mild ht
This can be a problem with some people because they will not admit they are cold. “I am fine” gets them in trouble.
I remember a spring canoe on a local river. I had some newbies that were professional geologists. The weather was warm. They showed up in cotton clothes, not good. In the first 50 yards they floated under an overhanging branch and capsized. They seem until later, when they capsized again after lining the boat. I got them to the trucks about 2 hours later, and had the heater on full blast. They were really cold by this time shivering with the heat. It took several hours for them to start acting impaired. This experience helped me recognize ht much earlier.
This
is not something you decide to do…Mild Hypothermia is determined after the fact…using criteria such as…you didn’t die , so it was hypothermia…but not severe enough to kill…only to impair. You can adjust and acclimate your body to cold…but not once you are actually classified as hypodermic. at that point…it has become “out of your control”
Best Wishes
Roy
Been near the edge of hypothermia
It was 1984 and Orwell seemed wrong.
So I decided to stand up in my new Lotus BJX – an open canoe with a 25" beam waterline – just as I had in the Everglades when I bought it.
Confident, I was.
Arrogant, I was.
Stupid, I was.
No longer in the Everglades I was.
It was February and I was in a river in the Catskill Mountains of New York. But it was “only flat water”, so why not stand up, if only to prove my super-duper-ness to defy yet another canoeing cliche.
I was also in civilian clothes, though I was wearing a PFD. Over I went, into about 33 degree water. No change of clothing. No nothing but two paddles.
Pulled boat to shore, emptied it and got back in. I was about five miles upstream from my car, and I was freezing. Fortunately, the air was only in the 30’s.
I decided the only thing to do was to paddle as fast as I could back to the car – bat out of hell fast – in the hopes that the exercise would keep up my body temperature.
I made it back. I had no change of clothes or towel in my civilian car either. I stripped naked and wrung out my wet clothes. The cold feeling brutally slammed me, and I really got the shakes. I had the poor judgment to try to tie my boat on top of the car before warming up inside the car, and I really fumbled and struggled trying to tie easy and familiar knots. (I didn’t recognize this as poor judgment at the time I was doing it.)
Then I got into the car and ran the heater for about 30 minutes until I felt better. I would have been in real trouble had I been away from civilization. I would probably have been in real trouble without the PFD to help reduce heat loss.
Since then, I’ve never paddled flat water in cold or marginal weather without a change of clothes and towel in a day bag. Nor, ironically, have I unintentionally dumped in flat water since then.
Great link
I was looking through my old emails for the http://coldwaterbootcampusa.org link. This site has taught me a lot.
This link also has a lot of information regarding hypothermia and what you can expect both physically and mentally as your core body temperature drops.
http://www.coldwatersafety.org/nccwsRules3.html
Euphoria!
In my late 20’s my girlfriend (now my wife) and I were driving on a Sunday afternoon in January from Montreal to New York City. I was starting a new job in Manhattan the following day and quite soon into our 7-8 hour drive the heater in my little Datsun gave up the ghost. We drove on, through the really cold weather in the Appalachians and Catskills and eventually reached New York. By that time we were singly loudly, driving far too fast and feeling extremely euphoric, all of which I put down to 1) my stupidity to have not stopped and 2) mild hypothermia.
After we had warmed up we both realized that we had seriously put ourselves at risk by doing this.
You have been
Never shivered