RE: [Paddlewise] PFDs

Darryl Johnson wrote, "But I will say this: if I *know* that you didn't put your PFD on as part of an informed decision, don't count on me to do more than the bare minimum to help you out. Not only am I not going to risk my life, I'm not even going to going to chase after your loose equipment for you."

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There was a time when I would have risen to debate much earlier in this thread.  But I do now rise -- or at least react -- to Darryl's comments because I found myself bristling a little when I read the statement above.  At first, anyway.  In the early days of PaddleWise, I'd have condemned this attitude of justifiable neglect for another paddler.  But I take Darryl's point: maybe we're not our brother's PFD-keeper.  Is there something in life that *requires* us to take disproportionate personal risk to compensate for another's ambivalence or indifference to his or her own risks?  

For me, thirty years in the U.S. Navy -- quite a few of them as a Navy CSAR helicopter pilot, flying into bad-guy territory to bail out the military's versions of kayak-idiots who wouldn't carry a full bag of survival equipment on their PFDs -- developed an uncomfortable but firm personal belief that we still *do* have to take care of the idiots of the world.  That we really *are* our brothers' and sisters' PFD-keepers.  Okay -- maybe there's a difference between being a search and rescue professional and just being a drive-by paddler witnessing a fellow-kayaker's distress. But it doesn't work that way for me.

I kinda wonder if Darryl -- or any PaddleWiser -- wouldn't unhappily do much more than "the bare minimum" for a foundering kayak-idiot -- with or without a PFD or the motivation or intent to wear one.  Faced with that disaster-in-the-making, my guess is that he -- and all of us -- would do -- if begrudgingly -- everything possible to help our less-equipped or less-experienced kayak-idiot to get the dry side up and the wet side down.   Yes, possibly even taking a disproportionate personal risk in the process.  Unless someone can cite an experience of actually paddling away from another kayaker's train-wreck on principle, I'm going to continue to believe that any of us would go well beyond "the bare minimum" if we were actually placed in that situation, and would pull out the kayak-idiots of the world even as they might not deserve in a legitimate Darwinian scenario.  'Cause that's what we *do*. 

Joq
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