This is for all the people who exercise their personal freedom, and liberty of choice, and choose not to wear a PFD. I support and believe in your principals, but if we were paddling together and you get into trouble (are drowning) I don't have a choice. My value system is so ingrained that I will come to your aid. I'll take on that responsibility as I suspect the majority of people who wear their PFD's all the time will. Take comfort in this. The rest of us will just shoulder the burden. One week after the drowning here in Victoria I joined the annual paddle out to Discovery Island to clean up the shore line. Every year local paddlers do this here and I encourage paddlers to do the same in their local waters. It's good for the environment and good PR. Believe it or not three of the paddlers choose not to wear any immersion gear. The water temperature taken with my cheap thermometer was 46*F. Air temp in the low 50*s. Before we left one person took on the responsibility to point out that there was no leader on this trip. He went on to explain the tides, currents and predicted winds. Everyone acknowledged and indicated they were all right in this. Two of the paddlers with out immersion gear indicated they were not that experienced and would be nervous in the predicted afternoon chop and said they'd likely turn around after reaching Discovery Island. So off we set. Upon reaching Discovery I glided over to the novices and gently suggested, since neither had immersion gear, it might be better to stay with the group. If one got in trouble I was not confident the other would be much help. They'd gone through the excellent intro course offered by Ocean River Sports but admitted they had not practiced a self rescue in a long time. I think they meant never. So they stayed with us. True to form the wind came up. On the return we split into two groups of six. I started out with the second group but by surfing the wind waves easily caught up with the first which was getting a bit spread out. I purposely choose to stay near the weaker paddlers. I'd rather have headed out to the rough water to play. I gave them some advice, paddle faster in the rough water, try to breath, simple stuff and generally tried to get them to relax. By the end of the day I was towing one in for the last mile or so. When we were parting company back on shore one of them came over to thank me which was nice. In parting I suggested they should get wet or dry suits. "Oh we have suits. We just didn't want to wear them," was the response. I spent my time shepherding, these people simply because they didn't want to be discomfited. I just shook my head and walked away. The third guy had his wet suit under his front hatch. Was I wrong in playing the role I took on? My value system says no. I had good day. I could have had a great day but if something had of gone wrong I would have had to live with my selfishness and I was not prepared to do that. Gordin Warner Victoria *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
At 11:21 AM 4/23/02 -0700, Gordin Warner wrote: >This is for all the people who exercise their personal freedom, and >liberty of choice, and choose not to wear a PFD. I support and believe in >your principals, but if we were paddling together and you get into trouble >(are drowning) I don't have a choice. My value system is so ingrained >that I will come to your aid. I'll take on that responsibility as I >suspect the majority of people who wear their PFD's all the time >will. Take comfort in this. The rest of us will just shoulder the burden. Gosh darn!! kayaking seems like a too dangerous sport to me. Maybe it ought to be BANNED. If you need all that safety maybe it ought to only be done by professionals and we could watch it on tv . To nobody in particular GET a LIFE Dana *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 07:33:54PM -0400, Dana wrote: > Gosh darn!! kayaking seems like a too dangerous sport to me. Maybe it ought > to be BANNED. I don't think anyone here has suggested that it be banned. > If you need all that safety maybe it ought to only be done by > professionals and we could watch it on tv . And I'm puzzled by the all-of-nothing approach expressed here. Risk isn't a binary quantity, with rare exceptions. It's a probabilistic measure, and one which (unfortunately) a lot of us aren't very good at estimating -- including even the ones who study risk and are familiar with statistics. (Aside: one of the most interesting things I've learned about actual risk vs. perceived risk is that people perceive lower risk when they believe they have control of the situation. Of course, the actual risk is precisely the same: what changes isn't reality, only the perception of it.) I don't think anyone is advocating that kayaking be made 100% safe because, short of convincing everyone to abstain from it entirely, it can't be. Nor is anyone (so far) advocating that kayaking be made 0% safe because that's equally unobtainable. What's being advocated is that some number of measures which -- as far as we can tell from accumulated experience in the sport, reasonable attempts at statistical incident analysis, and first-order physics -- are likely to take big bites out of that mythical 100% safety. Things like "don't go off and paddle a storm surge on your first day" or "class V+ waterfalls in flood are a bad idea" or "wear a drysuit or a wetsuit when it's cold" or "wear a PFD" all do that. NONE of them are a panacea: some people who do everything right get nailed anyway. (One of the consequences of this being an exercise in probability; it's an error to assume that these outlier data points are anything else.) But in combination these measures greatly reduce risk, to the point where it is somewhere between unlikely and very unlikely that a given set of Bad Things will happen. Personally, I like that, because I like enjoying my time paddling and I don't like having to worry that an easily-preventable Bad Thing will happen, or having to cope with a Bad Thing in progress. Now, as to codifying this into law: I'm not particularly in favor of that, but I do recognize the reality that it WILL BE codified into law, perhaps badly, if a sufficient number of people do a sufficient number of stupid things. (It works that way in every other area; I see no reason for this one to be an exception.) So I just wear my PFD and helmet and focus on what I think the real battles are: Colorado laws that allow landowners to prevent paddlers from navigating navigable streams; the pollution in the Cheat; access to Johns Creek in Virginia; the PCB contamination in the Hudson; the excessive damming and leveeing of the Missouri and Mississippi; and just what to do, if anything, about Dimple on the Lower Yough. ---Rsk *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
One ethical difficulty in exercising personal choice is that it almost always implicates a wider circle of people. Gordin's post is a good example of how a conscientious person chooses to respond to the situation upon recognizing their personal implication. And it's a matter of supposition to discuss what might have been had Gordin decided to exercise his own personal choice to ignore their ignorant behavior and let them deal with it themselves. One of the difficulties of having this sort of discussion on line is that anecdotal testimony and evidence almost always proves the exception to the rule: we can always come up with a witty, pithy, experiential narrative to show how or why our choices have merit. Still, I'm struck by the irony of the post's subject title: Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death. My sense is that when you dilute this advocacy to the issue of PFD's, vs. its origins in revolutionary nationalism, then you raise an interesting and somewhat simplistic possibility: Skip prudent PFD/Immersion gear and you can have both liberty and death. Some cold comfort in that bargain. -Will *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
At 07:15 PM 4/23/02 -0700, Gordin Warner wrote: >At 07:33 PM 02/04/23 -0400, Dana wrote: > >>Gosh darn!! kayaking seems like a too dangerous sport to me. Maybe it >>ought to be BANNED. If you need all that safety maybe it ought to only be >>done by professionals and we could watch it on tv . To nobody in >>particular GET a LIFE >> >>I'll use your vernacular in the interest of clarity. > >>Well shucks, I've got a life. But the poor guy here in Victoria who went >>out last week without any of that high falutin safety stuff doesn't. that is his choice and not any of ours, besides how else would you win a Darwin award Dana *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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