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.
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