[Paddlewise] Achilles Heel of Sea Kayaking Safety

Paddlewisers,

As I was paddling along the coast today, I was thinking about the barrage of 
safety I read about in Sea Kayaker magazine and on Paddlewise.  It made me 
try to think of the single most dangerous thing about sea kayaking, which I 
determined was the closed cockpit.

That darn closed cockpit has killed a lot of people.  In rare instances 
people have been trapped in them when they capsized.  More often they can't 
get back into the cockpit after a capsize, and therefore they die of 
hypothermia.  Sometimes even if they can get back inside the cockpit, the 
thing is so full of water that the kayak is tippy, and they can't get the 
water out fast enough before capsizing again.  Then again it is death by 
hypothermia.  It even happens to experience sea kayakers, not just the new 
ones

Why are so many of us paddling these kayaks with dangerous closed cockpits?  
Why have we allowed the dogma of this huge safety design flaw to exist?  Why 
haven't closed cockpits been banned by laws?  Why haven't the families of 
victims of closed cockpits filed class action lawsuits against the 
manufacturers?  Why haven't we denounced closed cockpit kayaks as macho 
phallic symbols and destroyed them so that we can all be safe?

If sea kayakers truly wanted to be safe, they would paddle sit-on-top kayaks. 
 Gone would be having to know how to roll or do rescues, using paddle floats 
and pumps, and worrying so much about new people in the sport.  If we 
capsized, all we would have to do is climb back on.  It is as simple as that!

The closed cockpit really is the Achilles heel of sea kayaking safety.

Duane
Bored on a Sunday night
and not looking for a SOT yet!

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