http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/fatal-canoe-trip-thompson-manitoba-1.4127497
Death of a five-year-old girl in a separate incident headlined within the article.
All were wearing life jackets
As the article says this was ‘absolutely tragic’, but ‘3C or 4C’ water is seriously cold whether you’re wearing a PFD or not.
I think you’d agree that they all underestimated the risk involved with immersion for any length of time.
There are multiple statements in that article that show general ignorance about cold water.
I do commend the use of PFDs, but the article stated “with the winter ice only recently having melted away, this was the first weekend the water was open” and that should tell anyone with half a brain that without cold water gear, you’re going to want to be within a minute or two swim from shore AT MOST. Assuming, of course, that they weren’t able to reenter the boat - which is unfortunately a good assumption.
It’s the classic story that will continue to repeat well into the future. Maybe the continued posting of such morbid incidents will help to raise some awareness and prevent future loss of life.
Do most people out for just a “recreational” paddle in a canoe or kayak even think about water temperature if the air temp is warm? Or consider that they might fall out?
Just prior to the holiday weekend, local t.v. stations started issuing multiple warnings about cold water, as well as the need to wear a life jacket. In spite of that, tonight there was a local news report of another death; guy up here for the weekend went kayaking with his daughter’s boyfriend on the Mio Dam Pond, capsized, and died. No info on PFD usage. Water temp per USGS was 61F.
Yes, it’s a morbid reality check. Perhaps it will give someone a reason to pause and rethink, I wish those dads had.
What can happen?
We can swim.
I just hang onto the gunwales; the others girls know how to paddle (on the same side) .
We’re not going to turn over.
The water isn’t that cold; the sun’s shining, and we’ve got cotton t-shirts & shorts on to keep us warm.
We never wear life jackets…
.
OK! You’ve convinced me…
I just put my drysuit away for the season - probably. I did wear it last week on a cold raining night without the insulating layers. 2 - 3 degrees C is 35 - 37 degrees F. For me that is the drysuit with a couple of good insulating layers. At that water temperature, the PFD will keep you from drowning so you can die of hypothermia - so sad.
I have a couple of friends that paddle flatwater year around without cold water gear in winter - I worry about them.
The problem (ok, one of the problems) is that those who need this sort of discussion don’t read this or any other boards or information. They go out blissfully ignorant and sometimes become a statistic, leaving behind family and friends who don’t want to think about their loved one’s responsibility for their own demise. In water in the 30’s, the PFD just makes the bodies easier to find.
The great unwashed public is also the great uninformed. Does anybody really believe over-excited-to-get-on-the-water recreational paddlers or say people who just bought a first time paddle craft, are going to immediately consider getting $800 dry suits for every member of their family? (Especially, if they don’t even have a clear concept of what could potentially kill them to begin with?) It’s amazing that they even had on the PFDs.
There has to be a better informed public service campaign, especially in northern areas where seriously cold water can hang-in through Spring and even Summer(Like, ready for a nice warm swim in Lake Superior come early July anyone? :# ).
More signage in public launch areas, notices hung with boat retailers, or even free public service announcements (on radio, tv, etc.) might help change the statistics…But don’t fret: If more and more events like these keep on happening, the “authorities” will inevitably come along to regulate the water rights of the rest of us who are already well-informed of hazards.
I hope that family’s relatives and their community can heal.
Scare tactics won’t be effective at getting people to wear drysuits in frigid water, any more than telling people that smoking is bad for them.
The exception is if someone whom the person knows personally dies from those causes.
With paddling, at least there is one easy, direct way to get the message across, but it is slightly sadistic: Make each paddler jump in the water AND TREAD WATER OR SWIM in it for at least 5 minutes–longer if the water is less cold.
If an outfitter did this, he would be OUT of business soon.
Just one note on some of the comments: people almost never die from hypothermia in cold water immersion, they drown due to aspects of cold shock that affect breathing and muscle control and even mental acuity.
It’s a good idea to read up on the biological realities of cold water immersion. Our local outfitter, Performance Kayak, screened an outstanding video about it at a sports and recreation trade show last year – wish I knew the title and source (I may ask them). It showed actual field tests where volunteers, supervised by researchers and medical personnel, were placed in various temperatures of water in a lake with assorted safety and thermal protective outfits to see how the temperatures affected them.
As the video demonstrated. the immediate involuntary response the human body makes to cold immersion is a sharp gasp of breath, which can result in inhaling water and choking (though initially the throat will spasm shut, which blocks water but tends to cause more panic) – the muscles throughout the body can immediately spasm and cramp in very cold water and even in moderately cold immersion muscular control rapidly declines. The distress that cold water caused the participants in the video of the experiment was very hard to watch – they all tried to stick out their immersion for as long as they could stand it but in some cases the organizers pulled them out early out of concern for their health. Many required immediate medical attention to regain any normalcy and they looked awful, shivering uncontrollably with faces contorted in agony. These effects happened with minutes, sometimes seconds for the very cold water, for people with little or no thermal protection (like street clothes, jeans and sweatshirts.) Even people in wetsuits had to be pulled out in several instances. There were some volunteers wearing insulation layers and dry suits who were fine indefinitely – were pulled from the water after more than an hour and still able to function.
Where I live, it is almost never that the on-their-way-to-hypothermia/cold-shocked, have to get rescued while renting a canoe/kayak from an outfitter–Whereas the purple-in-the-extremities folks pictured below, are getting fished-out frigid and terrified all the time. Admittedly, nobody really tells them about also potentially getting pinned on rocks in the ice cold(even in summer)Class II/III water :o …
Nature is not an architect- engineered amusement park ride.
@spiritboat said:
But don’t fret: If more and more events like these keep on happening, the “authorities” will inevitably come along to regulate the water rights of the rest of us who are already well-informed of hazards.
Wouldn’t enforcement challenges be a bar to such regulation? There’s lots of water in the Great Lakes area and many, many out of the way easy access spots. And would it make a difference? The highways are more deadly than water yet people continue to text and drive (or drink and drive), regardless of the illegalities.
@spiritboat said:
Nature is not an architect- engineered amusement park ride.
Where I live, it is almost never that the on-their-way-to-hypothermia/cold-shocked, have to get rescued while renting a canoe/kayak from an outfitter–Whereas the purple-in-the-extremities folks pictured below, are getting fished-out frigid and terrified all the time. Admittedly, nobody really tells them about also potentially getting pinned on rocks in the ice cold(even in summer)Class II/III water :o …
Engineered amusement parks have been failing also. The horror of knowing you took your kid to that situation is mind boggling.
@willowleaf said:
Our local outfitter, Performance Kayak, screened an outstanding video about it at a sports and recreation trade show last year – wish I knew the title and source (I may ask them).
Perhaps this one? I refer to it regularly when the topic comes up once again…
We can’t know exactly what happened in these accidents, but taking children 5 and 6 years old out on very cold water is not a good idea, in my opinion. It is not easy to find appropriate protective clothing for smaller kids. Children have a higher body surface area to mass ratio and so lose body heat more quickly than adults. Kids that age might be more prone to panic, and adults may place themselves in greater jeopardy trying to get the children to safety.
My wife and I took our daughters out in canoes at younger ages than that, but only on flat water or easy Class I rivers, and never on frigid water.
No, not the same video. They one PK screened was about half an hour long and had immersion experiments in water in several different temp ranges, also each volunteer had on different clothing and gear including wet suits and drysuits – even one in a full military grade survival suit (he appeared to relax and take a nap while bobbing in the 45 degree water while waiting for them to extract the other violently shivering and semi-paralyzed volunteers.) It was a little more “clinical” than this one and focused in real time on the people who were immersed so you could see how quickly they became incapacitated. This abbreviated one is more about the marginal advantage of a PFD in cold water, not about actually dressing for immersion…
RE Spiritboat’s post: drunken rubes on tubes, the bane of streams and rivers throughout Michigan…
I was invited on one such outing by a work friend the first summer I lived there and went reluctantly (trying to be the game "new kid in town:, I guess) after being told the float would “only be about an hour”. I should have checked their plans more carefully. Turned out they grossly miscalculated (probably due to low water and slow flow) and it was actually 5 hours to the take out – though we started on a warm sunny day and in comfortably warm water, the afternoon clouded over, there was some spitting rain and it got windy. There were two young children (6 and 8) on the trip and I recognized that they were becoming hypothermic – their parents had not brought any extra clothing at all for themselves or the kids. I had brought a fleece and windjacket in a dry bag and wrapped the kids (stuck the 6 year old’s legs in the dry bag) , also made the parents take them on their laps to get their little butts and legs out of the water. And got everyone to raft the tubes together (I could see adults starting to shiver and punk out too) and got the strongest (and least drunk) swimmers in the group to push the mass along until we reached the cars. Would never do that again.
Perhaps this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwETEkmVAeE
I think signage could help, but in my experience, the best help is leadership by real example. Two weekends ago I took my kayak to the local lake (Massachusetts) where the water was in the upper 50s. Many fisherman and families around, most in shorts and cotton sweatshirts. I went about outfitting my boat (was trying some new stuff like a new deck bag and testing the fresh deck bungees I just replaced so I was totally outfitted for an offshore paddle on the local lake 
). I was also wearing my drysuit. I walked down the boat ramp to do a quick swim test and floated there for a minute. As I walked back up the ramp a young boy said to his dad, “Do you really need all that stuff to paddle a kayak?” It at least started a conversation when the dad asked me about my suit. Last week I was on Hingham Harbor. The buoy temperature at the harbor mouth was 53°. The few people I saw were totally underdressed for immersion and two guys took off without PFDs. Again, after I got into my suit I floated for a minute or so and I realized that I was underinsulated. Even with thermal tops & bottoms, a wicking t-shirt, and a light zip pullover under my suit, I felt a chill after 1 minute. So I went back to my car for a fleece vest and noticed a couple getting their kayaks ready staring at me. The guy said, “We didn’t think it was a nice day for a swim…” That at least lead to a brief conversation about what I was wearing.
One person at a time maybe we can make a difference.
Edit: My wife mentioned another incident to me and I found something odd in the newspaper coverage. An 18-year-old woman drowned in a local lake (where I’ve paddled often) at 2 pm on Saturday afternoon in 6’ of water. Many newspaper stories here in Massachusetts ran a version of the same statement: no foul play is suspected and the autopsy results will be soon. See http://boston.cbslocal.com/2017/05/27/douglas-woman-drowns/ or http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2017/05/teen_s_body_recovered_after_drowning_in_douglas for example. Not a single mention that the water is cold. Yet a British paper, The Daily Mail covering the story lead with these bullets:
- Police are still investigating the drowning but say the water was too cold to swim
- Divers said the lake’s temperatures were about 57 or 58 degrees over weekend
The media has a perfect opportunity to educate, yet the local and American papers don’t. Compounding the tragedy if you ask me.
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” Boat safety is similar. In Florida everyone born after 1984 must take a safe boating course and get a boat operators card. I don’t fit into this category. If you watch the operation of boats in Florida you’d think they all slept through class. At the power squadron there is a underlying motto that we just have to keep trying.