Re: [Paddlewise] Kayaking safety

From: Richard Culpeper <culpeper_at_sympatico.ca>
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 15:45:55 -0400
Dan Hagen wrote:
--snip--

> Do more experienced paddlers exceed their target level of risk? I really
> don't know. Certainly there are some who do.  However this is not an
> easy issue to resolve empirically. Even if one were to show that more
> skilled paddlers have a higher death rate, this would not necessarily
> imply that there is a tendency for such paddlers to exceed their target
> level of risk, since it may be that the risk target for the population
> of skilled paddlers is higher, on average, than for the population of
> less skilled paddlers. (The level of skill development may be a function
> of the target risk level.)

I don't have any data, but my impression based on a number of years teaching ww
is that intermediate paddlers often over-estimate their skills (e.g. they think
that they have a bomb-proof roll simply because they only rarely miss one,
rather than actually having a bomb-proof roll), and over-estimate the ability
of their technique to get them saely out of something (e.g. the don't worry
about flipping because of their ability to roll, but fail to recognize the
hazards of head-knocking during a roll).

Richard Culpeper

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Received on Sun May 17 1998 - 12:54:09 PDT

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