[Paddlewise] Rescue Options

Hello all,

I had a nice day of paddling out on the IJselmeer yesterday. This 
is a large inland sea that was cut off from the North sea in the 
30's. Anyway, it was nice and sunny but we had force 5 winds. Didn't 
make the paddling too difficult (just slow) but did give us a chance 
to practice rough water rescues. There were three of us, and as we 
entered a particularly shallow and choppy area we had a capsize. 


The paddler lost hold of his boat and it drifted downwind, luckily 
towards me. I intercepted the boat about 20 feet (6 meters) from 
the swimmer. The third paddler is a relative beginner and had a hard 
time getting his boat turned around to aid the paddler in the water 
and bring him over to me for the rescue.  He did manage it with some 
shouted direction. He got the paddler on his bow, paddled over and 
we performed a T-rescue without problems. 

Here are some observations and questions.

The paddler in the water had never swam with his paddle before. This 
would have helped quite a bit. Even though he simply had to swim 
down wind to me and his boat, holding on to his paddle and the large 
amount of chop prevented him from doing so. The wind was of course 
also slowly blowing me away. 

Lesson learned - go out and practice that paddle swimming. It isn't 
too difficult but you do need to practice a bit to get the hang of 
it. 

What are the best methods for swimming with a paddle without doing 
a paddle swim? Wrapping your legs around it perhaps?

As I sat there holding his boat I felt pretty useless. I looked in 
John Lull's rescue book last night and see I could have paddled over 
to the capsized paddler by leaning over the empty boat and using 
a draw stroke. I am not sure how far I could have gotten, it would 
have at least minimized the amount of drift due to the wind.

Any other methods? I thought about attaching my tow line, but it 
seemed like it would take too long to hook up and I was worried about 
towing a boat full of water. And spend time detaching it to get the 
boats set up for the rescue. Though if there had only been the two 
of us this is probably what I would have done.

-Patrick






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