Help Choosing Between a Recreational and Touring

Advice
#61

@CA139 said:

@willowleaf said:
Sprayskirts are like bike helmets, car seatbelts and flood insurance: you don’t “need” them until you suddenly do.

I never thought of that way but I disagree. If you don’t know how to roll then you are likely to drown stuck upside down in your kayak. Given the thought of being upside down in water, never mind cold water, never mind having it get up my nose or down my throat with no end in sight and only so much breath to blow it out and hopefully last long enough to rip that stupid skirt off and swim to the surface. Nope. I know I could never train myself to roll as the situation it invokes is so uncomfortable ABSOLUTE PANIC is a mathematical certainty.

I’d just rather wear a dry suit and swim to shore and not push it weather or conditions wise. Been paddling 15 years, never fell in, not even once. That’s why I don’t push it but it doesn’t seem to limit my skills.

You should check one out some time. When they fit properly they come off very easy. Make sure and put the grab strap outside when putting it on the boat.
Skirts can also make the days paddling more enjoyable just by keeping you dry while you paddle.
I’ve been playing with a Greenland paddle and it seems to dribble a lot more water into the lap.

#62

That notion of being “trapped” inside a capsized touring kayak by a skirt is ludicrous. That sounds like the same excuse some people used to make about seatbelts “trapping” you in a car in the case of an accident. Few people LIKE capsizing but it is nowhere near as traumatic as you seem to fear. Being so CERTAIN that you could “never train myself” to do something you have never even tried seems rather irrational.

Gravity works underwater as well as above and one of the first things you have to learn when you are taking rolling lessons is how to fight to stay IN a kayak with a standard keyhole cockpit when you are upside down. If you don’t brace your thighs under the coaming and hang onto your paddle you are naturally going to tend to fall out or easily wriggle out within seconds – in fact that is what most people instinctively do. Unless you have a very snug neoprene rand type spraydeck (which people mostly use for whitewater or serious surf conditions where they WANT to keep the skirt on as snug as possible for inevitable rolling) the fact is that your nylon or combo bungee skirt is going to easily pop off, often without even having to pull the tab. There have been many times when I was able to recover from a near dumping with a quick brace maneuver – if I had not had the skirt on I could have taken on enough water over the coaming that I might not have been able to recover and the skirt also saved me from having to pump out the hull before continuing.

There are huge advantages to having a skirt and therefore being able to roll – first off it means you don’t risk being separated from your boat, second it is a whole lot less effort than any of the self-rescue options of climbing back into the boat or having to swim it to shore which put you at risk for exhaustion, panic and hypothermia, third is that it takes seconds to roll rather than minutes to recover an exited boat so you won’t hold up your companions or require their assistance, fourth is that your boat will not take on the gallons of water that it will if you capsize and exit (requiring assistance to drain the boat or the effort of pumping it out), and fifth you won’t end up immersed from head to toe – not as much of a problem if you are fully dry-suited but a bummer if you dump in milder conditions where you were wearing regular or semi-dry clothing and end up soaked from the waist down for the rest of the outing. I might add a 6th benefit, that not being afraid of capsizing (because you know through having practiced that it is not the end of the world and you’ve learned how to recover from it) can improve your comfort and expand your horizons in safely and confidently paddling in a wider range of locations and conditions.

You state that you would just rather swim yourself and your boat to shore if you capsized but then seem to indicate that you have never had to do that. It is not as easy as you seem to believe and sometimes is not an option at all if there is no suitable landing site. And having to swim a boat to shore certainly puts a damper on the outing.

Most open water kayaking fatalities can be directly linked to paddlers being flushed out of their boats and unable to re-enter them. Sometimes this happens only yards from shore. So, yeah, rolling (and self rescue) are both valuable safety skills to pursue. While it’s your personal prerogative to refuse to consider utilizing them (perhaps due to some phobias), I don’t think that dismissing spray skirts, self-rescuing or rolling as if they are some negligible esoteric practices or too scary to consider is a responsible attitude to press upon beginning kayakers seeking advice as they are here.

#63

@willowleaf said:
That notion of being “trapped” inside a capsized touring kayak by a skirt is ludicrous.

Let’s us not downplay it too much. With the “right” combination of sprayskirt and kayak, you can get trapped, and the danger will feel very real. On the other hand, I haven’t heard of anyone who didn’t eventually find a way out of the situation.

I had such an experience as an instructor. Quite embarrassing, and let me just say that my pupil (is there a better English word?) was not impressed. When she finally came out of the capsized kayak, the sprayskirt was still fully attached to the kayak. She had had to pull herself out of the sprayskirt under water.

In general, fibreglass kayaks are worse than plastic kayaks. On a plastic kayak, the cockpit coaming has rounded edges and a wedge shape on the underside, which means that you can usually pull off the sprayskirt with very little effort. On this particular fibreglass kayak, the gap between the coaming and the deck was also smaller than usual, and the sprayskirt was quite thick at the bungee, so it sat very well and secure in the gap.

Does that mean that one shouldn’t use sprayskirts? Hell no, unless one paddles in very sheltered conditions.

But it does mean that one should have a few “exit strategies” if the handle suddenly breaks (yes, that has happened to people where I live). And those methods should be tested, everytime one switches kayak or sprayskirt. My favourite alternative methods are:

  • Pushing with ones knees
  • Grabbing the surplus material at your hips and pulling out/up until you can get a finger under the sprayskirt
  • Letting yourself slide out of the kayak, hoping for the sprayskirt to release by itself (last resort method!)
#64

@CA139 and others above, about getting stuck in the boat…

CA139, the boat you use is a plastic boat with a fairly large cockpit. A nylon skirt, which uses a moderate diameter bungie cord, would not hold you in there upside down. Gravity works upside down and that is not a sharp coaming that has a better hold on a skirt. Unless you took off without burping the dry suit both you and the skirt would fall out naturally. You would have to hold yourself in.

IF you did not burp your suit, yes the air would all go into your legs upside down and you would have to push the boat off yourself. I had this happen once to me when I was doing safety for a demo day. I had gone out in a dry suit so I would be ready to handle a capsize and decided to pop a roll to cool off just before heading in. What I did not realize was how much air had built up inside my suit from the morning getting warmer while I sat on the water. Oops. I got out of the boat and had legs that looked like the Michelin Man.

Allan is correct, it can happen due to a gap in judgement when deciding which skirt.

I DID nearly get stuck one time, very early on in a pool session, due to a poor choice of skirt by a couple of younger guys who came from a WW background. I had expressed concern about being upside down in a boat, there was a risk that it might be a place where my occasional bouts with claustrophobia kicked in. So their solution was to put me into a boat that was way too big for me with a skirt that was quite secure because it was randed,

Apparently their thought was being in a bigger boat would solve the claustrophobia issue, and I didn’t know any better myself because we had only gotten our own transition kayaks a week before. The tight skirt part went by their radar.

Anyone who has taught knows the rest. I went upside down, fell out of position in a boat that was too big, and was being held in the boat now by a super tight skirt. And I also did not know yet to have goggles, which would have helped because I don’t open my eyes under water. I went into panic and felt a real likely risk I was going to drown in a pool all of 5 feet away from several other people.

Happily a useful thought entered and I realized I could make my way to the grab loop by feeling along the edge of the coaming. I did so. But I have never, ever erred in the direction of a tighter skirt since. I only go out with skirts that are if anything a little wetter ride than some others, because if I am tired or otherwise discombobulated I can get it off. I do use neo skits, but these days they tend to be maybe a half size up from the one that anyone more hard core would use.

Now to CA139 - having had that near panic response I have a lot of respect for how much it can mess up what would normally be a simple response to exit the boat. If you really have not capsized in 15 years I suggest that you start and end your season with some of that on purpose, to make SURE that you stay calm. And as above, being stuck is a non-issue for the typical nylon skirt using a bungie edge on a plastic boat like you have. And if you remember to keep your dry suit burped.

As to panic being a certainty, turns out it is for me being upside down under a boat. But I paddle solo now and before that was the only one of two of us with an early desire to get what I thought was a crucial skill for bigger water. So I had to suck it up and get thru it. It took me way longer than most, I spent a year or so just learning to manage that panic before I could execute a roll. But it was necessary to do the paddling I wanted. It is a problem that can be solved.

#65

As a beginner I recently scored a nice used composite boat with a pretty small keyhole cockpit and a neoprene sprayskirt. Like you I have various fears related to being upside down under my boat. So I practiced taking off the skirt, first above water, and then I practiced capsizing and wet exiting. It was easier than I’d feared, and, just as importantly, has helped me to feel less fear overall. I even managed to do an Eskimo rescue, which scared me quite a lot, since then you’re really under the boat. But, it was actually kind of fun!
Maybe more in retrospect, though. :wink:

And I can tell you when I first put the skirt on, it seemed so darn tight I thought I’d never be able to get it off, let alone get it on myself in under 15 minutes. But lo and behold with practice I now can.

(Allan, “pupil” has a slightly more formal sound than “student,” but we use both interchangeably.)

#66

@CA139 said:
I never thought of that way but I disagree. If you don’t know how to roll then you are likely to drown stuck upside down in your kayak. Given the thought of being upside down in water, never mind cold water, never mind having it get up my nose or down my throat with no end in sight and only so much breath to blow it out and hopefully last long enough to rip that stupid skirt off and swim to the surface.

Skirts and sea kayaks - the basics. Lots of info gong about here, so my big picture take (as a certified instructor).

Yes, you can die by being stuck in a kayak upside down. You can also die by getting electrocuted plugging a blender into an outlet. Both are possible, but also both are very rare as safety has been designed in to prevent both situations.

The average sea kayaker DOES NOT know how to roll. There are benefits to learning to roll, but in relatively flat water it is really not required. The flat water we paddle in means that we have the time to do wet re-entries like paddlefloat and T-rescues.

A sea kayaker using a properly sized nylon skirt with any sort of lifting pretty much anywhere on the skirt will cause the skirt to fall off. If you lift a knee up, the skirt will pop off. If you are upside down and gravity is pulling your body down, the skirt will fall off. Of course, you could always use the release handle made to take the skirt off, but usually that is not needed with nylon skirts.

Actually, you usually can’t even do a roll with a nylon skirt, as the twisting as you set up for a roll often pops the skirt off.

Things that could trap you:

  • using a too small neoprene skirt for the cockpit
  • using a thick randed skirt (the type meant for most extreme white water conditions) on a composite kayak cockpit
  • putting a somewhat tight or tighter skirt (usually neoprene) on with the release loop not exposed and not knowing how to release a skirt without accessing the loop.

Until one is comfortable being upside down and wet exiting, they should use a nylon skirt. Better yet for those concerned, get a skirt made for rentals (such as Seals Rental Skirt https://www.sealsskirts.com/prod_detect.php?i=20) which have bungees or lines that keep the release loop on the outside, preventing one from accidentally tucking it under.

The reality is that being trapped by a skirt does not show up as a cause for many sea kayaker fatalities (usually not at all during a year). Lack of flotation and lack of thermal protection for when one swims are the real killers which unfortunately take multiple people each year.

But wearing a skirt can add to your safety, specifically by keeping your boat from flooding if you are in situations where waves are splashing over your deck. As water accumulates inside your cockpit, the boat will become less stable. Often a couple of inches of water on the bottom will drastically change the boat’s stability.

#67

Speaking of changing a boat’s stability, adding supplemental padding to the seat of a kayak can drastically affect the paddler’s center of gravity. Even a 1" elevation in the seat can be a major stability changer.

#68

It sounds like learning to roll is a very good idea but it’s going to be very hard and the way I paddle makes it pretty unnecessary.

First off a lot of what we do is flatwater and very close to shore in packboats. There’s no rolling there, if they tip, you’re in and not getting back. But where these packboats are meant to be used swimming to shore is a very viable alternative in small lakes and rivers.

As far as going out behind our house on the Sakonnet River it’s always with a doubles with the wife. No need to roll there, you know how in a couple one is always more into paddling and that would I. She refuses to go out in rough waters so I have to time it when weather is nice and water glassy or nearly so. She is 0% prissy about everything and the kind to get her hands dirty but the one thing she is prissy about is getting her hair wet. No way I can get her to roll. And I always carry a bail. Always! One is fashioned to the rigging with fishing line and stored behind the seat in each cockpit of every boat we own.

And I am never alone out there because I have diabetes on an insulin pump. It would be foolhardy to go out paddling and risk a low sugar all alone without help. I never go anywhere in the wilderness, water or woods, unaccompanied. To go in singles just isn’t as fun as they’re not as fast and it’s more effort. I prefer the speed, stability and ease of the double by a long shot out on the big water. And once I discovered the dry suit I just put it on even when it’s 90’. I sweat like crazy. I found half a soda can of “water” in each dry suit foot/sock. It was accumulating in my arms too. The first few times I though the dry suit had a leak but now, it was just sweat!

Don’t care about the heat though, I prefer to keep the insulin pump on as it’s not waterproof and the dry suit is that vehicle. If I spend too much time disconnected (not long, basically over ~60 minutes without insulin flow) I get toxically ketotic which is a quick road to a potentially fatal turn of events so I’d rather deal with the heat from the dry suit but keep my pump on. Is this ideal? No, but neither is having type 1 diabetes. I deal just fine though. Hasn’t stopped me from paddling over 12 miles in a day and I don’t feel like I am limited.

This is actually not that bad. While I’ve never tipped a kayak in 15 years I once was tipped in a Canoe on the St Lawrence Seaway when my son was a lot younger. I had borrowed my friend’s canoe while visiting them up in their cottage which had defective, deteriorated ballast and filled up with water. Its handling was awful and didn’t take much to tip. We were 200 yards from shore because we were next to an island (227 yards according to my Leupold rangefinder actually). The St Lawrence Seaway in June is no joke, it was COLD! It took a bit to swim with the canoe. I basically said something to them to the tune of grabbing their paddles and “THERE IS ONE PERSON THAT WILL GET YOU BACK TO SHORE, YOU SO START KICKING.” There was a slight complaint and I responded “KEEP KICKING”. When the kids saw Jaws with us a couple years later my younger son remembered that scene at the end which I purposely copied from the movie unbeknownst to him and asked if I was trying to imitate the movie back in that situation. I was!\

In that situation I didn’t panic at all. What impressed me was how quickly I grabbed the insulin pump out of my pocket and stuffed it into my mouth to keep it out of the water for the swim. I was just in time, and it didn’t get waterlogged and fail. I have rehearsed the scenario in my mind and the first thing my hand did as I felt myself start to enter the water was to thrust into my pocket just for that purpose. Falling in the water isn’t bad. Good idea to have goggles though!

The one thing that might be limiting me is my ability (and desire) to “play” but I am not playful. I am not the steadiest or most coordinated and my equilibrium isn’t so hot. So I am not the playful type. I can run or paddle fairly fast, carry fairly heavy weights for long distances, shoot bows very accurately. Just don’t ask me to dance, do yoga or be playful trying to balance myself. If you are an old flight sim buff think fast warplanes that dive and climb quickly but don’t maneuver very well. F-4 Phantom; set speed records given enough time and altitude to power up and had enough fuel to cross half the world full of heavy loads but had a reputation of handling like a brick. FYI my BMI is 23, I am not pudgy at all.

So yes I agree with you now. You’ve changed my mind about my complete avoidance to the eskimo roll. I have actually viewed a couple videos and I am at least interested instead of totally repelled so thanks to this forum I learned something. But the situation generally won’t allow for it, I prefer to be a slightly less confident, more timid paddler. I’ll never be seen in a surfski and that’s OK. The doubles we have are plenty fast for me. I don’t feel limited by not wanting to literally rock the boat!

I might actually try a skirt, perform the maneuver with goggles and get back to you guys next year. Maybe I should add goggles to my paddling “kit”.

#69

I think you are totally missing the point. You do not need to know how to roll to use a kayak with a skirt.

#70

Peter is right. A sprayskirt is an everyday comfort item, even in fair weather and flat water and it is irrelevant if you can roll or not in terms of using one. We explained that it doesn’t “trap” you if you capsize to try to disabuse you of that fear you indicated of using a skirt.

#71

@CA139

I am myself not convinced that you need to actually learn to roll given how you paddle. My point and others was that there are safety aspects that you get with a skirt, like limiting the ability of water to flood the cockpit and make you unstable, that are worthwhile. It was more your impression that a skirt would trap you which I was going after. A coated nylon skirt with a bungie edge on a plastic coaming does not produce that risk. It does sound from your other post like you may be at risk of a wave at times.

There are other benefits to trying to learn to roll, regardless of whether you ever get to the roll. The process of learning to roll ends up improving your brace or, if more Greenland style, your sculling. Both make it more likely that should a wave or current start to knock you over, you can recover before actually capsizing. In fact a sweep roll could easily be viewed as a scull in a single stroke. This is a good thing.

It is also an excellent way to cool off on a warmer day in a dry suit. For various reasons I also wear a dry suit into warmer weather than most. Sculling keeps me from overheating nearly as well as rolling, and if I am alone it is a safer bet.

And a consideration, the wider the boat the more difficult it can be to roll. So the boat that works for your regular paddling might be an uphill climb to fully make it to a roll. But the same boat is usually not as difficult to brace and scull in. And that is where, as I said, you get a ton of benefits for your paddling.

#72

Basically the whole reason why I never rolled is because I would wear an insulin pump that cannot get wet so I just was very careful never to get in the water or risk maneuvers that could or put myself in a situation where that was possible.

Once I got the dry suit it was a game changer for me and I will wear it pretty much regardless of temps for this reason!

But yes I still prefer big wide, semi recreational boats. You don’t give up that much in performance if you’re in a double. In a single yes, it rules out all the fun, long, sleek singles and surf skis but I’m all set. Given I’m always with my wife or kids who don’t want to paddle that hard a tandem is in order, or in flatwater I’m happy to have more stable, slightly slower boats.

The Stellar ST17 is a thing of beauty though… fragile yes, but boy is it easy to make it go FAST!