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Sea Kayaks Techniques Bulletin Board
Roll Dammit!
Posted By: Nick Schade - Guillemot Kayaks In Response To: Incident Report (John Montgomery)
Date: Wednesday, 28 May 2003, at 4:50 p.m.
John thanks for your report. One idea I would offer is if there is no immediate threat to staying in the boat, keep on trying to roll. Keep in mind that if you know how to roll, you can roll even if the last two attempts failed. Too often I have seen people who are competant rollers, flip, attempt to roll, fail, and immediately wet exit (or in your case try to wet exit) when they could have rolled up instead.
The hard part of this is keeping your wits about you and having confidence in a technique that has just failed. It requires you calm down, set up carefully, and give it another try. Doing this will almost always be quicker than a wet exit, and even if you fail again, you will likely succeed enough to get a breath of air and go back down for another effort.
One thing to practice is holding your breath. You will have a lot more confidence in your roll if you feel confident in your ability to stay submerged. It takes about 5 seconds to set up and execute a roll. Most people can easily hold their breath for 30 seconds. This allows 6 roll attempts before you really need to breath, and with practice you can hold your breath a minute which gives you a dozen chances to get the roll right even if you don't get any chances to breath during your attempts.
One time in whitewater it took me 6 efforts to roll up. The first 2 were fairly reasonable attempts which failed, then I did three more which were just awful messy efforts done without thought. Then I stopped, said to myself " the water is cold, I don't want to swim, I know how to roll, so roll dammit", set up carefully, moved my hands to an extend position and popped right up.
And like you say, practicing emergency procedures in an unfamiliar boat is a darned good idea.
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