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.

Most of the time. It's not enough

I have concluded that I am at odds with most or, at the very least, much of what is put forth as sea paddling's best practices, and I'm ok with that now. When I say "put forth" I mean the answers provided by instructors when I ask questions, what is published by notables in the various web and print venues, and the actions and non-actions I witness on and off the water.

I just subscribed to the electronic edition of Ocean Paddler magazine and was reading an article about a rescue technique in which it was stated that the swimmer should go to the bow of their boat and adopt the HELP position (HELP stands for Heat Escape Lessening Position). The other day I was out and mentioned this to a couple of instructors I was paddling with and mentioned, if we got into some decent conditions, I'd like to try this HELP on the bow thing. At least one of them said they advocate sending the swimmer to the bow. It might have been more than one I don't recall since my brain had sort of crawled into a shell of self doubt.

See, I'm not a go-to-the-bow kinda guy. I'm a close-to-the-cockpit kinda guy and I'm pretty damned adamant about it. I have several reasons for being that way, but there are two that stand out. The first reason is that it's what my regular (regular as in usual, not necessarily normal) coaches taught me. I'm not usually one to slavishly follow the teachings of much of anyone but my coaches are pretty spiffy and, having no evidence to the contrary, accepting their opinion didn't seem like a bad thing. The second reason is that, despite the guidance of my spiffy coaches, I have gone to the bow of boats under instruction from rescuers (and instructors) who were, evidently, part of the go-to-the-bow crew. While there at the bow I have twice been smacked on the head. Hard. I saw stars once, but that was a boat loaded with supplies for 5 days so it was heavy.

5 days is a great trip length by the way. It's long enough to actually feel like you've gotten away, and short enough that you have room for plenty of beer and wine.

Anyway, I was fine, I had a helmet on. I don't know enough about head trauma to speculate what might have happened if I hadn't but I'm totally comfortable saying it would have seriously sucked. These events happened in reasonable conditions, tide rips running from 4-5kts and standing waves from 1.5-3ft. I can't tell you how many times I've been at the bow during a rescue. More than 20 and less than 50 for sure. So most of the time being at the bow has not been a problem.

But here's the thing, and the realization I came to after coming out of my shell of self doubt. "Most of the time" is just not good enough. At least it isn't for me. Most of the time I don't get smacked on the head has to be damning with faint praise, hasn't it? Most of the time I don't need a chart. Most of them time I don't need a compass. Most of the time nobody gets hurt. Most of the time nobody gets scared enough to never get on the water again. Most of the time I don't swim. Most of the time I don't need my radio, tow belt, spare paddle, food, water, dry clothes, to read the forecast, to know the tides and currents...

Within the bounds of understanding I want all the time. And that means I'm going to wear my tow belt on lakes. And keep a compass in my life jacket. Bring a stocked first aid kit with me on every outing. And stay away from the pointy ends of boats during rescues, even if it's in a pool and to teach that to everyone who will listen. If someone tells me they're not bringing a chart onto the ocean, or they haven't checked conditions before a trip, or tells me I'm being silly for packing my dry clothes bag because we're just going over there, I know that I can add "because most of the time nothing happens" to their sentence.

I have no delusions that, in fact, all of the time things will work out no matter what I do. All the time is a goal, and a desirable one at that. At least I think so. But I'm entirely comfortable now in my belief that most of the time "most of the time" is not enough.

Is Sea Kayaker mag relevant any more?

When I started paddling about 5 or 6 years ago I would pick up a copy of Sea Kayaker magazine every time it came out, or nearly every time, and read it cover to cover. Cover. To. Cover. A couple weeks ago I picked up a copy of Sea Kayaker magazine. It was my first in a year and a half, maybe two years. I don't read SK mag anymore, but a friend of mine suggested I peek at this issue because it was pretty offensive (my word. I forget what he said exactly but he meant offensive.).

I can't tell you exatly what caused me to stop reading SK mag. I suppose that, as with any longish term relationship, it's never one thing. Rather is was sort of a growing loss of respect. A disinterest in the others point of view. I remember, when I was shopping for a boat, I started to go back though my several back issues reading reviews and concluded they were all the same. All boats were equally good, varying only in degrees of initial stability, from excellent to not so good, or whatever same-every-time words the 3 reviewers used. I recall starting to become less and less enthralled by the nearly form-pace-tone identical travelogues. Not that they were bad, more like "dude we've had this conversation a whole bunch of times before.". Just...worn. Ya know?

I do remember the thing that finally caused me to stop buying SK though. It was a technique article about some rescue that involved climbing on the front deck of a boat. It talked about conditions, like you could actually pull this thing off when it really mattered. There were pictures, of course. And one of these pictures shows some kid grabbing an upside down boat, and the next picture shows him lifting the bow of the upside down boat so he can empty it!

Now I'm not (yet) an expert on rescues. But I knew wrong when I saw it. I knew that nobody had done that rescue in what I would call real conditions. Nobody had gone to Yellow Bluff on an ebb, or Cattle Pass on a flood, and really tried it. Because picking up an upside down boat, in real conditions is hard. Climbing onto and balancing upright on a boat, especially in conditions, is hard. And I knew that because I'd tried it. A bunch. And so I knew calling this an "appropriate for conditions" rescue was misleading. So that was it for me and SK mag.

Anyway, like I said, this friend of mine calls and says to check out the latest issue of SK mag because it's offensive (again, my word). So I head out to pick up a copy 'cause, this friend of mine and I, we're pretty similar in our principles so I usually listen to what he's telling me. I mean, not that he isn't often wrong and needs correction or anything but, in principle, pretty similar. And I cracked open this issue of SK mag, flip the pages, same mag, nothings changed, so to business and head right for the editors column called foredeck. Which directs me directly (heh) to the letters section. And it was, as advertised, offensive (my word).

In a nutshell some knucklehead went out in conditions he was, at least in equipment and mentality, entirely unprepared for. No radio, no food, in a fog that prevented him from seeing a break he capsized in. Just really stupid, patzer issues that my regular coach would beat me with a stick for ignoring. But that, evidently, was a topic for an earlier issue. In this, the offensive (my word), issue it's letters about the column describing aforementioned knuckleheads stupidity. One guy calls knucklehead "arrogant" and "egotistical". And, to be honest, I'm with my unknown 'bro here.

In response to this, I think, totally justified name calling SK mag publishes what I'd say are letters from the least skillful apologists I've ever read. First up some guy starts off thanking my new 'bro for his insight, then says he wants to offer a feeble defense of knucklehead. Feeble indeed. He talks about "the history of the human race". He tries to draw parallels to surgeons and astronauts. He talks about "adventurous risk takers", mentions "we need them", and says that if their attitudes grate on us we should "look to ourselves, our inadequacies". I'm pretty sure surgeons don't go into surgery without knowing what the status of the patient is. Really, do you suppose the surgeon is in the OR apologizing because he decided he didn't need his scalpel that day and so didn't bring it? And the astronaut thing? Those guys don't forget stuff or decide that, "well hell, space isn't looking too gnarly to me today, I'm gonna head out without my radio". And talking about my limitations? First, look up ad hominem. Second, I'm gonna work as hard as I need to so nobody has to put their lives at risk to come get me. This isn't about my limitations, it's about some knucklehead selfishly taking more than he's entitled to because he lacks an imagination and has undeserved feelings of superiority.

(I am, if you can't tell, seriously disgusted with this horrible excuse for meaningful elucidation of an issue).

We're then treated to a letter from knucklehead saying (my interpretation), "well shucks, I promised my wife I'd pick her up, and it wasn't that bad for a couple days before so I just, you know, figured it'd be ok. But I hope you learn from my mistake". I'm not gonna beat knucklehead up here. He at least wrote this whole thing up, which I think shows some real serious integrity. I'm gonna stick with calling him knucklehead here though since, when I make mistakes like this that's what I call myself (but I work really hard to not make his kind of excuses).

Right, so I'm red faced at this point but turn back to where this ridiculousness started, the editors column, foredeck. I take a breath, pour a glass of wine, and start reading. And I'm told by the editor of SK mag that "It's safe to say that Michael Powers (the knucklehead ed.) is an expert kayaker.". Expert kayaker, says the editor of SK magazine. Lemme think...hmm...nope, don't think so. I'm gonna have to stick with knucklehead.

I didn't get much further. Essentially SK gave knucklehead the chance to take the high road, which he sort of did, and then tells us explicitly that he's an expert and implicitly, by publishing the he's-like-an-atronaut letter, that if we don't chalk this up to boys being boys it's due to some innate inadequacies of our own, and, again implicitly by publishing knuckleheads response, that this error is understandable because he promised his wife he'd pick her up.

That's just spectacular. God forbid I ever have to call the Coast Guard for a rescue, but if I do SK mag has well prepared me. I can just say, "sorry you had to jump out of the helo from way up there, swim to me in the 50 degree water and otherwise risk injury and death on my behalf. But I'm totally late to pick up my wife so I had to chance it and, besides, it's not that I was arrogant it's that you have inadequancies. Now take me home.". Hell yeah! Thanks SK mag!

So that's it. My friend was right I think, it was offensive (my word). SK mag has taken the editorial position that an "expert" kayaker is one who hits the Oregon coast with no food or radio and in fog. Their position is that if I feel this was caused by arrogance then I'm really not accepting my own inadequacies and should be grateful people make stupid, dangerous mistakes so I might learn a lesson that I don't need to learn in this way. And that if I have a prior engagement then it's ok to take terrible risks so as not to be late. That last might perhaps apply only to family though. If you're late for, say, a job interview and it's foggy and you forgot your most basic kit, best to stay on the beach. Maybe. I dunno, you'd have to ask SK mag.

These are not my perspectives. I define an expert differently. I think arrogance is am entirely reasonable conclusion to arrive at when doing a root cause analysis. And I'm sitting here hard pressed to think of any type of engagement that would have me say it's ok to put in without the proper gear just so I'm not late. I'm pretty sure, at the least hopeful, that my wife would rather have me late than dead. Nope, SK mag is really not at all relevant to who I hope I am and strive to be as a paddler.

But that's just me.

Paddling Science: Tale of the Tape

I've been thinking about the contents of my repair kit recently and that's perhaps a sad commentary on my life. In any case, one of the things that should probably be in a repair kit, says I, is some sort of tape. I happen to have a bit of Denso tape in my kit, which is really good for fixing things like a hole in a boat. But Denso is pretty expensive and can be terribly messy to work with. You really wouldn't want to use it for, say, well, anything but patching holes in boats probably. Honestly, it's a helluva mess to work with. So when someone in my club announced a surf zone play day (SZPD. I love acronyms) I thought, "Sweet, this is a great time to test some tapes. And to surf a bit.". An SZPD is, not surprisingly I hope, a day to play in the surf zone. This particular day turned out to be surprisingly beautiful. Blue skies, reasonably warm temperatures and gentle 2s and 3s that were only a little dumpy. I even put sunscreen on.

I'd chosen two tapes to test. Here they are:

I picked Duck tape because it comes in cool colors. There was hot pink, red, green, the orange you see here, and a bunch of others. If it worked I could get several rolls of different colors and make special tape designs on my boat or something. The other one, as you see, is Gorilla tape. I got that because the glue (Gorilla Glue) by the same manufacturer claims that it's 100% waterproof and for a couple of things I've used it for that's been true. I guess you could say I got the Duck because it was cool, and the Gorilla because it was pragmatic.

What with this tape testing being really scientific and all I didn't want to limit my tests to a single boat. So I enlisted one of the people who showed up for the SZPD and happened to have a plastic boat. Here are the test subjects:

The Romany there is mine and it's a fiberglass boat. The Necky is the volunteers and it's some sort of plastic. I decided I was going to simulate patching a small hole under the seat of each of the boats even though I wouldn't use the tape for that if I had some Denso with me. Here's the tape on the volunteer boat:

You can see there that the tape has been measured and cut with some precision because, as I said, this is a scientific endeavor. 

Here's the tape on my boat:

Note again please the extreme care with which the tape has been measured and cut. Also, it was agreed that in terms of Rippability(tm) the Duck tape was far easier to rip. That said the Gorilla tape was easy to rip, just not as easy as the Duck tape.

With the tape applied it was time to get on the water. Note that the tape was applied to dry boats. This being an SZPD the owner of the volunteer boat wanted to practice launching into waves. Here she goes:

Despite what you're seeing the waves actually did get a little bigger than what's in the picture here. I should also mention that I didn't get explicit permission to use the volunteers name, so I'm just going to keep calling her Volunteer. To protect her privacy and stuff.

Here our nameless Volunteer is after getting out:

For myself I carried my boat into the water and plopped in, so the tape on my boat didn't have the more real world treatment that Volunteer subjected her tape to.

In the event we were out for about 2.5 hours or so. I only got put on the beach once, meaning I only subjected the tape on my boat to one knuckle walk on the sandy beach. Volunteer swam a couple times and so ended up putting her tape through rather more harrowing circumstances due to trips to the beach to empty out her boat.

By way of demonstrating the really gentle conditions of the day, as well as my suck ass timing when it comes to taking action pictures, here's one of the participants breaking through a wave:

Suck ass timing.

I guess I should have mentioned this before, but the SZPD took place in Monterey, CA. Monterey is a pretty nice place I think. Here's a picture of our view from the water:

I've never been to the Mediterranean but I've seen pictures and I think they look like Monterey. Or vice versa. Whatever. It's awfully nice.

While I'm at it, take a look at this:

That's a rainbow and, at the end of the rainbow, are two coast guard boats. They were doing some sort of exercise. There were a heck of a lot of folks in life jackets on the white boat. The other boat kept zooming in, then out, then in. No idea what they were doing, but I've never taken a picture of a rainbow before so I'm glad this sort of came out.

Right, enough of that, there is science to be done here. Like I said we were out about 2.5 hours or so. Upon arrival back at our put in, here's the results:

As you can see,  the gentler treatment the tape received on my boat resulted in the Duck tape remaining affixed and the Gorilla tape actually looking pretty darn good. Meanwhile the Duck tape has fallen of of Volunteers boat and the Gorilla tape is barely hanging on.

So there you have it. What conclusions can be drawn from this experiment? Well I'm not a scientist so who the hell knows for sure, but I'm going to keep a little Gorilla tape in my repair kit. Many thanks to the unnamed volunteer for her assistance and to everyone else who was there for making it a nice day of science on the water.

Kayak Kamp with B&S

Ben Lawry runs this multi-day class he calls Kayak Kamp where, evidently, he travels to various places and, through the auspices of a local paddling shop, sets up Kamp. You can read about it here. One of the local joints near me, California Canoe and Kayak (Cal Kayak), organized Ben coming out my way and paired him with Sean Morley for the duration of the Kamp. Sean is a not bad, now local to me, paddler you might have heard of.

I'm always (always) on the hunt for what I consider to be good coaches. Last year at the Golden Gate Sea Kayak Symposium (jeez that's long. Just think GGSKS) I got to spend an hour or so with Ben. That's insufficient of course to decide if we (he and I) could work effectively together, but I really got some useful stuff out of that hour so I jumped at the chance to spend some quality time with Ben. Not like, you know, quality time. We didn't have dinner or anything...

The way this Kamp thing works is pretty interesting and, I suspect, pretty difficult to get right. First off there is no syllabus for the class. When you get there you're asked what 3 things you want to work on (e.g. navigation, forward stroke, rough water skills, etc) and that is written on a white board (NB: I believe it was 3. I might be wrong in the count, but it is a bounded list). This list ends up being what's taught in the class. Secondly, at least in this Kamp, the students are not interviewed to determine their skill level. There can be people who've paddled for years along side folks who've been paddling less than a year and struggle a bit with a T rescue in the calm. And there was. Finally, Ben is not a local. He's been to the San Francisco I don't know how many times, but he very clearly is not yet intimately familiar with the area. For that he relies on knowledge provided by the person from the local joint he works with which in this case was Sean, as I mentioned.

All of those combined challenges made me really curious as to how it was going to work out. I'm just a beginning coach but I have an inkling of how hard this stuff really is and this sounded damned difficult. But it all seemed to work out. I, at least, was satisfied. Of the, what, 9 or 10 things in the syllabus the only one not covered at all was navigation. But we did cover topics as wide ranging as surf landings to reverse sweeps in flat calm, to rolling. It was pretty impressive I thought.

I do like Bens style. He does a fair bit of this-then-thating. An example. First day and we're still not in our boats. He has everyone hold their paddle up in the air, blades high. Everyone close their eyes. Point at your blade. Open your eyes. Who got it wrong? So we don't need to look at our blades to know where we are, do we? I really liked that.

He also blurbs out some really intriguing stuff using this style. Everyone sit on the ground like you were in your kayak. Ok, have your partner try to knock you over by pushing on your shoulder. Ok, now put your knees together. Have your partner try to knock you over again. Which is more stable? Knees together right? So you're more stable with your knees together...any questions? . This kind of mind blowing unexpected stuff keeps coming for a little while at a pretty fast pace in bite size chunks. Blurbs as I say. But not blurbs in a bad way. I didn't really get a chance to experiment with most of this stuff, but it's interesting as hell.

Despite the fact that there is no before-you-get-there syllabus for the class, it's really obvious that Ben has one set up in his head once everyone get's their preferences on the white board. I've been in classes, sometimes with the very best of coaches, where they've pretty obviously run out of things to teach or don't quite know where to go from here. This didn't happen much at all here. I mean there were a few bumps. We went looking for an eddy line that wasn't there for example. But the recovery was really good I thought and continuity was well preserved.

I guess out of pure necessity Ben has to individualize quite a bit. I'm not really at the new paddler end of things any more but I very rarely found myself doing something I would consider myself reasonably skilled in. For example instead of doing T rescues in the calm me and Matt spent time with a scoop variation in which the victim is able to minimally assist. Ben checked in every now and again as one would expect and require. Really well done I thought. I did get a glimpse of the potential difficulties in this format of class though. At one point a portion of the class was identified as been more skilled than the others. They were taken aside and asked if they wanted to move into more challenging conditions. In the event the answer was no, but I could see how it would have been a touch less than optimal to have to have to split the class. Note that I'm talking from the coaches perspective here. I don't think the students would have suffered at all.

There was a bit of a mistake made during the class I thought. As I suggested there was a wide range of skills represented in the class and we ended up getting into conditions that were too uncomfortable for some folks. So instead of spending effort moving forward they were spending effort staying up right. Pretty classic issue. Ben had myself and a couple of others do some towing to help out. From a purely mercenary perspective it was a good thing since I got to do my first real life tow, so that was cool. The cause of the (I say) error was, I think, Sean being too optimistic about everyone's skill level and/or fitness and, I think, Ben perhaps not being conservative enough with respect to Sean's choice of venue at that moment. (Side note: I have a little more to say about this below).

Lawry is, I think, a pretty good coach which is really just a way for me to say I was able to learn from him and in my estimation others could as well. Umm...let me put it this way. I was talking to someone a little while ago and I said I can tell anyone how to do a forward stroke but, at this point, I can teach only a select few. One of my criteria for the good coach label, if you will, is that they don't need the "select few" qualification. So Lawry, I think, falls into that camp.

Hopefully they'll run this Kamp again next year. Or at least one on this coast. My impression was that there's a fair bit of depth that I haven't gotten into with Ben yet. You know, the subtleties of the sport that lead you towards elegantly effective simplicity on the water. So, yah,  I hope he runs a Kamp out here again. I'll go.

Circling back to the paragraph above about the mistake. I wrestled a bit with putting that in. Despite the fact that there are, maybe, 3 people who read this drivel I write, I still don't want say stuff that's hurtful or whatever. The internet never forgets. But I decided to include it and here's why. First I do conclude that the need to tow was caused by an error. Second I'm frankly sick to death of "best coach ever", "learned so much", "had a great time and learned a lot" type of comments (reviews if you prefer) when it comes to classes, symposiums, coaches, etc. There's another, third, reason also but it's a really big topic on which revelation of my perspectives will be offensive to one, insulting to another and redundant to the third of my 3 readers here. So that's for another post.