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My drowning and other inconveniences (2017)

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Re: My drowning and other inconveniences (2017)

#11
post #8

Whitewater kayaking is the only extreme sport I've seriously tried so far that I outright quit. I learned how to sweep roll (when you are upside-down in a kayak and flip upright), I learned how to hand-roll, ran several class III rapids, surfed kayaks in the Atlantic hurricane swell, and I was working on a special recovery roll that I can't remember the name of when I decided to quit and never do it again. I've rappe…

Friend was training to be a rafting guide.

One weekend she was doing training. The second day things went wrong. People fell out of the raft and had to be recovered. The raft flipped over twice. They were running late. At dusk they found their takeout under water. Half mile down the river in the dark on a sharp bend in the river a guy managed to grab a tree branch. A woman climbed over him and got a rope on it. They pulled themself to shore and tied off. Found a flat spot 40 feet up a steep embankment and spent the night. Daylight revealed a waterfall and cascade just around the bend.

She said she found out later about a dozen people died that weekend up and down the west coast. And she was done with rafting.

Another friend does canyoneering. Couple of years ago on a trip he missed, a friend was fording a river carrying a rope. Rope tangled him up on a submerged tree. He drowned with his friends watching from the rivers edge.

Re: My drowning and other inconveniences (2017)

#12
post #2

The secret to river rafting at 73? Always keep moving. My father is 86 and still goes to the gym daily to lift weights and walk the treadmill. It's a bit of a social club too - but he primarily goes to keep moving. Effective advice!

Yeah, I mean there might be some survivorship bias here but my Grandmother always said something similar. "When you stop walking every day, you'll stop being able to walk!" - she's 90 now, and still does a circuit in her neighborhood at least every couple of days. I do think there's something to it though - in Western society in general we don't do enough exercise, and the culture of retirement is to slow down and re…

My father is getting up there now, and lived surrounded by older people for a while.

He kept saying "whenever an elderly person starts sitting down in a wheelchair for the first time, they're not getting back up".

Even just breaking a bone and sitting down for a few weeks just completely shatters the patterns of regular movement, and the patients just end up becoming more and more sedentary, then getting more issues due to that, and it spirals out of control.

(Anecdotal, obviously.)

Re: My drowning and other inconveniences (2017)

#13
Not only was it a riveting read, full jaw-dropping revelations - it was also a brilliant black comedy! I wonder how the author could make me laugh so hard at what is perhaps the most serious moment in his life. It wasn't schadenfreude, just very clever writing

I died that December day on Tequila Beach. This created a great deal of consternation—and it has tended to complicate my relationships with others ever since.

The paramedic nodded at them: “You guys saved a life today,” he said. Which was news to me.

In their pages, men were attacked by savage bloodthirsty penguins at the North Pole (yeah, I know)

Re: My drowning and other inconveniences (2017)

#14
post #11
post #8

Whitewater kayaking is the only extreme sport I've seriously tried so far that I outright quit. I learned how to sweep roll (when you are upside-down in a kayak and flip upright), I learned how to hand-roll, ran several class III rapids, surfed kayaks in the Atlantic hurricane swell, and I was working on a special recovery roll that I can't remember the name of when I decided to quit and never do it again. I've rappe…

Friend was training to be a rafting guide. One weekend she was doing training. The second day things went wrong. People fell out of the raft and had to be recovered. The raft flipped over twice. They were running late. At dusk they found their takeout under water. Half mile down the river in the dark on a sharp bend in the river a guy managed to grab a tree branch. A woman climbed over him and got a rope on it. They…

Terrifying stories like those are the norm in the outdoor recreation industry. Risk management is almost always nonexistent, and people coast on the principle of "if it didn't go wrong before, if probably won't go wrong now". They made an excellent choice to take out at a random bend in the river, but one has to wonder how the company training them didn't tell them every feature for at least three miles past the takeout.

As for the canyoneering drowning--that sounds awful. Fording a river seems like such a simple task, but it can be so dangerous.

The first time I rafted, we were on the New River in West Virginia. We took a raft ourselves with a novice guide just for fun, and flipped in Class IV rapids. I've never been that scared before.

Re: My drowning and other inconveniences (2017)

#15
post #10
post #8

Whitewater kayaking is the only extreme sport I've seriously tried so far that I outright quit. I learned how to sweep roll (when you are upside-down in a kayak and flip upright), I learned how to hand-roll, ran several class III rapids, surfed kayaks in the Atlantic hurricane swell, and I was working on a special recovery roll that I can't remember the name of when I decided to quit and never do it again. I've rappe…

I definitely had a decade of my life where whitewater kayaking was my drug of choice, and I agree 100%. I think one of the things that we have so little intuition for is how massive water is. I don't even know if that is the right word, or if we have a word. As a point of reference the standard for an Olympic artificial whitewater canoe/kayak course is something like 12 cubic meters per second (you might hear kayaker…

The first time I found out the weight of water was when I had the bright idea to lay a tarp down on my driveway during a snowstorm so I could drag the snow off to the side instead of shoveling it.

What was the most extreme rapid you ran? Did you have any close scares with death?

Re: My drowning and other inconveniences (2017)

#16
post #9
post #8

Whitewater kayaking is the only extreme sport I've seriously tried so far that I outright quit. I learned how to sweep roll (when you are upside-down in a kayak and flip upright), I learned how to hand-roll, ran several class III rapids, surfed kayaks in the Atlantic hurricane swell, and I was working on a special recovery roll that I can't remember the name of when I decided to quit and never do it again. I've rappe…

I went kayaking with my mother down a still river that was only 3 feet deep and ran into this cute little whirlpool that sucked us right in and tipped our kayak. It looked harmless but once it's black hole like gravitational pull got us I couldn't fight it, even with all my might. Water is scary. Here's a crab getting wrecked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nce9QNK7ITY

Delta P... it's so strange to be totally comfortable in water and then to feel a pressure differential. Even a simple current is wild.
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