reason for overconfidence
Wow, that makes them appear all the more foolish. I was looking for some cause of over-confidence. I mean, when they’re on the beach of the island there and launching for the return trip, looking at 7-foot waves and facing 85-km wind, the thought had to occur to every one of them that “if we capsize and we’re in the water for very long, we’re dead”. Probably it was said aloud. And there were 8 of them to discuss it, usually the larger the group the less likely of doing something stupid. And yet somebody had an answer that was good enough to persuade them to launch.
I thought maybe it was - “Well, then, we’ll just have to not capsize - we’ve handled worse waves than this before.” But if that’s not the case, if they were inexperienced with rough water, then the answer must have started with “So what if we capsize - if that happens, we’ll just have to…”
What?
My next best guess is maybe they were all great cold water swimmers. “So what if we capsize - if that happens, we’ll just have to swim for it - it’s only 2 miles. Remember the XXX race? We had to swim 5 miles in water not much warmer than this. And we all made that, didn’t we?”
Of course, that theory isn’t fully supported by what happened after the capsize, when the one dude climbed up on the center of the other kayak. That sounds like the water was colder than expected and he was desperate to gt some relief. So maybe they also had heard a bad number for the temperature of the water in the cove.
It’s interesting to speculate.