Your life, no skin off anyone’s nose here. People make choices all the time. Some irreversible sadly. Info is here people can chose to follow or 
all free to do as we please.
Enjoy pantless paddling. 
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I missed it. What was the question again?
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Good way to get sunburned in all the wrong places.
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I think we get. Working the risk is preferable to getting into the water to find out if you have the charts right.
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“2.9 people die each year out of 100,000 from kayaking. 11.7 people die each year out of 100,000 from auto wrecks. I would wager every one of us spends more time per year in a car than we do in a kayak.”
Use of statistics is a wonky thing. I read this, and it struck me that I wasn’t sure which way this was meant to sway me, but it read to me like an attempt to downplay the risk of kayaking. Of the 16 people in my office, I’m the ony person who was in a kayak in the past week. This is misleading, in that 1 / 16 = 6.3% might suggest to someone that 6.3% of the driving population paddled a kayak in the past week, and I would be very surprised if 1% of the country’s driving population last week paddled a kayak last week - and this is summer. The colder half of the year, you may not average one in 1,000 drivers that you would find to have paddled a kayak in the last week. But let’s use it anyway.
I average an hour a day getting to and from work, and I have one of the easiest commutes in the office. I know one person told me she averages 3 hours a day getting to and from work. And I know a lot of folks live north of town and deal with that traffic. So lets do a conservative average 1-1/2 driving hours per day, very generously to include all other driving outside of commuting. Lets just figure that for all 7 days, pretty confident that this is an underestimate of hours spent in a car per week per person in this office. 1.5 hours x 7 days a week = 10.5 hours per person x 16 = 168 hours driving per week. Now I’m not going to figure my personal time paddling as a generalization. I know that I am an outlier. My data would not result in a statistically meaningful result. So lets say 2 hours x 1 person x 1 day in the last week for kayaking among 16 people, which is already a wild overestimate of comparative kayaking hours among our 16 compared to the general population.
So lets bring this to 100,000 people. 16 people x 6,250 = 100,000.00 people. 168 hours x 6250 = 1,050,000 driving hours. 2 hours x 6250 = 12,500 kayaking hours.
2.9 people die in 12,500 kayaking hours. 11.7 people die in 1,050,000 driving hours.
0.0232% of kayakers die - 232 in a million. .0011% of drivers die - 11 in a million.
So by this, a person is more than 20 times more likely to die kayaking than driving. But I don’t think this is even close to a proper representation. I don’t think padding hours to driving hours among 100,000 people would come even close to 2 to 168. We paddled Saturday from a dock in a major population center. We launched near a bridge. 4 lanes, constant steady traffic both directions. We could have counted 10s of thousands of cars in the time we spent on our 5 mile paddle. We didn’t encounter another kayak. I could have picked any spot in the area from the air, picked out a few blips for individual kayakers, and 10s of thousands of cars. At night, maybe a couple blips for the entire region for kayakers, and still 100’s of thousands of cars traveling the region. I spoke to a kayaker who owns several kayaks - nice kayaks - yesterday after I landed after a 10 mile solo paddle, again not seeing another kayaker on the water. He said he gets out usually 4 times a year. Among the general population, this is an avid kayaker. So I agree, the population spends way more time in a car than they do a kayak, and so this statistic suggests to me that kayaking is far, far more risky than travel by car.
Still, you can do a lot to mitigate risk when kayaking so that the fatality statistics among your kind of kayaking preparedness would be much lower. Most often, the fatalities have been notably careless in some regard.
I don’t see anyone wrecking their car on the freeway to see if they can survive the wreck, yet everyone works the risk every day when they get in their car with nothing but a hope and a prayer their number doesn’t come up. It is the exact same thing. Only the risk is substantially greater in a car than it is in a kayak without a wetsuit.
Right. Getting into chilly water near shore for about 30 minutes, for someone who claims to be a strong swimmer, is definitely comparable to running your car into a barrier to see if you walk away.
Some part of this story is not adding up.
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Sir, if you do not want to follow safety precautions when kayaking, then don’t. We don’t know you, and it’s no skin off anyone’s nose here if you never flip, flip and swim easily to shore where you find the sun and air are warm, or die in the water. At this point, the only reason anyone but you is still in this conversation is that you keep offering poorly reasoned rationalizations for your decision on a public website. Not every novice who reads this website has already decided not to worry about capsizing, and not all of them have Capefear’s grasp of statistics, so we can’t really leave your rationalizations unanswered. It’s a free country, just say “thanks, I do not choose to do those things” and move on. You don’t need to justify your behavior to us.
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Well, how about, mid winter, you go for a dip in the water and see what your reaction is to the cold water, see if you experience cold shock and how long you can swim for.
Please excuse “why1942” for their ignorance. Being prepared for cold water immersion is to buy you more time to function. When you wear appropriate gear for the temperatures you may experience, that being air temps /water temps; your survival times increase. For inexperienced paddlers , buying time is an important thing to consider when gearing up for a paddle. Making my point as to this paddlers ignorance is when they state they think it might be a good idea to wear shorts to minimize their sweating to keep drier when out kayaking in colder conditions. First , this would be the opposite to what a knowledgeable paddler would advise and second, kayaking is a wet sport. If you don’t want to get wet you should not be kayaking.
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There’s two types of fools on the water- those that simply don’t know, and those that know but do some risky stuff anyway. I’m the second type of fool. I take calculated risks. Sometimes my calculations are off a bit and things get interesting.
My scariest experience wasn’t on the North Fork of the Payette, Upper Gauley, or Upper Yough. I was leading a group of canoes on a lake crossing on a beautiful summer day. It didn’t stay beautiful. All hell broke loose. Nobody swam but make no mistake about it- it got very real! I was on a familiar lake doing a standard lake crossing that I had done regularly. What made it so scary was being responsible for others and watching the group scatter. The story ended well but I learned that weather can be totally unpredictable. The way things usually are may not be the way they always are. Conditions can change unexpectedly and suddenly. I think you’ve got to get “nailed” a few times to learn that lesson.
So my experience is very different than the OP. My experience is that stuff can happen when you least expect it. So I dress for immersion and always wear a pfd when paddling. I agree each of us gets to make our own decisions. There’s some inherent risk in all paddling. The trick is to minimize it and become the second type of fool. You do that by respecting the environment you are in and realizing that it is not a static environment- then adapt to the changes.
I don’t know the water temps, length of crossing, or the exposure that the op experiences but when I do sketchy stuff it’s great that people call me out on it. That means they care.
Cold water kills, so respect it and dress for immersion. It ain’t complicated for me. I might be a fatality some day. At least I’ll be wearin’ a pfd and dressed for the swim…the second kind of fool. I would hate going out of this world bein’ the first kind of fool- leavin’ this world with regrets… if I only I had…you gotta know what you don’t know and not be to proud to change
My apologies to the regular posters- I only know one tune and sing it loudly whenever I get the chance
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When I first started canoeing the Boundary Waters in the 1950s as a high school student, i was with other equally clueless high school students. We didn’t have pfds, spare paddles, nor any backup plans, yet had only minor problems and great fun. Some years later (early 1970s?) I lost a brother-in-law and his 2 sons, who drowned while duck hunting when their small boat swamped in a cold northern Minnesota lake. Gee, they were good swimmers; how did that happen? Even then I didn’t understand hypothermia … But I do now. Today this old guy won’t paddle with those who are not wearing pfds and Immersion clothing (the latter when appropriate). This is actually for my own selfish comfort, because otherwise I spend all my time worrying about such companions.
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FORECAST
noun
a prediction or estimate of future events, especially coming weather or a financial trend.
Not a guarantee 
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What i have not seen mentioned is our individual and collective responsibility to not be a burden or threat to search and rescue personnel. Sure you can crow “my body, my risks” but rescue crews are obligated to put themselves at risk extracting your flailing carcass from the water if you have the good fortune to dump somewhere that you are spotted and they are called in to rescue you. There have been many instances where SAR crew members have lost their lives trying to save someone who placed themselves in jeopardy by being improperly prepared or outfitted for conditions. I’ve been personally inconvenienced on multiple occasions during my life on backpacking, mountaineering and paddling trips by having to interrupt the activity (for which I myself was well prepared and outfitted) in order to assist with the extraction and aid of some bozo(s) who blundered in over their heads because “statistically” they thought the risks were minimal (if they thought at all.)
Also, when insufficiently prepared recreationalists repeatedly burden local SAR by getting themselves into trouble that requires intervention, that can lead to restrictions on activities for everyone, even those who are responsible for their own safety. So those of us who share the waters do have some vested interest in persuading those taking up the sports we love to adopt the safest practices. My outdoor club went through several cycles of having to fight to get legal access restored to local cliff areas in parks and public lands after some of them had been the sites of accidents and even deaths caused, not by experienced and safety conscious rock climbers like our members, but by reckless people scrambling over or rappelling off the rocks without proper gear or training.
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Smart move. I do not go on the water with anyone who doesn’t wear a zipped up pfd and appropriate water temp clothing. I am not going to get into cold water to rescue someone who can’t give themselves appropriate protection.
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You can drown on a teaspoon of water, what do you think might happen in a lake, river or ocean?
Just a calm bay. Nothing to worry about…
sing
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