If you paddle a kayak and haven’t read volumes 1 & 2 of Sea Kayaker’s Deep Trouble, then I suggest you stay on land until you’ve had a chance to read a few of the stories they contain. These are true stories of kayakers in trouble, some of whom live to describe what happened to them, and others whose last paddles require forensic analysis. To read the stories is chilling, instructive, and essential.
But what about less deadly kinds of trouble? So far – thankfully – I’ve encountered only mild trouble in 15 years of mostly solo paddling. Here are a couple of those tales of troubling but fully survivable outings.
Deflated on the Pacific coast of Baja California
Ten years ago, a wee bit before I started regularly consulting wind and swell forecasts while road-tripping in Baja, I stood on a beach at dawn, and paused. Even at a nice protected little launch near a small fishing village, 4-foot waves were breaking loud on the sand. These breaking waves were definitely within bounds for a kayaker trained in surf launches (which I was), and they seemed to present no problem for the lobster fisherman launching their pangas. But it’s Baja – a foreign country where risks to safety tend to run a little higher than gringos are accustomed to. It’s hard to say whether anyone monitors channel 16 in that area, and the nearest (very small) hospital was a 20-30 mile drive away, so extra caution was in order.
However, I launched. The prospect of staying on land was a picture of idleness and boredom; the prospect of paddling was fresh fish on the line, possibly a big juicy yellowtail. And the conditions weren’t awful, they just weren’t great, with 5-6 foot swells out on the open water. My newish Feathercraft Wisper XP was fully outfitted with a spare paddle, bilge pump, and paddle float, and the pocket of my PFD had a proper PLB zipped up safe where it rides every time I ever go out, period.
None of that equipment was any help when I stopped in the lee/swell shadow of a small island a few miles offshore to blow some air into the sponsons, and the rubbery blow tube suddenly detached from the left-hand sponson.
If you don’t know what a sponson is or what it does, here’s Feathercraft’s description. Basically, they are inflatable chambers on either side of the boat that a) stretch the skin tight over the frame and b) vastly improve your primary stability.
To suddenly lose one sponson is to quickly become VERY unstable. It took me a few seconds to realize that unless I wanted to keep bracing constantly on one side, I needed to deflate the right-hand sponson too. I let half the air out and started eyeing the shoreline in that part of the island: all rock and cliff, and even on the lee side, the landing situation looked foamy, splashy, and unsafe.
I pointed the crippled kayak back toward the launch and made a little progress. Once I was back out in the full force of the swell, it became clear that I needed to completely deflate the right-hand sponson in order to have predictable control over the kayak. But I must say, predictable control wasn’t easy control: my stable Feathercraft now had the primary stability of the sleekest high-performance boat in existence, it seemed, and I felt like I was bracing with every stroke. My abs never had such a workout! But yes – after an hour of hard paddling I made it back to the launch, thought about kissing the sand after stepping onto it, and devoted the rest of the day to drying the boat and gluing the tube back on with aquaseal.
The main lesson, as I took it, was to make sure the rubber hose connecting to your sponsons is long enough. With my beautiful Wisper, the tubes were so short that I had to lean over hard to reach the inflating nozzle with my mouth (especially awkward with a PFD with full pockets) and it seems like I had been unconsciously pulling them out and up every time I added air while on the water. Pull hard enough often enough and guess what? They come apart from the sponson!
Following these events I became a sponson nazi. I ordered an extra Wisper sponson from Feathercraft, specifying that I wanted a nice long tube attached to it please, and made sure to get a spare Kahuna sponson for my backup boat. ALL of my sponsons have now been modified with nice, long tubes that allow fairly relaxed inflation while seated in the cockpit. I recommend these measures to anyone who paddles a foldable with sponsons.
Windbound South and North
During the windy winter months on the Sea of Cortez you’ll get wondrous calm days that normally come two at time, sometimes three in a row, and very seldom much longer than that. What comes after a nice spell could be anything from a stiff breeze for a couple days to a three or four-day “Norte” blowing very hard out of the North.
It was on the second day of a calm spell that I launched from Caleta San Lucas in a Feathercraft Kahuna packed for camping. From that launch point around the spit and then up to the north end of San Marcos island it’s a half dozen miles or so, and I enjoyed every dip of the paddle. Trolling for grouper was very good, and I had a fantastic fresh dinner under the stars in a near-perfect arroyo camp on the island, sipping a few ounces of my small ration of scotch for dessert.
By nightfall, however, a wind started to pick up noticeably, and by the wee hours of the morning it was a howling gale that made sleeping in a tent somewhat challenging. I was sheltered in the arroyo, but the noise was impressive, with surf booming on the rocks a hundred feet away.
There was no question of going out on the water that next day. Gusts must have been reaching 30 knots or more, and channel between the island and mainland was filled with whitecaps and devoid of any kind of boat. Concerns in my mind were mild but real; I had planned on three days out and brought five days worth of food and probably nearly a week’s worth of water – if carefully used – in three MSR dromedary bags. However, I hadn’t included two critical elements in my backup rations: alcohol (the scotch was just about gone) and (gasp) coffee!
The wind kept blowing all the second full day, and sitting on land got very old. To hike south to the gypsum mine at the south end of the island, a dry and difficult five mile walk I calculated, was something I was saving for an emergency. And despite the desperate feeling of running water through coffee grinds a third time, I wasn’t quite at that emergency level yet. The wind would lay down eventually, and I’d head straight back to the caleta.
Just after midnight on my third night out, I’d swear that I heard a change in the general tone of the howling . . . was the wind starting to die out? I convinced myself that it was, even though 3-4 foot waves were still crashing in on my little beach. I wanted out of there bad enough to operate at the limits of my ability and confidence.
And yes, the wind had dialed down to about half its general fury in those dark wee hours. The sky was radiant with stars and very beautiful, and the conditions felt marginally safe – until I got about three quarters of a mile out. At that point, the sheer size of the spilling waves just got to be too much. I couldn’t see them coming (it was that dark) but I could hear the big ones foaming toward me from the north, increasing steadily in volume, and then when the spilling noise was just about in my ears I got lifted UP UP UP very quickly, as if on some carnival ride, and doused with water while bracing hard on the back of the waves. Ten minutes or so of that treatment convinced me to pick a moment to carefully turn the boat and head on back to the island. My escape attempt was a failure.
I laid down on the beach and resumed “sleeping” with the boat’s sponson as a pillow, exhausted, frustrated, and fully daunted. Eventually I dozed off under that beautiful sky, and when the warmth of the morning sun woke me, guess what: the north wind was replaced by a slight breeze out of the south, and the channel was very nearly flat. I couldn’t believe it! Just a handful of hours after my abortive rock ‘n rolling carnival ride, conditions were perfect for paddling. I launched without hesitation, and in the time it took me to cover the miles back to the caleta, the water had actually grown just about completely flat, demonstrating the power of a even a slight opposing breeze on wind waves.
Ultimately, this trip felt like a very valuable and even rewarding experience that I decided I would make every possible attempt to not repeat. Yet, for some reason, a few years later I found myself windbound again on a tiny island on Naknek Lake in Alaska, a thousand or so miles from Baja and right at the end of a 10-day trip. This time the winds were even worse – 60 knots, according to pilot who eventually was able to come pick me up – making windfall trees my main immediate concern, in addition to anchoring the tent firmly enough that it wouldn’t blow away.
Once again, the two-day blow finally subsided while I was sleeping. I wore earplugs in the tent, which was the only way I could doze amid the howling gusts, and I cautiously took one out to confirm: YES! It was quiet! No howling, no gale. A man never broke down a camp quicker than I did in that dim near-midnight midsummer subarctic light. Good thing I hurried, too, since the wind was finding its voice again by the time I was loaded and ready to launch. I hustled upwind in the lee of an adjacent island, and then turned downwind toward the beach on the mainland which was actually my appointed pickup spot for the next morning. Pushed by the wind, I reached the beach landing after a brief, brisk paddle, and let out a long, heartfelt howl of relief that had been building for 48 hours.
How happy was I to see the floatplane landing at that beach in mellow 10 knot winds the next morning? Very. Reflecting on a half dozen or so long trips in that area, I realized that I've been lucky to have been seriously windbound only once. It's a manageable risk that I’ll be happy to take again some summer coming up soon.
