Re: [Paddlewise] Stuck in cockpit

Niels,

Let me take an attempt at this.

You bring your boat parallel to his, very close.  You lean your body over, 
placing your weight onto his boat.  This was the most difficult part in 
practice, learning to trust an inverted boat to hold your weight.  You grab 
the victim by the shoulders, forcing his shoulders back to his rear 
deck.  Then you pull (roll) him upright.  It is either quick and easy (with 
proper technique and practice) or completely impossible (with poor 
technique / no practice).

I've never seen this done in "real life" though the people who trained me 
had done it in the surf.

In a similar rescue, we did the same with the added complication of having 
the victim partly out of the boat.  We had to guide his feet back into the 
cockpit (easy), get his torso back in (hard) and then roll him upright with 
a flooded cockpit.  In this you assume the victim is unconscious.  Getting 
him upright was not as hard as getting a big man into a tight cockpit.

-jerry.


At 08:31 AM 9/17/2001 -0400, Blaauw, Niels wrote:
>Last wednesday I was instructing a group of novices. They were in kayaks for
>the third time. All of them had capsised in the first lesson, and shown that
>they were able to remove their sprayskirts and get out of the boat. During
>that exercise an instructor was standing in the water next to the kayak, to
>help if the novice did not manage to get out. All got out without problems.
>
>Last wednesday a guy capsised in deep water and panicked. I saw him
>struggling to get his head above the surface, without releasing his
>sprayskirt.
>
>Luckily he was on my side of his kayak. If brought my bow close to him, and
>he managed to grab my bow. After that I told him to relax and breath, and
>then to take his time to get out of his boat.
>
>If he had tried to get to the surface on the other side, I would have had to
>paddle around, loosing precious seconds. I he was too panicked to grab my
>bow, I don't know what else I could have done.
>
>Does anybody have experience with rescues in that situation? Any
>standard-rescues available?
>
>Niels Blaauw.
>
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