Hi All, I greatly appreciate your generous support on these matters. I believe the relative success that we see today has been the product of the efforts of huge numbers of paddlers, independents, club members, business operators, magazine editors who have contributed greatly in helping fellow paddlers understand what is required to address the risks of cold water boating. There are several stories that have facilitated the evolution in attitude that has occurred over the past several decades. In the northeast, the story started when Jim Chute and Ken Fink started the sea kayaking newsletter ANorAK. The first subscriber was Brian Insley. We planned and carried out many paddling trips through that publication. Most prominent was our annual Columbus Day weekend camp/paddling gathering. In 1983, we camped on Dutch Island in Narragansett Bay, RI. Brian was one of our paddlers. I have several pretty good pictures of him paddling past a big Newport sail boat. It was a stunning sight to see that yacht flying by us driving hard upwind. Brian died about three weeks later on the first weekend in November on Lake Winnepessaukee, NH on a day when the wind was blowing about 40+ mph and the water was already bitter cold. Ken Fink and I both wrote accident reports on that case. Brian was a friend of ours! Many of us became fully activated on the business of cold water paddling! The struggle started then and has continued to the present with an ever increasing number of players. Now days, paddlers connected with clubs or just a few other friends, who are in paddling chat groups, who get sea kayaking magazines or newsletters all "GET IT" about dealing with cold water paddling-even on the coast of Maine, Frenchman Bay, off Bar Harbor in early August. One of our group, not dressed to swim, capsized. We rescued him, but our little trip that day was over as soon as he bailed out of his boat. I grant that we all now see that the people we paddle with understand and prepare for the situation on cold water. We can not have a crisis every time one of us swims! But the boaters outside this now vast safety net don't get it! No one tells them. As I did, they learned from their fathers or on their own. My father hated life jackets. He learned from his father. The idea of clubs never seemed necessary. Besides those little plastic boats are so stable they will never capsize-thus flotation isn't necessary and they know how to swim and they will be near shore and they have done the polar bear thing and they have never had a problem since they bought the boat at the beginning of the summer-so what's the problem? The fishermen and hunters aren't paddlers so they don't need training. Luckily, we have Cold Water Boot Camp that tells boaters, that if they wear a pfd, they will have 1 minute to recover control of their breathing, then 10 minutes to call for help before they become paralyzed, and then an hour to think about it before they are dead from hypothermia. They are cautioned to leave a FLOAT PLAN so that, if they don't come home on time, rescuers will know where to look for them. Odds are, that would be several hours after they went into the water. With the pfd, the rescuers won't have to call in dive teams. I think we need a wider network of on-line cold water boating information that will reach out to hunting and fishing communities, that will enlist sports writers and retailers that serve those communities. We also need to find some way to get USCG, USCG Aux, USPS, NASBLA to promote the use of more than just pfds. At the present time-WE DO NOT HAVE THEIR SUPPORT!! It drives me NUTS!!! Chuck Sutherland *************************************************************************** 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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