Re: [Paddlewise] Your rolling stories

> I was wondering, with the list being so quiet, maybe some one out there
> would like to share their tales of unexplained capsizes and rolling
> success!?!

I was out storm paddling a few years ago, winter, rough, bleak, cold; I had 
to cross the open mouth of a bay - one with outgoing currents, with 
co-committant eddies abounding from the proximity of a tide race nearby. I 
normally avoid this scenario, as a capsize might lead to an unplanned 
offshore excursion-detour should I bail and end up in the water, somehow 
unable to reenter. I was confident in my roll and re-enter abilities, but 
how confident is one really? I was in a position to call for help if things 
went really south, though another call to the Coasties would be a strike 
three for me at the time, so not something I wanted to contemplate.  I 
started surfing the following seas, buoyed by the exhilaration and 
incredibly fast progress across the perilous portion of the passage. As the 
waves grew bigger, I started looking backwards, overly obsessed with each 
hissing, tumbling open-water breaker looming from behind. The Nordkapp has a 
"sweet-spot" for tippiness at certain wave angles from astern when one 
shifts their balance backwards to look behind - especially, as one shifts 
their balance backwards to look behind...

My normal modus operandi is to focus forward, relying on the boat to see me 
through these annoyingly more vertically oriented breaks, maybe every 20 to 
30 seconds or so. It's not a matter of ignoring the problem, nor one of some 
kind of paddling Zen thing, but rather an issue of just trusting a 
well-designed sea kayak, trusting your muscle memory with your paddle always 
ready for a corrective brace where cognition of balance and the calculus of 
paddle-placement are instinctual by simple result of long-term circumstance 
exposure, and staying focused on the holes that open in front of you - ones 
that can burry the bow and could trip you up if you weren't careful.

But I let the elements at play - the psychology of fear, the pull of 
uncertainty a solo paddler faces as things ramped up toward the middle of 
the bay with evening approaching, and the sweeping sense of being imminently 
overwhelmed (seas were passing the gnarly stage for me by then) to swerve me 
from my usual state of insentience that needs some retention to stay relaxed 
at the hips and create grace-like attributes of flexibility and flow. I was 
showing the fanged dog my fear. And I knew it was happening. And I still 
kept looking back. Being the typical obtuse gear-head, I remember whishing I 
had a cyclist-like rear-view mirror on my glasses.

It wasn't long before I felt that momentary suspension of hull and water, 
then the sudden plunge forward. My paddle sliced the icy sea at the wrong 
angle, and over I went, the rictus of indignation opening my mouth to the 
briny tange of west-coast water. Immune to the immediate shock of the cold 
water (no paucity of immersion gear with this boy), I nevertheless freaked 
out, thinking ahead to other swims I had taken where dependency of one's own 
resources had been tested to the limits.

However, I rolled back up just fine after a momentary pause to set up my 
roll - a pause that took two decades to perfect, perfunctorily; a pause that 
saves lives - saves at least a cold, wet-ass swim - a pause that can too 
easily be left out of the bombproof roll equation. I turned back into the 
waves, my cold eyelids burning in the unabated brashness of the northerly 
breeze, then went "wave-jumping" for a few minutes to regain my composed 
bravado that gonzo paddlers purposely perfect to help them get on with the 
job at hand whenever risk, reward, and probability metrics can't be 
reconciled logically. In the end, it's what a kayaker doesn't know that they 
don't know that can kill them. What we do know that we know and what we do 
know that we don't know can keep us alive.

I went out for a few weeks after that, and practiced flipping over on the 
fly in steep following seas until the roll back to vertical was incorporated 
into the actual paddle stroke. Now that gets a little more Zen-like. 
Something to aim for, maybe. Or get a more stable boat.  Or maybe stay out 
of steep following seas :-)

Doug Lloyd 
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