Gotta love the sun

I don't do cold very well. A couple of weeks ago I was up in the San Juan islands. It was...cold. And windy. And it snowed. It snowed! It looked like this:

which looks pretty and all, especially in a picture as opposed to, say, just outside your window. Didn't paddle a bit even though the San Juans arguably have some of the bestest, prettiest paddling anywhere. I wanted to, I really did. But the cold sucked my will to paddle as much as it sucked the warmth from the rest of me. I think I'd be ok if I lived in that sort of weather. Really it wasn't that bad and the snow melted  off within 24 hours, largely thanks to the rain I guess. People in Wisconsin and other really cold places no doubt would snicker at my lack of fortitude. I of course would snicker at their lack of short sleeves and flip flops in January, but whatever.

Last week my brother-in-law invited me down to Santa Cruz with him. He surfs (on a board, not in a boat) and figured I could do my thing (paddle) while he did his. Surfing my boat in the same break with him wasn't even talked about. It's likely, albeit not certain, that I would have been beaten bloody by the locals and he'd be forced to deny me 3 times.

It was just a beautiful day. Winds were like 5kts and it was in the 60s. The swell was pretty big. NOAA had a place called Pleasure Point at 11 1/2 foot and 16 seconds. I ended up staying pretty far offshore going around Soquel Point. I've only been there once before and I don't know the waters very well. It shoals up a bit and it was breaking rather a ways out.

So basically it was a quick out and back 5 mile paddle that took about 2 hours at a get-there-whenever pace. That's shorter than the drive there and back, one of the reasons I tend not to do short paddles. If I'm going to put that much carbon in the atmosphere I'd like it to be for a more substantial outing. I took my camera with me of course. I didn't take pictures though. Dead battery. I really must be slipping, that's never happened to me before. Anyway, no pictures from me but the day looked something like this:

Gotta love the sun.

The Inside Passage. Open to everyone now?

Early last year I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do by way of a trip during the summer. I've always been quite interested in doing some of the Inside Passage. It looks doable as a solo trip. A good portion of it is in Canada and Canada is just full of nice. Nice scenery. Clean ferries. Nice people.

Really nice people. Like Stepford wife nice. Depending on what part of the world you're from it can really put you on edge. You're like all waiting for one with a knife to come up from behind and terminate you so your really nice robot double can take your place and move the diabolical Canadian plan of a world full of nice one step closer to realization. But, no, no knives. Just nice. So far anyway.

The one thing that's not nice though is that there are bears. I had a frightening experience with a bear when I was a boy scout and now I'm fairly content to just let bears alone. In general bears don't frequent the places I do, like restaurants, museums or bars, so I'm totally willing to stay out of the places they frequent, like portions of the Inside Passage.

I was mentioning this to a couple friends a while back and they laughed. They've been out millions of times and never had a problem with bears. They said.The bears, I told my friends, really had convinced them they were all:

Hello. Would you like a beer?

But I think bears are all:

GTFO!

There is, I think, a subtle but important distinction being demonstrated here. Yes, bears can be urbane. Charming. Considerate even. But they can also fucking eat you.

It turns out that Canada does not allow handguns. This probably has to do with an empirically determined inverse relationship between the number of handguns and the degree of nice in a given locale and Canada I guess tends to optimize for nice. Go figure. Nevertheless handguns are what I'm told is the best thing to carry in bear country because, again, bears can eat you and this is frequently not an outcome you desire for yourself and you might therefore want to stop them from doing so. But, to be honest, I'm not very interested in shooting a bear. It's really their house not mine and they're allowed to get cranky I think. Hell, if people shot me just because I got cranky in my house I'd be dead more from lead poisoning than trauma.

Ultimately though one thing we're good at down here is catering to most tastes for violence needs for self defense. Which brings me to the point of this. Taser has a wild life edition! You can check it out here. I'm guessing tasers are allowed in Canada since it's not a weapon (it's called an Electronic Control Device). I'll have to look it up to be sure, but it might be ok. That means I can head to the Inside Passage armed equipped with a device that will ensure all of us, the bears and I, are nice. Maybe not Canada nice, but at least please-don't-eat-me nice. And that's enough for me I think. Time to start looking at some charts.

Don't tase me bro!

If you can't measure it you can't get back in the boat.

I am, to a fault perhaps, adamant about what not to do during a T-Rescue. Don't push down on the back of the boat, don't grab an upside down boat, all of that. Others disagree, or at least don't find the harm in allowing "experienced" paddlers do these sorts of things in certain circumstances.
There's an adage that goes "you can't improve it if you can't measure it". I've heard this used in all sorts of circumstances. Management types use it. It's a given when doing software performance tuning. Probably other things. I've not heard it applied to kayaking but I'm thinking perhaps it's time to try.

I was talking with some friends the other day and mentioned the The Principle of Charity which says, essentially, that people you talk to are rational and well intentioned. I use this all the time in my work which is pretty much an endless series of passionate debates on often obscure points that very, very few people care about. And in my biz everyone really needs to be this way otherwise we would each be systematically beaten with a keyboard by someone on the other side of this or that debate. I've not heard it applied to kayaking but I'm thinking perhaps it's time to try.

This all leads me to do something particularly annoying to many folks but I think is rather enjoyable. I'm going to define the requirements for a rescue. Not a T-Rescue. A rescue. In order to get the most out of this you want to understand RFC 2119. RFCs are, BTW, the things that define the standards that most of the internet works under. It's short and, besides, you'll get to see the kind of writing that is akin to erotica for a geek like me. So that's good.

Let's hypothesize a process that addresses this circumstance:

A person paddling a sea kayak has capsized and has been forced to perform a wet exit (the swimmer).

and fulfills the requirement that:

The person is back in their boat.

A quick note. We have said nothing about conditions of anything. Not the paddler, equipment, nor environment. Regardless there are things, or requirements, we can say (using our RFC 2119 language) that are certainly true even without specifying any of those conditions. Some of them might be:

• The process MUST NOT damage the swimmer
• When completed the process MUST allow for the boat to be in a state that it can be moved
• The process SHOULD be executable by all paddlers/swimmers
• The process SHOULD be executable in all environments in which the paddler will paddle
• The process MUST be executable within a reasonable period of time

I think it's self evident that these non-functional requirements apply to all rescues, self and assisted.

Let's move directly to an assisted rescue. For the sake of argument we'll say that an assisted rescue is more desirable than a solo rescue in this case (i.e. someone is swimming). An assisted rescue requires, obviously, an assistant and that's just what I'm going to call him or her here. The assistant. The function of the assistant, again obviously, is to assist the swimmer in getting back in the boat. And again, regardless of conditions, there are requirements for an assisted rescue process that will hold regardless of how it is done. Some of those might be:

• The process MUST NOT damage the assistant
• The process SHOULD NOT cause the assistant to require rescue
• The process SHOULD be executable by all paddlers/assistants
• The process SHOULD be executable in all environments in which the assistant will paddle

I think these apply to all assisted rescues.

I'm not going to try to design an assisted rescue. Frankly the T-Rescue I think is a fine way to assist someone back into their boat. What I am going to do is to demonstrate how I think some aspects of the T-Rescue advocated by others violates some of the requirements above.

When I think about pushing down on the back of an upside down boat, or not having the swimmer flip it  over, I think several things. Lifting a potentially large weight. A slippery hull. Boat movement proportional to the roughness of conditions. 

For myself there are certainly weights I simply cannot lift. There are other weights which I could perhaps lift but I am exposing myself to injury because I'm not conditioned for them. And of course there are some weights which are no problem. A pint is more or less entirely manageable for example. But the fact   is that there are weights that boats reasonably will attain that I cannot lift. It is a fact, therefore, that I could not perform an assisted rescue in all conditions in which I might paddle if the process required me to lift the boat. Conditions, in this case, might mean a boat loaded for 2 weeks on flat calm waters.

A composite hull that is wet can be slippery. A slippery hull is harder to initiate and maintain a hold on than, say, a deck line. If I lean too far over in my kayak I will capsize and require a rescue (a roll perhaps, but a rescue nonetheless). This is a fact. If I attain a hold on a slippery hull and commit to that hold prematurely I can end up leaning too far over. Not a fact. But the previous factors increase the probability of the circumstance.

In rough conditions the ends of a boat can move further in space relative to the surface of the water than the center of the boat. Pushing down on the end of the boat requires me to hold onto a slippery hull. If I do not and choose rather to hold the deck lines while the boat is upside down my face is placed directly over the part of the boat that can move far and fast, risking my ability to drink beer for a while, to say nothing of my teeth and nose.

You get the idea. I think that flipping ones boat over, staying away from the ends, not lifting to empty it, and other things, keep one closer to conformance with the requirements outlined. These requirements are a priori desirable and worth realizing (says I). So in order for me to accept, say, pushing down on the back of the boat is better or the same as having the assistant use inertia to help it onto the deck I'd have to be convinced that lifting the boat better satisfies the requirements. To do that someone is going to have to somehow change the laws of physics so that I can lift a boat loaded with enough beer to get me through 2 weeks in the wilderness...or convince me to take less beer. The physics thing is really going to be easier to do though. Or they'll have to convince me these requirements are incorrect. That they in fact do not define the qualities of the best or ideal assisted rescue. 

It seems that paddle sport is rife with a general lack of specificity and an over abundance of generalization. "Tools in the toolbox", a common if trite utterance, is a wonderful concept, but fails miserably if it doesn't tell you when to use the ball peen hammer instead of the claw hammer. Or if it tells you that a circular saw cuts wood faster than a handsaw but fails to talk about kick back.

The conditions in which such and so rescue or paddle type or whatever will be used to achieve a particular outcome can be enumerated with some accuracy. Which means the applicability of this or that technique or bit of kit can be measured and considered objectively with respect to those conditions and outcomes. It can be measured. Measuring means that the question of better and worse,  of right and wrong, can be better understood if not quantified.

The above things are (some of) my metrics for a rescue. I can state, with specificity, why such and so technique fails or is less optimal than something else because of and relative to them. I can debate with others, objectively and specifically, why this, that or the other is better or worse. I can understand when I'm being told something that is not optimal and make a reasoned consideration of it's usefulness or applicability. I think that is useful. It's how some of my coaches have taught me and it seems to work pretty well.

Jesus, this is long as hell. So here's where I'm at. Above are my requirements for a rescue and how I evaluate the bits of a T-Rescue and I'm going to stick by them. If someone suggests something and it seems to not satisfy these above requirements then I'm going to think carefully about it. If someone continues to suggest, cajole or insist that something without addressing these requirements then I'm going to think carefully about them. Charity does end at some point. I'm not sure that's measurable though.

No Yoga, No Drown with Helen Wilson.

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to take a short class with Helen Wilson. Helen does Greenland stuff which I really don't care about. I'm not sure why exactly. I think it has to do with the "paddles". They don't look sufficiently engineery or something. Give me some good old fashioned carbon fibre splits with fat blades and a recessed button. Black ones. But(!) Helen can do a static brace, something I really, really can't do and I figured I might as well try to get some expert help before I gave up completely. Yoga, you see, is out of the question until the yoga gets a new image.

Here's a picture of Helen doing her thing:

The class was run through Cal Kayak one of our local shops here and they offered a discount to everyone who was in the local kayak clubs. I'm not particularly cheap but this was a bargain that was hard to turn down and, I think I mentioned this before, I want to support any effort to get foreign coaches into the area. If I didn't well then now you know.

There were 6 folks in the class. I think there were 2 of us who had rolls already and we all were there for slightly different reasons. The other roller was a real Greenland geek (geek is a term of respect). He had one of those skin-but-it's-really-nylon-or-something on frame boats and his own too thin wood paddle that the Greenlanders seem so attracted to. And he could do all sorts of rolls and he wanted to learn a couple more or get better at the ones he was doing or something. I wanted to avoid yoga classes and everyone else wanted to work on their regular old roll.

I remain convinced being a good instructor/coach is damned hard and requires some real effort to learn, so half the reason I take any class these days is to watch the instructor teach. Helen had a helluva task I think. It looked like everyone in the class was at a different place in terms of skills and/or desires so Helen had to individualize the class to 6 people. I had to do that for 2 people when I was taking my Level 1 and that was hard. For 6 people I would have thought it near impossible. Helen seemed to pull it off pretty well though. Everyone spent some time sitting doing nothing but generally it seemed like everyone had enough to do and that's the point.

For me the class probably could have ended after about 10 minutes on the water. Helen had us all do some stuff without our boats first. Then we all got into our boats and put paddle floats on the ends of our paddles. She move from person to person doing this and that and then she got to me. I got into my static brace position with my paddle floats on and she said good or something that indicated my position was not terrible (that was encouraging since good position meant no yoga). So then she wanted to see this without paddle floats. Off come the floats and I mentally prepare myself for a several moments of glub-glub-glub. I go over and Helen, bless her, grabs me before glub-glub-glub and tells me "relax your arm", meaning the one holding the paddle. So I focus on my arm and tell it to relax and, being entirely sober, I'm able to accomplish it. Helen let's go and I'm static bracing. I slide onto the back of the boat and come up. I do it again. It took her less than 2 minutes to fix my static brace problem. "Relax your arm". Sonofabitch.

I played with that for a while. I did a couple of butterfly rolls or something, I forget what she called them. But really I was done as soon as my static brace started happening. So, all in all, a great couple of hours with Helen. No yoga. No drown. Yes static brace.