Clarifications
A few clarifications.
I never said that the PFD will keep you alive or your face out of the water, I only said it’ll float you. This is the key difference as to why we don’t wear life jackets, we wear PFDs.
Regarding the whole concept of standing up in moving water, either surf or a river, standing up is not a good option as it can lead to foot entrapment or simply getting beaten up trying to get to shallow water. I always teach (my WW is showing) to swim/crawl until your crawling on the bottom, then you stand up.
Generally not a huge fan of blanket statements but I would apply one to this. PFD’s are there for the situations that we don’t plan for. It’s also why we, as instructors, teach to never paddle alone, never mind that many do. We prepare for that by learning the paddlefloat rescue, which is the rescue of LAST resort, not 1st resort.
When I’m faced by a recalcitrant student that says that they’re a strong swimmer I counter that if you capsize, unexpectedly due to the conditions (surf, weather, swift water, etc), those conditions are still there and will likely hamper your ability to swim and putting your PFD on after your in the water is difficult enough in flat water let alone moving water.
I know there are those who will, inevitably, say that early kayakers didn’t wear PFDs. Well, no, but it was also generally acknowledged that to swim was to die in the icy waters where kayaking was born.
If you don’t want to wear your PFD, fine. Keep in mind that if you foolishly die while not wearing your PFD your death reflects on the paddling community as a whole.
No argument about any of that
Your last sentence indicates that you missed the gist of my post. Like I said, I wear my PFD 98 percent of the time, including plenty of times where I can't imagine what might go wrong. Also, all the situations you use as examples to show how bad things can go without a PFD are places where I'd never question the need for one. I just don't like to hear THOSE reasons (dumping surf, swift water, self-rescue far from shore in rough conditions, etc.) applied to all paddlers in all situations as if there are no other conditions in this world. That's what I tried to illustrate with the farmer-in-a-pickup analogy. Even though I always wear my seatbelt when driving, I wouldn't fret about the farmer in that particular situation, but it's quite clear that a lot of people here, you included, would do exactly that (unless double standards are your thing). Using Angstrom's post as an example, if a person can spend the whole day walking the sandy bottom of a warm shallow river in perfect safety and comfort, why would a person paddling a boat in the same place be at potentially greater risk? Sure, either person could get hit by a hunter's stray bullet, stung by a wasp he didn't know he was allergic to, or any number of things that might put him in a situation where the PFD would make it easier to keep his head out of the water, but I'm NOT talking about risks that are vanishingly small. Those kinds of risks are everywhere else too and we ignore them, as someone already pointed out.
pickup is apples and paddling is orange
The number of drivers is tremendous and many laws have been written to regulate driving. In comparison, the number of paddlers is insignificant. We are viewed by non paddlers as a whole and stupid acts committed by one reflect on all. I certainly found this to be true when I was a climbing guide/instructor.
I didn’t miss the point of your post. Do we want to drill down to specifics or are we speaking in generalities?
Alcohol
No surprise about that in either the James River case or in many other accidents. Then even the ability to swim AND wearing a PFD might not be enough, unless the drunken one is wearing the kind that keeps face up out of the water.
The TYPICAL scenario of it all
Nit pick the details all day long …
People die often very near the shore, coast, sandbar
for a huge variety of reasons in North America.
News reports are full of scenarios where people
drowned with a 100 yards of safety of land/boat.
Almost all live on land 365 and 24/7 having
“limited” exposure to the waterways.
They often over-estimate their capabilities
and under-estimate mother nature.
Time on and in, the water, add useful experience
to access and manage risks.
From what I have seen in the Detroit, MI area
many make extremely foolish choices all too often.
Related to your comment
I used to wear my PFD almost every time when paddling. The next February after I got a sea kayak, we went to FL for a winter break. One of those days I forgot to bring the PFD along, let alone wear it. I was paddling a Tarpon 160, super-stable boat. No capsize, in case that's what you're thinking.
We got to a nice place where people were allowed to swim underneath and maybe see manatees, a few of which were nearby. I slid off the side of the Tarpon, accustomed to having a PFD instantly float me passively. Guess what--this time I immediately began sinking down. Oops, better tread water! Which I did just in time.
The biggest safety tool on board is our brains. If we wear PFDs most of the time, we may forget about that little thing called sinking without it. The "recalibration" might take a fraction of a second with no damage done, as in my case. But if I were going to wear a PFD most of the time (which I am not, given my present paddling venues and climate), then I'd also practice SWIMMING without one frequently enough to burn in the equation "body-in-water = sinking".
Also related to your comment is the fact that a PFD can make swimming, rolling, and cowboy re-entry harder because it is bulky. So, although the flotation can help with some things, there's also a disadvantage to wearing one. What it means is that regardless what your habits are, you need to practice all of these things both with AND without a PFD on. (And I am guilty of not doing enough cowboy practice with it on.)
Re-enter and roll is even more interesting. If I do it the more common way (from the side), wearing a PFD helps because it floats me on my back while I put legs against the hull floor. But if I do it from underneath the still-capsized kayak with a reverse somersault, wearing a PFD makes it very difficult because it doesn't want to let me shove myself down.
Not apples and oranges to me
It's an analogy. In both cases, we are talking about a safety precaution that can save your life. In both cases, the manner and location in which the vehicle/boat is used determines the degree of risk. In both cases, the potential benefit of the safety device decreases with the degree of risk, and when the risk approaches zero, so does the potential benefit of the safety device. In these analogous terms, I'm not telling the 3-mile-per-hour truck driver to wear his seatbelt BECAUSE a high-speed collision might kill him. I'm telling him to wear it when there's potential risk, and even though I'd be wearing it at that very moment, leaving it off just then is clearly okay. In these same analogous terms, you are focusing solely on the risk associated with locations OTHER than the place where the truck is actually being driven. This analogy is in no way whatsoever affected by the fact that there are more drivers than paddlers or that rules have been made to regulate drivers, because the fact remains that the truck in this example is all by itself going 3 mph, and making the driver wear his seatbelt at that very moment can't possibly accomplish a thing. By the same token, paddling in one or two feet of warm, slow-moving water is NOT the same as paddling in any of the conditions you listed as evidence that wearing a PFD is always necessary, and neither is it more dangerous than wading.
I have no problem with generalities, and advising all paddlers to wear their PFD all the time is fine by me. I have no problem with discussing specific situations either. What I DON'T agree with is using YOUR CHOICE of specific situations to counter any statement about OTHER specific situations which are completely different. Stick to generalities, and don't do the paddling equivalent of citing the dangers of high-speed driving to dictate proper safety measures when driving at a snail's pace, and I'll have no quibble at all.
PFDs and water depth
I surely agree that the risks anyone takes, doing anything, are best left up to them and their own judgement or lack thereof. No one can legislate morality or good judgement. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to use and encourage good judgement though… but there is room for some reasonable difference of opinion on what that is, I think. “We takes our own chances and pays our own dues”, as the song goes.
But I’m not sure water depth has much to do with the need to wear a PFD. In fact, in a worst case scenario, like if the Starship Enterprise beamed the PFD off my back and, while they’re at it tipped me over… if I HAD to swim a swamped boat to shore without a PFD (in any water temp), I’d rather swim it in with nice deep water, free of toe-stubbing submerged logs, and onto a nice gradual sand or gravel beach.
The situation I’d least like to deal with sans PFD, would be in the shallows. Consider swimming a swamped canoe through something like a long shallow Mississippi River mud flat with 2 feet of water and six feet of boot-sucking mud. In waves. Or an acre or two of water lilies and weeds. Even a wild rice bed. That could get really really ugly and fast. With a PFD. Without a PFD even the best swimmer would be in pretty serious trouble.
Kayak or canoe rolls and most self-rescue techniques would be seriously hampered precisely because the water IS shallow. So in those fairly common situations there’s simply nothing better than a PFD - worn. You couldn’t very well count on being able to put on a floating PFD while in the water under those circumstances either.
So water depth is almost irrelevant to the need for a PFD in a lot of situations many of us see around us with some frequency while paddling . IMHO the criterion for wearing a PFD (other than as a very wise general principle and habit) is much more about a well-reasoned consideration of whether you can safely swim a swamped boat to a safe place to drain it in the given environment.
Like Sissy, and I’m sure many others who started paddling decades ago, I used to carry a PFD and put it on if I saw a reason to. Now I’ve reversed the thinking. I wear a PFD and take it off if I see a real reason NOT to.
I’ll admit to sometimes not wearing one in big sandy rivers where my beavertail touches bottom on almost every stroke, where there’s a lack of any reasonably attainable shade, in 90 and 100 degree high-humidity days, with heat shimmering off the baking sand… Heat exhaustion is very possible and I’ve felt the onset of its effects often enough on such days in such places. Dunking a white cotton Goodwill shirt in the 80 deg water helps for a while, and works better without a PFD. The ideal thing to do in such weather, I think, is to paddle early in the mists of the morning (with PFD), sit in the water in shade through the middle of the day, paddle a few hours at dusk (again with PFD), and set camp in the gloaming. But how often does one really get to do what’s ideal?
So we takes our own chances and pays our own dues.
Less distance…
I’m not being snide. All it takes is enough less distance to make it impossible to find land, and in some cases that could be within a few feet of safety. Also this discussion seems to assume that someone can just swim to the nearest shore and get out. But I can name a lot of hard, rocky, greasy shorelines in lakes around here as well as ocean bays where we go in Maine where getting out of the water requires balance and strength to overcome the lack of easy footrests.
Obviously how many feet of difference it makes is variable based on body type (how much fat), how efficient of a swimmer someone already is, age (kinda related to the first in terms of cold tolerance) and how cold the water gets. It makes it to the high 30’s around here in the winter and it can still be open, so someone might be paddling on it. One drysuit failure can be catastrophic pretty quickly at those temps for example, and shit like that does happen.
We had our usual array of drownings in lakes around here this last spring. Most of them could swim but didn’t have enough swimming ability or knowledge to overcome cold water, or know to get out of heavy clothing when they fell from a canoe (another place where the floatation of a PFD could make a difference)… as I recall at least two of the drownings from canoes were people who as far as their families knew could officially swim, were in early spring water with temps in the high-forties and the capsize happened 20 feet from shore on a calm, flat lake.
Panicked people don’t do the right things to help themselves, and lots of things can make someone feel panicked. The risk isn’t complicated, but the mechanisms that get constructed to deny it get pretty fancy.
The question is?
… whether PFD would have helped.
If the shore is difficult to scramble up, PFD wouldn’t have helped.
If people have cold induced reflex and choke on water, PFD only makes it easier to find the body.
If their clothing is water logged, they may sink without PFD. That would be the difference a PFD make. But if they don’t make it ashore quickly, they would still die from hypothermia!
I just don’t see all this fanatical emphasis on PFD has much logic in it. Especially in this particularly context of swimmer in “shallow water”!
People swim ever since they can. Why is it such a big freaking deal that kayakers who can swim must wear PFD, in water they would normally swim happily?!
It is not a big deal
It is a very easy thing to do. You are making the wearing of a PFD - which is a legal requirement for several months of a year in many states - into a big deal. I continue to think that you live in a state of warmer water and sandy, easy beaches.
Being tired makes a scramble harder, swimming in colder water without a PFD makes the swim harder. None of this is a difficult reach for most…
Getting accustomed to PFD or no-PFD
There’s ANOTHER risk associated with this sort of thing, but in this case, it’s associated with being accustomed to NOT wearing your PFD, and I’ve heard of this problem cropping up a few times. If you commonly don’t wear your PFD, it’s very easy to leave it behind after a rest stop because not having it on doesn’t trigger any reaction that something feels “different” (years ago, a friend of mine lost a very expensive motorcycle helmet this same way).
However
Just because it’s “easy to do” is not a sufficient justification to obsess over its usage, which is what this forum is!
“I continue to think that you live in a state of warmer water and sandy, easy beaches.”
Wrong again! I live in the same state as you.
However, just because I live in a state that has cold water doesn’t mean I will paddle when the water is cold.
(I even paddle in Maine coast often enough. But againn, I don’t do it in the winter when it’s 36 degree water and 26 degree air!)
You’re equating default living location as default paddling location. It’s in the same vein that you think PFD is “neccessary” because “you can”. Those two are very different things! Life is about choices, not default rules that are one size fit all.
That only happens to some people…
Some people are forgetful, some are not.
I left a bike helmet on the roof of my car and rode away. Only realized it 20 miles later when I stopped and went to “take off” the non-pleasent helmet! I never bike without helmet, at least not on purpose. It still happens. So habit has nothing to do with it. I’ve also forget my company ID in the bathroom, even though I’ve been wearing it on my neck 5 days a week for a year!
My mother, on the other hand, never forgets anything at all. Handbags, wallets, shopping bags… “forgetting something” is an alian concept for her.
try making progress walking
in class 2 water, waist high. Weigh all the factors, depth being simply one of them.
Right
I have and I wouldn't want to go far... and there's plenty chance for foot entrapment just doing that if the current's strong enough. And the chances of getting bounced off rocks and possibly KO'd are there in class II also. Definitely PFD and probably helmet territory, that. But we started looking at white waterish situations and I thought there are other shallow water situations where PFDs are really really wise and might profitably be mentioned as well.
Heck, I can recall a couple years ago during winter when I was thinking of going out later in the week. I took a drive along the river to see if there was enough open water to make a short trip worth trying. I parked along the road, hiked a ways to the bank for a good look. Found myself standing on top of a snow-covered 60ft undercut bank looking at 100 open yards of cold, fast, deep, steel grey water with an seemingly endless ice sheet over the downstream end. The thought occurred that I should have a PFD on to even be standing there looking at it from shore. One misstep, a slide down that bank, it would all be over minutes, I'm sure... I backed away fast and didn't paddle that weekend. And yet I wouldn't make a blanket statement that a person should never LOOK at a river without a PFD on.
Near water
Just as an FYI: In my fire department swiftwater rescue class, we were told that a typical protocol would be that everyone within 10 feet of the water’s edge, or 10 feet from the edge of a steep embankment leading to the water, must wear a pfd.
You have it wrong
The science says that if you are in 50 degree water and have a life jacket on you can typically go an hour and still survive. Hypothermia is a gradual thing. The most serious thing is gasp reflex, which take place in the first minute or two. Loss of motor control happens within 10 minutes. A life jacket greatly extends your likelihood of survival in those conditions.
Sure,
and if I there I’d wear the PFD because you’re describing a situation where the firemen are the rescuers. And failure to wear a PFD could quickly turn them into another victim who needs rescuing. But that does not translate into an absolute need for everyone to wear a PFD all the time.
I think it is fairly safe to say that those of us who are arguing that there is some wiggle room regarding the wearing of PFDs do appreciate their utility and, in fact, usually wear them. We prefer a common-sense approach to the decision that is tempered with good judgement.
Peter
I agree completely with you - heat is a
copout.