Weakness Leaving The Body

It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Milan Kundera.

Is vertigo the fear of falling or the desire to fall? I’m speeding along the new Mogo trails on my mountain bike feeling that almost overwhelming desire to go faster and faster until I crash. That’s mountain biking, the play between how fast you can go and how fast you should go. I heard about another casualty of the new trails yesterday – broken ribs and a broken collar bone – another old person like me tugged along by the pull of gravity mixed with desire.

My big goal is to ride 1000 metres of vertical in a day. That’s not really a big goal as I’ve hit the mid 700’s without really trying; but I’m leaving my 1000 metre goal for summer when it is too hot to rock climb and too busy to travel.

Mountain biking is a good sport for old people. It’s like that sticker on cars “objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” Obstacles and challenges come up quickly when you are mountain biking which means you have to react just as quickly and, as we age, our reaction times get longer and longer; some because of a reduction in fast twitch fibres, some because we stop doing things which require fast reactions.

There’s also the riding uphill which is a good leg and lung workout (no E bikes), and unlike running or walking (where you can slow down but still move uphill), to keep the bicycle moving you must go at pace uphill. An afternoon on the trails can become an interval workout. That’s the other thing we lose as we age, the ability to push your lactate threshold out. Without specific training, older folks get good at endurance and poor at power and strength, which is why so many older folks become MAMILS (or the female equivalent), though women seem to just drop out altogether.

Mountain biking is the closest I’ve found to backcountry skiing in Australia. “Earning your turns” we used to call backcountry skiing back in the old days when people still earned their turns. Most of a big day out in the backcountry was spent skiing uphill breaking trail through fresh powder. It might take an hour to gain 300 metres which was descended in the blissful joy of powder turns in about three minutes. Mountain biking is like that, most of the time I’m riding uphill but, there are descents where the bike and I float down buoyed by gravity. Weakness leaves the body the moment you decide to enjoy the uphill as much as the downhill.

Six Things

Here is a list of six things that I learnt recently while working towards my sea guide qualification:

1. The trip should be about the group having a good time not necessarily about your personal goals If you screen participants before the trip the likelihood of your personal goals coinciding with group goals increases. In fact, you can plan for that.
2. Maintaining situational awareness is imperative, particularly when hazards are flipped over.
3. Keep instructions concise, clear and to the point.
4. Avoid excessive instructions and/or long monologues because when you really need the group to pay attention they won’t be listening.
5. Build in appropriate safety margins by considering the worst thing that could happen. For example if someone capsizes right beside a bommie, reef, headland etc., do you have sufficient distance to perform a rescue or will you have to first tow them out of danger?
6. Consider drift when rafting the group up. This applies to quick raft ups for “just in time” briefings and longer raft-ups where you want the group to say in one location. Transits help with this.

But What Weather?

After Sunday’s paddle, I got interested in the minutia of weather forecasts and all the varieties available to the sea kayaker. First, I got the standard BOM marine forecast for my area which spans Ulladulla in the north to Montague Island in the south. Here it is. After that, I collected the MetEye forecasts for the same area which are produced in three hourly increments. You can see all of these as well. There was very little happening on MetEye at 8 am so the first image is 11 am, then 2 pm then 5 pm. All paddlers should be off the water by 5 pm!

Finally, I went to Willy Weather and started pulling up forecasts scattered through the region. This is where things got both interesting and perplexing. Starting in the north of the region at Ulladulla, Willy Weather actually has a drop down list of seven different Ulladulla locations ranging from Ulladulla off-shore to Ulladulla boat ramp. This is clearly a case of precision without accuracy.

Further south, things get even weirder. I’ve pulled both the Meringo and Congo forecasts. These two beach side communities are four kilometres apart. At Congo, the southerly wind comes in at 20 knots, while at Meringo the maximum southerly wind is 11 knots. Finally, to Narooma near the southern end of the BOM marine forecast. Willy Weather offers no less than 10 different options for Narooma! I chose Narooma Beach but also looked at both Narooma Offshore and Montague Island. As might be expected winds peaked at 20 knots for both offshore locations (they were the same) while at Narooma Beach winds peaked at around 13 knots.

What to make of all this? The most obvious first. If a paddler is using Willy Weather, the exact location chosen matters and varies widely. If I used one of the off-shore forecasts, I would be planning for winds up to 20 knots, while my paddling buddy – who chose Narooma Beach is prepared for 10 knots. There is a world of difference between paddling in 10 knots and 20 knots and there are a lot of paddlers out there who will struggle mightily in 20 knots. Drive your car at 40 kilometres an hour and stick your head out the window and imagine that wind blowing at you while paddling. This could well explain my perplexity when I’m paddling with folks who report a widely different forecast to my own. When I think back to all the times I’ve rocked up with a very different forecast to my paddling partners, when questioned, these paddlers always report using Willy Weather. But which Willy? Who knows? On a short stretch of the NSW south coast there are over 100 options and varying degrees of congruence between those options.

It’s interesting as well to compare the BOM marine forecast with MetEye. I tend to think of MetEye as a finer grained forecast than the broad brush painted by the BOM forecast. Inshore winds on MetEye range from 10 to 15 knots to 15 to 20 knots. That fits well with the BOM marine forecast and a sensible paddler would go out prepared for up to 20 knots of wind. Prudent outdoor adventurers (in any sport) plan for the worst but hope for the best.

But look at MetEye at 2 pm, there’s a half dozen tiles that are green (15 to 20 knots) among a sea (no pun intended) of blue tiles (10 to 15 knots). Some folks might look at this and think that if they are at Burrewarra Point at 2 pm the wind will be, at most 15 knots, while if they are at the Tollgate Islands or even North Head, the wind will hit 20 knots. Conversely, staying near Tuross Head, only 5 knots of wind will be encountered. This is false precision and an artefact of the way MetEye forecasts are presented. When I see this kind of discrepancy, I ignore the small details and assume that, in the afternoon, the NW wind will be anywhere between 15 and 20 knots. With that assumption I am pretty much covered in terms of preparation.

Finally, the very last image is from Windy. This application seems rarely used by sea kayakers but I think it’s the best. The presentation allows much better visualisation of the weather patterns, there are four different models to choose from and you can easily compare the different models. If all the models are in agreement, you can feel more confidence in the forecast, while if they are discrepant you should assume uncertainty.

What to make of all this? Well, that’s up to you. I’ll continue using everything except Willy Weather for all the reasons explicated above.

My Observation Beats Your Forecast

If one person says it’s raining and another says it’s not raining then the journalist should look out the window and report the truth. Unknown.

Stupidly, I had packed my lovely Jantex wing blade away in my front hatch instead of strapping it to the back deck. I do this simply to avoid washing the paddle after each trip. You might think that if the paddle has simply sat on the back deck unused it won’t need washing with fresh water, but you’d be wrong because salt gradually gets encrusted on the shaft and you end up with a paddle that will not go together when you need it most. But, if you need your spare paddle, what good is it stored away in a day hatch?

This is not the first time I have wanted to switch paddles on the water and been prevented from doing so easily because my spare paddle is safely stored below the hatch. You’d think I’d learn! One November day on a trip across to North Head with Quick Nick, I was, of course, paddling with my wing blade while my flat blade was safely stowed away in a dry hatch, but the adjustment on my wing blade was loose (we thought it was loose but it turns out when more closely examined at home, the joiner had actually worn out and I needed a new one) which meant the two halves of my paddle spun about as I was paddling resulting in many, many missed strokes where missing strokes was not only very slow but almost capsize material. I was not a happy paddler and I got a lecture from Quick Nick about having my spare paddle accessible.

My HR after switching to my wing blade

This time, I wanted to switch from my flat blade to my wing blade because the wind was getting up and I’m much more efficient in windy conditions with a wing blade. Somehow, despite the forecast I seemed to be the only person expecting windy conditions. Dan John has an expression “what do YOU mean by XYZ?” and I always think about that when among a group of three or four people there are three or four widely varying forecasts. It seems like only one person can be right; there should be only one forecast, but a lot of people use apps (such as Willy Weather) which pull their forecast from a variety of secondary sources.

Willy Weather forecast, 10 knots max

Willy Weather for North Head for example (an app that paddlers commonly use but which I make no bones about NOT liking), claims to use BOM data for its wind forecast, which is inexplicable to me because the Willy Weather wind forecast rarely matches the BOM marine forecast. This makes me think there is some algorithm in the app which adjusts the forecast. I dislike these algorithms (common as they are) because it’s impossible to know what the algorithm is and it turns out that humans are much better at this kind of thing than machines. Humans ARE pattern recognition machines, it’s how we evolved.

On this day, for example, the BOM forecast is shown above. The synopsis – a feature of the weather forecast which is surprisingly hard to get in Australia – predicts cold fronts and fresh westerly winds. Around Batemans Bay, westerly winds can be fresh indeed as they tend to funnel down the Clyde River Valley and conditions can get surprisingly rough where wind and tide collide. The BOM marine forecast has an increasing sea, and, off-shore (a flexible definition at best) winds up to 20 knots. Willy Weather predicts winds to just around 10 knots from the west. Twenty knots might only be twice 10 knots, but for the paddler, the effect is more than doubled as making progress into a 20 knot headwind – offshore no less – while not nearly impossible, takes some effort. I admit to being always leery of off-shore winds as the margin for error shrinks rapidly.

Weather forecasts aside, I think my pattern recognition software must have been firing because I was expecting it to get windy. I even tried to get one of the paddlers to make a bet with me but he refused. I love betting on these things. It’s my downfall. Captain Bivouac once took away all my hard earned Bivouac Points when I lost a bet with him while we were out on an eight day ski traverse. I had managed to amass several hundred Bivouac Points which would have kept my site membership active for decades and I lost them all in one rash bet! But back to the weather around Batemans Bay. Sunday was forecast to be at least 10 degrees hotter than Saturday. Whenever the air temperature changes by 10 or so degrees between one day and the next (hot or cold), we have windy conditions. It makes sense, the hot air has to come from somewhere and that somewhere is far enough away that you can lay money on windy conditions. That is, if you can coerce someone into betting with you.

Gnarly Climber Dude Style Writing

I ran around the Dam Loop this morning. There was one bicyclist: a true aficionado of analog. Old school bike on an old school trail and he was rocking it. When I got to the Dam wall, there was a big gaggle of blokes chatting but not riding. What is the correct collective for a group of males? I jogged past, they eventually rode past, at the far end of the Dam, I passed them yet again chatting, perhaps a chorus of males? In any event, there were a lot of fancy bikes, fancy helmets, fancy shoes, fancy everything, not an analog to be seen. Apparently, it’s possible to spend $22,000 on an electric bike. $22K!

Humans seem to have this innate desire to increase complexity and gear requirements beyond the bounds of reason. Take endurance sports, the easiest and most basic of sports to master. Do roughly 80% of your volume at your aerobic pace, the remaining 20% is sprints, threshold, and intensity work. Eat protein, drink water, sleep. Boom, 98% of your results are right there. So simple, so cheap, so easy. Instead, endurance athletes consume nutty amounts of refined sugar individually wrapped in annoying little wasteful packets, drink slurries of goo, strap their legs into air compressor powered sleeves, breathe hyperbaric oxygen, and have special running packs and shoes, even sunglasses.

I am currently delving into the ultimate analog experience which is reading Barry Blanchard’s autobiographical book: The Calling: A Life Rocked By Mountains. Blanch, or Bubba as he came to be known, is a few years older than me, and I would often see him out guiding groups of novices up on the Wapta Icefields. One of the world’s leading alpinists in his day, known for putting up bold ascents in the purest style on some of the world’s largest alpine faces, Bubba was both an outstanding climber and every-man. Friendly and welcoming to every outdoor adventurer he ever encountered, a world class climber with zero ego. An older, now wiser, but no less rash as a youth, Marc Andre LeClerc.

It’s an engrossing read and the story of an extraordinary life. Blanchard truly knew the meaning of passion. With equipment and clothing prehistoric by modern standards, Blanch pushed his personal boundaries from his very first climbing days, from climbing Takkakaw Falls in winter, in a single day, approached on rental skis with ice axes wrapped in rubber inner tubes, and only a handful of ice screws to spending a night stuck in the polished and ultimately unprotectable chimneys of Mount Yamnuska. At the time, of his Takkakaw Falls climb he had less than a half-dozen ice climbs under his crampon points. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had endured multiple unplanned bivouacs under the harshest conditions, including a mid-winter night over 11,000 feet after climbing the classic and dangerous route Slipstream on the east face of Snow Dome in the Canadian Rockies. There is no doubt, Blanchard’s passion involved enormous suffering.

The irony of the alpinist versus the ultra-runner is that the alpinist works several times as hard and consumes only what he can carry along, often running out of food long before the epic is over, while the ultra-runner, who has honed their efficiency consumes calories like a fat lady at an all you can eat buffet.

I’ll close with the two one star reviews on Amazon, because one star reviews are always a belly full of laughs. And yeah, when shit gets real out in the mountains people use the f word!

I usually like these adventure books but this was not good literature. I stopped reading after a few pages.

This could have been a much better book if he had stuck with his meaningful and introspective parts: "each of us were at work on Monday morning, swollen hands, faces bloated and sunbaked, tired feet labouring to gain stairs, but hearts as light as feathers." Instead, half the book was laced with f--- this, and f---that. I guess this is meant to appeal to gnarly climber dude style writing, but I found it totally unnecessary and off-putting.

Flipping Risk on its Head

It’s been a long time since I’ve been on the water in my kayak this early. The sun is well up, because it is spring before daylight savings kicks in, and it’s very calm with no wind, but an ESE swell is running into the Bay. I’ve not long been gone when my mobile phone, tucked away in a waterproof case in a dry bag in my day hatch rings. In my mind, there are only two reasons I’m getting a telephone call this early and neither of them are good. Instead of paddling straight across to Long Beach where I am planning to meet a big group of novice kayakers, I detour to Snapper Island where I can sit out of the swell and check my telephone.

The call turns out to be from Doug who wants me to let him know how my day progresses. There are strong northerly winds forecast and, although I am generally comfortable paddling around the Bay on my own, if the wind hits 30 knots as predicted I may not want to paddle back by myself. At Long Beach, I paddle west to east and, near the far eastern end, I see the trailer and stack of red plastic kayaks.

With the usual faffing that a big group entails, we are finally on the water and heading southeast towards Three Islet Reef (known locally as Yellow Rocks). I am neither the instigator nor planner of this trip, I am simply here to gain experience with big groups. It is an experience, big groups are difficult to keep together, even large groups of novices have faster and slower paddlers particularly when some paddlers are in double kayaks and some in singles. During the day, I only rarely paddle towards the front of the group and only if it looks like the lead paddlers are confused. Adrian, who has taught me a lot about leading groups, uses the CLAP acronym and this runs through my head all day.

CLAP stands for communication, line of sight, avoidance/awareness, position of maximal usefulness. There’s a good article about CLAP in practice here. It was not my job to communicate on this trip, and, as an invitee I am careful about not overstepping my bounds, so mostly I keep quiet. I could however, keep all the paddlers in my line of sight, I could be aware of hazards, and I could position myself where I was most useful.

As we approached Yellow Rocks, I was somewhat surprised that before leaving the shelter of the Bay we did not group up and communicate the hazards to the paddlers, nor even check whether or not anyone needed to adjust clothing, take a drink of water, etc. My practice when changing environments, for example, from sheltered waters to open ocean, is to stop before hand, group up, make sure everyone understands both the plan and the potential hazards and only continue if the entire group is ready to go. I learnt this years ago from an ACMG Mountain Guide who said that he followed this technique before every meaningful transition: from below treeline to treeline from treeline to alpine, from front-country to back-country.

As we approached Yellow Rocks, the leader, who had been near the back of the pod previously, moved to the front. The entire area around Yellow Rocks can be hazardous. A reef with shallow water extends to the south, there is a bommie that always breaks, currents run past creating bumpy conditions, and, the swell is encountered for the first time. There have been capsizes and near misses aplenty over the years.

It’s amazing how quickly things happen: “It was all good until it wasn’t.” In my “position of maximal usefulness” I was positioned towards the back of the pod - but not the last paddler – and off to one side. I’d been coaching one paddler on their paddle stroke as not only did it look incredibly awkward and uncomfortable but the paddler was at risk of a shoulder injury with hands far outside the “paddlers box.” I took my eye off him for a moment because the paddlers following the leader were heading straight for the breaking waves at Yellow Rocks. Everyone in the pod, should – and we all know this – be to the safe side (in this instance the right or south) of the lead paddler who is setting the safety boundary.

I completely forgot about keeping quiet and loudly called to the paddlers ahead of me to paddle to the right of the lead paddler. Some paddlers were a bit confused by what I meant by right but it was easy to clarify with some different words and all the boats turned and paddled into deeper and safer water. In the time this had taken, which could not have been more than a minute or two, the uncomfortable paddler behind me had capsized.

We had been quite close to the bommie, and as I turned and sprinted back, I wondered if I would need to tow the paddler and boat off the bommie before effecting a rescue. I was running through the sequence in my mind. Should I have the paddler hang onto my stern with one hand and his kayak with the other while I towed him away from the rocks? I did this once when a fellow capsized out at the Tollgate Islands and it worked fine although it was a heavy tow. Perhaps I should hook my short tow – which lives on my deck ready to be deployed – to the kayak and have the paddler hang on to the back of his kayak? I don’t know that there is one correct answer; context always matters. I once towed two kayaks off the rocks with my short tow after a paddler had capsized and been put back in her boat but the boat was full of water and the kayaker unsteady. The rescuer in this case supported the capsized paddler while I towed them both off the rocks until we could safely empty the boat and get the paddler comfortable again.

In any event, it was not necessary. When I arrived, I judged we could simply effect a rescue without towing. The paddler was with the boat but the paddle was floating free. I could get both paddle and boat, but decided the lead paddler could come back and retrieve the paddle while I got the paddler back in his boat. I’m not sure this was the best decision as I was reliant on the lead paddler coming back as a rescued paddler without a paddle would be even more unstable. In any event, the rescue was effected relatively expeditiously although it would have helped if the group had practised getting back into kayaks with a heel hook (as the NSW Sea Kayak Club teaches) in sheltered water. The chap who capsized was a big bloke and kept wanting to sit up instead of staying low and rolling over into the kayak. The leader had by this time picked up the errant paddle and was forming a raft with me on the opposite side to the rescue. I admit to being comforted by this as I was a bit leery that this large bloke was going to pull me over with him, but, generally, if you lean really well over the victims kayak, the raft becomes fairly stable.

After this excitement we went back into the shelter of the Bay. While we had lunch on a beach, the forecast wind came up very strongly, so strong in fact that when I laid my paddle across my kayak deck, the wind blew it off my deck and only my paddle leash prevented me losing my paddle altogether. As we made our way back to the launch site, the leader had the group keep to his left (south or ocean side) as we paddled around rock reefs that extend south from the headlands that separate all the little beaches along this stretch of coast. This might, at first glance seem appropriate, but the hazard now was not little reefs (not breaking) but off-shore winds. A northerly is not technically off-shore, only a westerly is really off-shore on the east coast, but, if your shelter is the northern shoreline a northerly wind is, in practice, off-shore. This is risk flipped on its head.

Overall, it was a good learning experience and I learnt much more than detailed here. I’ll probably write that up in a further post – if you happen to be interested (unlikely). Doug, meanwhile, did paddle across to meet me, and, after I had seen the group back to Long Beach, we paddled across the Bay to our home beach. It was very windy and conditions were challenging especially where wind and current were colliding. I had to brace into breaking waves a few times and we surfed into our home bay through rather large confused seas. It was probably the roughest day I’ve been out since we got back from Tasmania. Fun times if you were comfortable but I was sure glad the big group was not out in these conditions.

Comfortable Patterns

Yesterdays flashback to 2007 is a precursor to tomorrow's post about hazards when sea kayaking and how the nature of the hazard can be completely flipped on its head. In 2007, not one but two rain events occurred while we were spending a week skiing in the Kokanee Range in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia. Rain on fresh snow inevitably triggers a widespread avalanche cycle, and, when the temperature drops afterwards (as it always does in mid-winter), the risk from avalanches decreases to near zero, but the risk of slipping, sliding, injury, even death on steep, icy slopes suddenly shoots sky high.

I had probably half a dozen (if not more) ski weeks in the Kokanee Range but the one that is burned into my brain is 2007 because, despite the classic progression of the Pineapple Express (starts with snow, progresses to rain as the warm wet air moves through is followed by a freeze as the cold front passes), the skiers on the trip did not recognise that their risk mitigation strategies needed to completely flip, from worrying about avalanches, to fretting about what is recorded annually in Accidents in North American Mountaineering as “involuntary glissades.” Involuntary glissades are slips on steep and icy snow slopes, and if not arrested rapidly, can quickly become deadly. Arresting without an ice axe is possible, but requires practice and most people do not practice near enough if at all, and most practice is with an ice axe, not skis and a ski pole.

In 2007, after the first Pineapple Express, the snow froze solid. It was tough to get an edge in, even kick a ski boot in. Doug and I, who live by the weather forecast, had brought in ski crampons, boot crampons and ice axes. No-one else had, although in follow up years, some folks who took note of 2007 turned up on later trips with ski crampons.

These ski weeks were a loose collection of individuals, which changed by the year, although there was often a core cohort who came together for a week of skiing with no defined leaders. There is no such thing as “leaderless groups” where decision is made by consensus. Someone, not necessarily the most qualified someone, rises to the top, particularly in novel situations. As humans are prone to conflate confidence with competence, very often the person who floats to the top as the leader is simply the loudest individual.

The unofficial drill on these ski weeks was that over a communal breakfast, people would sort into groups of who was going where to do what. The morning after the first rain event of the week, people were talking around breakfast about the risk of avalanche and where they would ski that day. The hazard however, had completely flipped. The risk people needed to mitigate were slips on snow. Around Kokanee, those slips could be very dangerous indeed as any journey at all required travel through timbered slopes. An uncontrolled slide could result in broken limbs, a broken head (no-one wore helmets in those days), even a fatality. Without ski crampons, most folks were at a distinct disadvantage. I remember saying, in my blunt outspoken way “forget avalanches, you need to worry about going for a slide.” Everything, apart from a skier, that was going to slide, had slid!

Doug and I chose long tours with mostly gentle slopes to ski. Despite that, we had one narrow miss when a skier lost his ski edge as we approached the acme of Tanal Peak and began to slide down a steep treed slope. Somehow, he managed to claw to a stop and thereafter removed skis and kicked steps up. The same day, across the valley on the steep slopes leading to the Kokanee Glacier, the folks who had followed one of the louder individuals had scared themselves witless on the steep icy slopes and all but one or two had sensibly turned around. Amazingly, this behaviour was repeated later in the week as different people followed, got scared witless and retreated.

There were people in the group who had spent 20 years or more ski touring, and yet the mental gymnastics required to flip over their risk mitigation strategies was missing. Mental flexibility is tougher than we all think. We get so used to thinking about start zones and convex rolls and wind slabs, and neglect to think about steep icy slopes, trees, cliffs, rocks, skiers locked onto their skis with cranked up bindings, hands in ski pole straps and the risk that these individual components collect when lumped together. It is, in essence, a novel new experience and our old comfortable patterns no longer fit.