoot.
JT in Central Florida
Disagree…
unless, of course, you have that rather bulky camera/housing on your deck.
I can have the WPi ready to record in a few seconds whereas my long lens camera is tucked away in side the boat.
Carrying a larger camera outside the boat may work fine for calm water paddlin’ but I sure wouldn’t consider it in many of the places I go - underwater housing or not!
Different cameras for different paddlers… and having two cameras is the best of all 
Holmes
Camera Sits in bottom of boat.
Do it Wes
– Last Updated: Jun-14-06 1:15 PM EST –
I was down at the Chesapeake this spring, and for the first time I took NO film camera, not even my little Canon Elph Sport APS WP.
Took a bunch of pics, but discovered that I had few on-thw-water shots due to the pop skirt/open drybox/snap pic/close drybox/replace skirt hassle. And candid shots of friends mean more to me than landscapes.
With my Olympus 720 on a retractable tether I can pull the camera from my PFD pocket, snap pic, replace camera all in about 15 seconds. Now I'm a picture-takin fool! (before I was just a plain old fool)
Jim