|Woody said: << I can't help but think the number of kayak deaths each year is |very low, or we'd hear more about it in this forum. I suspect there are many |more canoes on the water than kayaks. But it's pure speculation for me to try |and break it down any further than what is reported in the report. >> |Well, the number of sea kayaking deaths may be low, but if you spend some |time reading RBP you will have noticed that the number of WW kayaking deaths |seems much higher. This was exactly my comment/thought when I saw the earlier posts on this subject. I have not read r.b.p. in months but in the years I did keep up with the newsgroup it seemed that there was a death every couple of months and many very close calls. To many close calls and deaths. Some of the close call stories sent chills up my back. The last death on r.b.p was of a regular poster on the newsgroup. He was killed running a river and a spot he had run many times before. It was well within his skill level. BaysideBob said... "Given the long threads on signaling devices, etc. I believe the sea-kayaking community is a bit more aware of their fragile mortality than other boaters." Most of the whitewater people are VERY safety concious. VERY. The WW people on r.b.p. are just as safety concious as the people on this list. The problem I see in whitewater is that a slight change in "things"can be deadly when the chain of events are just right. One of the last close calls I read was a story where the water level had dropped just a bit. Less water should be good right? Not always. The guy had one of these WW kayaks where the stern is long and very thin. He went through the rapid and the stern of his boat got caught in an undercut in the rock. The water pressure then pushed him and the boat underwater. He barely got out alive. Of course his version of the event is much more discriptive than mine! If the water level had been up another inch or two or if he had a high volume stern the accident would not have happened.... >From reading the accident reports on r.b.p it seemed that there were two type of accidents. Many, maybe most of the deaths, were people running rivers completely above their skill level. Ignorance and Arrogance was a big factor in these accidents. But the deaths that scared me the most were the people dying doing what was within their skill set. Running rivers they had run many times and the same water levels. The would run a river they knew really well and it would kill them. Simple as that. The accidents described in r.b.p. just seemed to be Act O God type of things. Course one could argue that running a raging river in a little boat ain't sane but given the skills, knowledge, conditions, etc. these people seemingly died by random events. I don't see this randomness in sea kayaking accidents. Lots of ignorance caused accidents but not many random events. Can anyone relate a touring kayaking accident that was random? My impression is that at the higher rapid levels IV+ the chance of random death is very high in white water. I define "very high" as I ain't going there! Or on a III rapid either. 8-) It would be interesting if the accidents could be broken down by boat type and environmental conditions. Later... Dan McCarty *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Oct 01 1999 - 08:11:51 PDT
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