On Thursday, April 17, 2003, at 01:37 AM, Dave Kruger wrote: > Nick Schade <nick_at_guillemot-kayaks.com> wrote: > > >>> The ACA has just released a report on "Understanding and Preventing > Canoe and Kayak Fatalities". http://www.acanet.org/CJintro.htm [snip] > > > In short, the pamphlet is a good and bad thing. I suspect it may > result in > sea kayakers getting lumped in with WW boaters ("Hunh? You mean a > kayak is > not a kayak?" said the state legislator as he voted for mandatory > offside > roll expertise and Z-rescue capability for all sea kayakers.) > > I'd be happier if the ACA drew clear distinctions among the types of > paddlecraft and their uses. Self rescue is advocated, but what that > means > for a WW boater is very different from what it means for sea kayakers. > I > really hate it when I see a "one size fits all" approach to regulation > coming ... and as a long-time professional organic chemist with > buckets of > experience handling hazardous materials (safely), I've seen plenty of > regulations that do exactly that. I won't try to justify the ACA in grouping white water with sea kayaking, however at this point most accident statistics glom all canoeing and kayaking into one group. Even if it is not perfect, differentiating between canoes and kayaks is at least an improvement over existing record keeping. The thing to remember is that the people doing the regulating will be less informed than the ACA. It is too much to hope that any regulation designed to protect casual paddlers who buy their boat at Walmart will not include sea kayaks, just because we know them to be "different". Any regulator will see "kayak" and assume they are all the same despite any differences we perceive. In the past 6 years there were 11 canoe and kayak related deaths in Connecticut, of these only one was a kayak on open "flat" water, the others were canoes or kayaks on whitewater. When it came time to propose legislation the total number was used to justify the legislation, not the individual numbers. If we don't want to burdensome regulation on our sport, the best bet is to work to see that the casual paddler is safer. It is very unlikely that any mandatory certification would require learning a specific rescue technique. It would most like require you spend a few hours in a class room then pass a written test. While would do a little to improve safety, it would do very little. It would however make it more difficult to enter the sport. It would also create an enforcement issue. Most people would just not bother getting certified. I would not criticize the ACA for grouping all kayaks together. Instead realize that this is the way they would be regulated regardless of how illogical it may seem to a skilled kayaker. With that in mind, we need to look for ways to educate the casual kayakers so they paddle more safely, without creating another bureaucracy which won't do much other than make it harder to kayak. Nick Schade Guillemot Kayaks 824 Thompson St Glastonbury, CT 06033 USA Ph/Fx: (860) 659-8847 http://www.guillemot-kayaks.com/ *************************************************************************** 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/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Apr 17 2003 - 07:06:58 PDT
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