I’ve paddled and floated the Edisto for years. The only time I was really concerned was when the flow was 10,000 cfs. It looks like flatwater at that level but when huge trees are bouncing in the current, it is a dangerous place to be. Most of the water is funneled through the swamp.
Otoh, it was a really fast trip.
2 Likes
I watched the whole video. I love that section of the Connecticut River. We did that trip in the spring of 2018 at around 6’, 4,000 cfs on the North Stratford gage. Pretty famland, nice campsites, lots of quickwater, and one class 1/maybe II rapid at Lyman Falls. We were hoping to go back this spring but the level dropped too quick.
I checked the gage on August 17th when these guys were out, and it was around 4’, 1,000 cfs - low but still fluid. Lots of rocks, so prime conditions for pinning a boat. Kind of scary to hear the description of the paddler’s feet getting stuck under the seat. Don’t know if the seat was hung high or low - I guess it can happen either way. Hasn’t happened to me yet, and hopefully it never will. I do have the seat up high. (That’s why dedicated whitewater boats have pedestals.)
Wasn’t quite sure which boat pinned - was it the SRT. I had a friend pin his SRT. Not quite as bad as that one, but still pretty bad. He was able to get it repaired, and now you would never know. Hopefully he will get the boat back.
Not sure how much the PFD had to do with keeping his head above water as he worked himself free from the boat. Looks like it was pretty shallow anyway. Not to say that the PFD still isn’t important.
He really didn’t talk about how they got the gear from the boat to land. Current moving over a rocky river like that is prime territory for a foot entrapment. Just like the current wrapped the boat around that rock, it will hold someone down if they fall in with their foot stuck in a rock. There are ways to safely wade across the river.
Still, makes me want to get back and do that section again - fun section, but not without its challenges.
1 Like
Excellent review from Frostburg State U (MD). Thanks for the link.
Yes it was the SRT
That’s a real bummer.
I’ve seen a couple of discussions about this incident on some paddling pages. The two other paddlers slowly walked back and forth retrieving gear and taking it to shore. Paddler who lost his SRT was pretty adamant that PFD gave him time to free himself. “It took me some time to free myself and quite honestly my PFD was keeping my head above water until I was able to free one leg.”
4 Likes
I didn’t see any response to your question about whether i wore my PFD. I have always been on record that I never go out on the water without a PFD on my body. I made note that if you’re willing to take chances with your own life, that is a personal judgement call. It really is nobody’s business. If you paddle with me, I require everyone in the group wear one. Primarily because nine times out of ten, it’s my equipment. I don’t want to be the one chasing it (if it isn’t yours, you’ll probably just watch it float away as you grab onto whatever is nearby. Another reason is it’s typically family or friends, so I want them safe. Third is I want you to be equipped to save me in the event I freak out and want to stand in your head. Id hate to be the reason you drown.
I hope I quelled everyone’s fears about 30 mph gusts. 10 to 15 mph with 20 mph gusts are typical on the bay. Gust to 30 are less common and add a new dimension to paddling because the effect of wind tends to increase more exponentially. I don’t fear them, I just don’t like them. It can add up to 20 minutes to a trip. As winds increase, waves grow. Managing them means, for instance, dropping speed from 4.5 mph to 3.5 mph. Do the math: 2 miles at 1 mph slower keeps you in an aerobic zone and prevents water overwashing the deck and spraying your glasses. Just a mater of perspective.
I won’t paddle with @szihn. He’s crazy.
2 Likes
Crazy?? !! Me??? Naaaa, Can’t be me.
I am so outspoken about metal health I put a bumper sticker on my truck.
It reads
“Support Mental Health
Or I’ll kill you!”
3 Likes
Shallow water, why wear a PFD…you hit your head on a rock on the bottom, you isn’t walking anywhere.
This post is intended for new kayakers. It is not to resurrect the PFD debate but to help the novice boater understand how to assist in their own capsized recovery.
Tuesday was a great day for a kayak trip, with light wind, 77° air temp and 64° water temps. At the launch, an angler setting out in front of me was approached by a boy who asked his assistance for an overturned kayak. By the time I managed to launch, he was on the scene, so I momentarily considered proceeding on my trip - the water depth in the cove was only around 5 1/2 feet deep, and they were only about 30 ft from shore. However, I figured it better to offer aid and be turned down than dismiss a potential medical or health issue. It turned out that a mother and her son had just bought the kayaks. It was their first outing and her birthday.
Upon arriving on the scene, the mother immediately mentioned that she was a good swimmer but was exhausted from treading water. The kayak clearly had no floatation or bulkheads. She had a PFD but was too exhausted to put it on. Attempts to stand on the shallow bottom were unsuccessful (5 1/2 ft deep, but she was 5 ft 4 in tall) and the bottom was silt (probably one foot of mud). I asked her son to back away. He was in a similar boat with a dog on his lap and no PFD. I told him to put on his PFD, but he said it was uncomfortable, so I told him to go back to the launch because his presence was more liabilty and distraction than help to his mother who was fatigued and on the verge of hyperthermia.
The guy in the fishing kayak had an electric motor, so he towed the mother back to the launch and I towed the boat. Below is a picture of the
Aside from the obvious points of not wearing the PFD (their decision doesn’t matter to me; I wear mine and will only go so far to save someone, meaning that I won’t go in the water or remove my PFD to search under the water - I won’t do it, so if you go under, you’ll probably stay under), there are some serious judgement issues:
- It was their first time in those boats, which 22were grossly overloaded. I took a picture of the group as they returned to the launch. Notice the low freeboard on the son’s kayak. The mother is in the water, obscured by the paddle splash.
-
If you don’t plan to wear a PFD, at least wear it on the maiden voyage, and don’t be so obsurdely stupid as to take a dog out until you understand the characteristics of the boat. Ironically, the dog had a rudimentary float on it’s back that looked like a seat pad from a dining room chair (is the dog’s life more valued than the idividual).
-
A sizable school class in canoes had just landed and departed, so she couldn’t have been in the water for more than five minutes, yet she was exhausted and showing poor judgement, either from limited mental capacity or the onset of hyperthermia. The son was helpless to render any assistance, especially with the dog that appeared anxious and animated. The story speaks for itself.
-
Before investing in a boat, learn about safe load ratings.
-
When someone demonstrate poor judgement that leads to a dangerous situation, don’t expect them to have an epiphany, but expect further deterioration of judgement. Notably how the mother insisting she was a good swimmer yet couldn’t swim 30 ft to the shoreline, and the son refusing to put on his PFD as we engaged in his mother’s rescue.
The pair were still in the area when I returned about 2 hours later, so I offered advice about load ratings and internal floatation features to look for in a boat. Their minds were in a fictional place ignoring the obvious, so I bid them good day and a pleasant tomorrow.
2 Likes
I got the wind speeds directly from the weather reports that came out of my VHF. The winds were out of the SE overnight which puts the wave action up the bay for, you tell me how far it is from the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the Gunpowder River down the channel to Hammerman. Look at your charts and tell me the depth of the bay and what happens at the delta around the mouth of the river. What happens to outflow of a river going with the tide or against it. How much current does a 10 mph wind generate that blows overnight in the same direction.
Based on your data, how high do you think the waves were? How many times have you actually paddled the Gunpowder channel?
I know this much, 24 inches is up to my neck. Now that you made a liar out of me, how fast was the wind and how high were the waves?
Also if you are used to swimming in the ocean, remember that fresh water you’ll be less buoyant.
It’s also harder to swim with booties on.
I’ve paddled the Gunpowder area many times. For localized conditions I often use data from NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center and Windfinder as well as the VHF weather channels.
Of course I also rely on what I see when I actually get out on the water.
Well if you had access to the data and couldn’t verify the conditions I described, I guess it didn’t happen . . .
Thanks for the reality check. Next time I’ll have to get a certified record.
Shortly after joining the forum, I joined a conversation where the Tsunami was described as a barge. When I explained that the 175 could average 4.65 mph over distance and the 145 Tsunami could average 4.99 over 21 miles. That was flatly rejected and I was told it wasn’t possible. I posted GPS data, but never got a retraction to nulify the challenge to my integrity. That’s unsettling to me.
If you guys don’t see it, you won’t believe it. That doesn’t make it untrue.
1 Like
Depends on wind and currents also. I hit 12 mph in currents under a bridge.
You keep saying that you don’t read the posts. I havent validated the weather conditions, but beyween a slack tide and SE10 to 12 mph swind, only had about 12 inch waves yesterday, but I hadn’t been out for three months.
The fact is, if a boat is long enough to be below its hull speed when reaching the speeds you describe, there ARE people capable of making the boat go that fast even if the boat is a poor design, and the Tsunami is hardly a “poor” design even if it’s not made for extreme ease in reaching high speeds. In short, I believe you.
Max speed is designed into the boat. Someone posted a very good video around a year ago that explained how speed is 90% related to length, and features such as width and hull form contribute the other 10%. Of course, boats specifically designed for racing and speed follow a specific formua that makes such boats faster at the sacrifice of seaworthiness and capacity to “some degree.”
As @Craig_S pointed out, max speed says more about the conditions you face that your physical ability. Since we have finite energy stores to paddle a boat, the power output has to be carefully managed for the task. This isn’t intended to be scientific, but most people can paddle all out for about 30 minutes before glycogen stored in the muscles is depleted. Then you bonk. Strategy for managing that energy is vastly different for a 3 mile race than it is for a 10 mile race.
A 3 mile race at an average speed of 5 mph is over in 36 minutes. The person who can sustain the anerobic output the longest in the fastest hull form will win. The conventional advice on the forum for increasing speed is to paddle harder. While that seems like common sense, its actually counterintuitive and dependent on how far you intend to paddle.
PaddleDog52, I’ve answered your obsession with wind, current, tides and waves many times, SO ANYONE WHO DOESN’T BELIEVE MY DRIVEL CAN STOP READING NOW. However, I’ve been exchanging direct messages with a relatively new member who git into racing. I’m pleased to say he’s faster in a 12’ 6" kayak than I am in a 17’ 6" kayak. My last trip out waa for demonstrating a point about energy management over 8.5 miles, using my test course of 4 equal legs which face conditions or tides, winds, currents (one side of the peninsula is a simple inlet and the other has a constant river outflow), and waves. Although my GPS data has been questioned, and one astute reader knows more about the conditions I face than what I reported, I took the time to paddle through it and record the data, so I’ll share it, mainly because a few readers have actually expressed an interest.
Here are three separate course under similar conditions. The 5.03 mph avg was the middle of a flood or rising tide, the 4.79 mph avg was the middle of an ebb or falling tide, and the 4.44 mph avg was the end of and ebb tide and start of a flood, which in my mind was essentially neutral. I plan to cover greater details in a direct message, but if you can’t see the correlation between how to best manage energy resources, take pleasure in knowing that god smiles on three types of people . . .
The difference in the avg speeds is the result of difference approaches to conditions. For PaddleDog52, the chart with the highest peak (actually hitting 6.4 mph peaks) was because I powered through the segment where I was fighting about a .6 mph river outflow, but with a following SW 8-12 mph, gusting 20 mph (I won’t argue that data with anyone who wasn’t there). Despite the assist from wind and hitting much higher speeds in the 2nd leg, the overall avg was much lower than the trips where I faced harsher conditions. The difference is in the way I managed the energy output.
While one post scoffed at the effort to chase tenths of a mph, the graphs show that the difference can be as high as .56 mph differnce under harsher conditions. You don’t have to believe it. Maybe someone who wasn’t there can unmask the mystery.
I found that I can stay within a range on the GPS that is (+/-) .2 mph of my target avg, when I peak over that target by an addition .2 to .5 mph (if target avg is 4.2 mph and I try to sustsin 4.7 mph, the yellow mark ahows the spike and a steady decline). What is most noteworthy on all my trip graphs is how those spikes always result in a decline. That decline is showned by the declining yellow line. The 2nd leg of the trip has the elevated speeds for half of that distance. Although I managed to stay well over the average, most of the trip spent under the average countered the benefit.
Compare that to the other two trips which had max speeds of 5.6 mph and 6.1 mph (both of those trips could have hit max speeds of 7.1 mph and 7.3 mph respectively, which I avoided in the interest of achieving better overrall efficency. You don’t have to paddle harder - you’re better off paddling more efficiently. If you overpower the padfle stroke, it’s only energy wasted. I estimate that the wasted energy iver a 10 mile trip equals up to 1/2 mph of wasted energy. Maybe I’m wrong or it just works for me - take it or leave it.