Between Storms: A Few Winter Paddling Tips

A storm had come through the previous night, battering the windows with sleet, covering the ground with a layer of slushy snow, and another storm – a bigger one – was on its way. But for a few hours anyway, the air temperature would rise above freezing, and this happened to coincide with high tide: a perfect opportunity for a quick paddle. I got into my gear as quickly as I could and headed-out.

It has been awhile since I’ve written much about the measures I take before I feel adequately prepared to paddle on a day with both air and water temperatures in the mid-thirties, but it’s certainly worth mentioning every once in awhile that I don’t take the risks lightly, and I wouldn’t want to encourage anyone else to either. But it seems that some do. Two weeks ago, the Coast Guard rescued a man who had capsized his kayak off of Kittery. Somehow, when we read such accounts it is unsurprising that he wasn’t wearing a lifejacket and that his cold, wet clothing was cut from him before he could be treated for hypothermia and shock. Of course he was lucky just to survive.

It’s the sort of story that makes the news and gets the general public thinking that kayakers aren’t too clever. I won’t make any assumptions beyond the bare facts in the Coast Guard’s report, but any time I hear about a mishap like this I have this vague fear that among the paddler’s gear they’ll find a soggy copy of my guidebook (with the entire Introduction completely unread, of course). I have also been concerned that someone might have read my blog, said ‘that looks like fun’ and gone-off to try it themselves.

Part of the reason I shy away from writing about gear or how to acquire skills is that I feel strongly that this is something best learned first-hand, in person, rather than reading about it or from videos. Sure, I can tell you what gear I use, but I’d hate to give the impression that it’s all you need. And if you take a class or get coached by a knowledgeable instructor, you’ll learn about these things.

I think I worried more about the example I set in the earlier years of this blog, before Facebook became saturated with photographs or videos of paddlers taking what might appear to be baffling risks, often with no context at all to give the viewer some idea whether this were something they should try at home or not, or what the paddler did to be safe – or not. At least I try to put things in context. But I’ve also tended more toward trying to convey the experience, rather than the ‘how-to’ aspect of kayaking. And again, the Introduction to my guidebook covers quite a bit, and I’m not fond of repeating myself. Really, I recommend it.

But at the risk of repeating myself, here are a few points about the paddling I do in the winter in Maine. Really, these are all things to consider no matter the season, but in the winter, my attentiveness to risk management is greatly elevated, and I pay particular attention to the following concerns: timing my trip, relaxing my ambitions, choosing less consequential locations, and of course, before all of those considerations, I need the skills and gear.

1) I choose my days carefully. For this reason, I avoid putting some random Saturday on the calendar and inviting friends for a trip that we’ll take that day, regardless of the conditions. I constantly watch the weather, looking for windows of opportunity. Everyone has their own standards, but in the winter, I’m looking for minimal wind and air temperatures around freezing or above. Bonus if the sun is shining – it keeps you warmer. It helps that my winter schedule is fairly loose, but I think it’s a bad idea to get your heart set on a particular day and being tempted to stick with it, even when you know you shouldn’t.

2) My ambitions tend to be scaled-back quite a bit from what I do in warmer weather. Usually, I’m happy just to get out for a short paddle – maybe one or two hours. My hands and feet don’t have much chance to get cold. I tend to get chilled when I get out for a break, so it helps to just avoid breaks and keep paddling. You can certainly go for longer days, but you need to be vigilant about throwing-on extra layers, bringing warm drinks, etc. I don’t often drive very far to go paddling in the winter. (In fact, when it’s cold I pretty much only drive to the pool).

3) Most of my winter excursions tend to be in more sheltered areas that I’m very familiar with. Again, we’re fortunate to be in a good spot here on Greenlaw Cove, but when winds pick-up, it can be very sheltered here.

Beyond those are the more usual concerns about skills and gear, in that order, which apply to the rest of the year, but become more consequential as the air and water turn colder. These are simple facts; it’s fairly straightforward. If you tip over in 37-degree water (as it is here now) and you fail to roll and can’t get back into your boat quickly, things may go downhill for you very quickly, even if you’re wearing all that fancy gear we put so much faith into. And that’s assuming that the cold water hasn’t triggered a gasp reflex (it’s really better to avoid capsizing). You need to be absolutely confident in your rescue skills and in those of anyone with whom you paddle.

Much could be written about gear, but I’ll just list what I wore Wednesday as an example. The drysuit is the crucial element, and I adjust the layers underneath depending upon the weather. Underneath I wore wool socks, wool baselayer (top & bottom), thin synthetic pants and 2 more upper body layers (1 wool, 1 fleece). I wear various neoprene gloves, mittens and pogies, but yesterday I was fine with a pair of NRS Rogues. Since last winter I’ve been wearing thick, 6.5 mm diving boots made by Xcel, and my feet have always been warm. On my head I wore a neoprene beanie made by Hyperflex. These beanies have become a favorite piece of year-round kit, and I’ll write a bit more about some that I’ve tried in another post.

One of my big questions before I launch is how many layers I’ll need on top. Yesterday, with 3 layers plus the drysuit (and lifejacket) I was hot within five minutes. But the air temps stayed in the low to mid-thirties and the wind picked-up into the teens, and I was glad to have the extra layer. My gloves were a little damp and my fingertips may have been mildly numb by the time I returned. If I’d been concerned I could have added pogies, or switched to a heavier glove or mitt. Of course I also carried with me all my usual back-up gear, radio & cell phone, storm cag, etc.

But part of the reason I shy-away from getting too gear-focused is that it’s easy to start regarding your gear like a suit of armor that will protect you no matter what. People put on a helmet and seem to forget that it won’t prevent you from breaking an arm or getting your face impaled by a broken paddle shaft. And even in a drysuit, that water is freakin’ cold. Which leads me back to skill. Whether or not you get out on the ocean this time of year, it’s a good time to hone your skills in the warm water of a swimming pool.

Oh, and the whole paddling alone issue. I’m confident in my abilities in the situations I get myself into. But as a human I’m prone to error and I have come to the realization, mid-paddle, that I could be getting into a situation that I can’t get out of. That’s a bad feeling, and I really recommend that you avoid it. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but my skills are well above average and I practice frequently – a good combat roll in chaotic surf and tidal currents that I’ve been able to test many times, and I seldom swim. But everybody swims sometime, and failing to think about what will happen when you do could be fatal hubris. Cold air and water only decrease the odds of a happy outcome.

Again, there’s a section in my guidebook about solo paddling and group dynamics. If there’s some doubt in your mind about your abilities should anything go wrong, either don’t launch or change your plans. In addition, don’t subscribe to the ‘safety in numbers’ myth. That’s a whole other can of worms. If you’re relying on someone else, make sure they know it and they’re worthy of your trust. Two moderately-skilled paddlers vaguely relying on each other are less safe than a skilled paddler relying on no one but himself, but with a realistic sense of limits.

Rant over: back to ‘the experience of paddling’. Right. Well, it was a nice paddle, not much to say about it really. An hour and a half: along Shore Acres Preserve and around Campbell Island. Some ice floes, which are cool to paddle among. It makes you feel like Nanook or some Arctic explorer as you weave among the ice. A bit of wind in the face for the return stretch. It just felt good to get out. And then the real storm came.

But then again, you could just wait for the ocean to freeze, strap-on some snowshoes and walk over the ice at low tide.

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It's worth pointing-out that some of these photos were taken from shore, on days when I wasn't even considering getting on the water (or the ice, as the case may be). And thanks to Rebecca for the shots she took of me from the porch, when she was recuperating. 

Catching a Breeze

Last week, on one of those not-so-great paddling days with strong gusty winds, Rebecca and I were distracted from our chores at the campground by a pair of paddlers who’d found a good way to take advantage of the wind- with sails. We’ve spent many hours watching and re-watching Cheri Perry and Turner Wilson’s rolling DVDs, and the pair are internationally known as instructors of Greenland technique, but I’d never seen them sailing a kayak. It looked like a blast, and they offered to let us give it a try later in the week, when they returned from a multi-day trip out around the archipelago, their vacation before heading off to teach in Europe for the summer. They paddled Tiderace kayaks, equipped with Flat Earth sails that they’d discovered while teaching in Australia. They’ve since become for the company.

I went first (one of us had to watch the office and answer the phone). They gave me a few basic instructions and words of encouragement and I paddled straight into the wind, letting the sail remain in-line with the boat. I paddled, as I always do, just focused on the forward stroke, looking-out for boat traffic, enjoying the feel of a different boat, until it occurred to me that, oh yeah, I can use that thing to move me forward instead of the paddle. So I turned off the wind and let it take me.

What a different feeling! The wind takes the front of the boat and you move along, without even putting a paddle in the water. Turner had likened it to surfing, where you have forward momentum and need to figure out the best ways to turn it. With the bow weighted with wind, the logical part of the boat to move would seem to be the stern, so I tried a lot of stern ruddering… but then you also realize you’re getting blown sideways a bit, unless you’re heading directly downwind, in which case you just fly along. I took a few tacks back and forth along our waterfront while Rebecca got ready. I could see that you could really spend some enjoyable hours figuring-out how to best maneuver.

Rebecca got in and, thanks to sailing instincts she’d developed as a teenager, seemed to discover the most efficient points of sail pretty quickly. I had half-expected to capsize, but while there were a few jolts when a puff of wind caught me, or I came-about, it felt fairly easy to manage. There’s only two ropes leading back to the cockpit, one to raise or lower the sail, the other to trim it in or let it out. I think I could figure that part out. I didn’t need to learn any salty nautical terms to shout out before making a move.

It could be particularly fun and useful on a longer trip, where you might have some downwind parts of the day to give yourself a break from paddling. Most of all though, it just felt fun and different. As I’ve instructed paddlers over the past few years, plenty of beginners have asked about putting sails on their boats, and since I personally felt I had enough on my plate just learning how to paddle well, I was never encouraging. Cheri and Turner concurred that it is a skill most easily learned by someone who has some experience in a kayak. And with that experience, it feels like another fun way to mess around in a boat. I want one!

Hopefully we’ll get Turner and Cheri here this September for a weekend Greenland paddling and rolling workshop. I’ll post details as we work them-out.

Warm Fingers and Toes

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One reason that many of our cooler weather excursions are limited to a few hours, is the chill that often sets-in to the extremities: cold fingertips and toes. While our core stays toasty, thanks to multiple thin, warm layers and our exertion which seems to fire-up that inner furnace, that warm blood doesn’t always keep our extremities warm. This is one of those ongoing subjects to which you hear plenty of solutions and opinions, but aside from avoiding cold weather, there’s no “one size fits all solution,” which is especially important to remember if you’re guiding people. You could be wearing the same gear as your paddling companions, but having an entirely different experience.  Age and gender figure heavily into blood circulation, but there are enough other variables that it’s pretty tough to guess what someone else is feeling.

 

One way to deal with the cold is with gear. As the air and water turned cooler this winter, I noticed that my feet were getting chilled every time. (It doesn’t escape me that, since we paddled in warmer climes last winter, it had been almost two years since I’d paddled in freezing water, and, well, I – and my blood circulation system – have grown older during that time). The first thing I did was put a foam pad beneath my feet, something to insulate them from that 30-odd-degree water on the other side of a thin fiberglass shell. That helped. But then I ordered the thickest wetsuit boots I could find.

Most kayak-specific gear is not quite thick enough for ice water and clomping around in the snow, so I thought I’d try-out some diving-oriented gear that I ordered from a company in Maryland that specializes in all things wetsuit-related, called Wetsuit Wearhouse.

These XCEL Thermoflex Dive Boots are made with 6.5 mm neoprene with a poly fleece lining that really keeps the heat in. The zipped sides help when it comes to getting drysuit booties over heavy wool socks into the boot (although I’m guessing these boots would keep your feet toasty even without the extra layers). I usually wear a 10 to a 10.5 shoe, and even with the drysuit and socks, the 10 worked just fine, but if you sometimes opt for a larger size and you’re wearing those extra layers, you might want to ensure that your feet are not cramped (which decreases circulation) and order-up a size. Since I started wearing the XCELs, my feet haven’t been even vaguely cold, and they’re even comfortable for walking and cling well to wet rocks. They go for about $64 at Wetsuit Wearhouse.

Hands are another matter. I’ve gone back and forth between gloves or mitts of varying thickness and pogies or a combination of the two. Hands tend to get wetter and are more prone to wind; even a mild breeze will cool your hands if they are encased in damp neoprene. Obviously, the thicker the neoprene, the warmer it will be, but you need to balance that warmth potential with your need to actually use your hands. Mitts make a lot of sense, since the fingers stay warmer when they’re all together. But it’s tough to go through life with claws instead of fingers. Taking pictures is out of the question. You might be able to get a sprayskirt on. I’ve usually gone with a combination of mid-weight gloves and pogies. With the gloves alone, especially once they’re wet, my hands would be cold. But encase them in that extra layer and they tend to be toasty.

But I thought, along with the thick boots, I’d give thick diving gloves a try. The 5/4 mm XCEL Thermoflex Dive Gloves are by far the warmest neoprene gloves I’ve worn. Not only that, but they work pretty well at keeping your hands dry. The neoprene is lined on the inside with XCEL's exclusive Thermo Dry Celliant inner lining, which according to the website “recycles your body heat and converts it to usable infrared energy for greater warmth, increased endurance and drying time, faster recovery, and overall enhanced performance.” So far, the sealed seams have kept all the water out, aided by a hefty Velcro strap around the wrist. They’re thick enough that a little break-in time makes them a bit more pliant. The longer I’ve worn these gloves, the more I like them, especially on those sub-freezing days. These go for about $45 at Wetsuit Wearhouse.

There’s an old adage that says if your feet are cold, put on a hat. It’s easy logic- much of your heat goes out through the top. In past years in New England, as my bones get a little creakier and my circulation poorer, I’ve taken to wearing some sort of hat for warmth for more than half the year, and it does go a long way toward keeping my hands and feet warm. I usually have two or three warm hats in my day hatch, just in case (and they are often enough leant to guests, even in mid-summer). On the water though, the knit hat has always felt like a bit of a weakness, since I’d really rather not get it wet, even if it is wool or synthetic. Yes, there are the neoprene skullcaps, complete with chinstraps, but I don’t wear these casually, especially since I can’t hear once my ears are completely covered. Besides, when I started wearing one of those years ago, my overly fashion-conscious buddy Todd nicknamed me “Cannonball.” Oh, to have been called “Cannonball.”

The Stormr Typhoon Watch fishing beanie fits just like an ordinary wool beanie, but it’s made of 3mm neoprene with a thin, fleecy lining to wick-away moisture. When I wear it on the water, I can feel the heat building-up in my torso like a stoked woodstove. If I need to hear better, it’s easy to fold the edges up. It works well when wet, and stays on in the stiffest breeze. And unlike the hoods and scullcaps that might make you feel like a superhero or earn you a cool nickname, you can wear the beanie into the convenience store on the drive home and not get stared at, except by other covetous paddlers. I may need to get a thinner version for warmer weather paddling. These go for about $25 at Wetsuit Wearhouse.

Of course all of these items work best if you rinse out the salt water after each use and let them dry. You’re much more likely to stay warm if you start your excursion with dry gear. I like to have extras, especially if I’m guiding or paddling with friends, so there’s always an option or two. Wetsuit Wearhouse has far more options than I knew existed, and if these options allow me more time on the water and more confidence that I’ll be able to return home without numb appendages, they’re worthwhile investments.

Access

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In a few days, thanks to Daylight Savings, we could enjoy twilight until almost seven pm, and it just keeps getting later, all the way to June 21^st. It’s good to keep this in mind, reminding ourselves to take advantage of the daylight, since on June 22 – only three and a half months from now - we again begin the slow march toward short days and long, dark nights. The good news is that means we have about seven months with at least as much daylight as we have now.

Long dark nights have their merits though. Aside from giving us a chance for binge-watching television shows or getting our socks sorted, winter nights can launch inspired planning sessions that will help us make the most of that short period later in the year, when the days are long and warm. And while I like to celebrate living in the moment, inspired planning can be its own reward as well, whether it's a flight of fancy, imagining all those places we might go, or detailed planning. We gather our tools around us: the charts and maps, Gazetteers and guidebooks. We imagine trips, parsing-out the distances with a length of string, checking the current tables, imagining the lunch stops and play spots, the places to camp. I fill notebook pages with potential trips. Sometimes they turn into real trips.

 Of course, the first thing we need to know, if we’re car-topping our kayaks, is where we’ll launch. Aside from public access, we need to know how difficult it is to get our boats to the water and where we’ll park the car. We’d like to know if the high tide might reach our parking spot, or if we return at low tide we’ll face a long slog through the mud? When I was choosing routes for AMC’s Best Sea Kayaking in New England, I omitted some nice places to paddle simply because parking is a hassle or getting there is a challenge at low tide.

Unfortunately, lack of convenience… and just plain lack of public knowledge ensures that some paddling destinations are busy and launches become overcrowded, when in fact, there are a lot more places to access the ocean than we might at first think. So for most trips I tried to include multiple launches, alternate routes and resources to make planning easier.

One of these resources is the Maine Coastal Public Access Guide. Published in 2013, the guide was put together by the Maine Coastal Program at the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. The guide comes in three volumes, covering tidal areas in the Southern, Midcoast and Downeast regions. That’s a lot of shoreline- about 5,300 miles, according to the introduction, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it covers over 700 public access areas. Not all of these are places where you can launch a boat – it isn’t a kayaking guide – but if you’re like me, knowing about these public access points is akin to knowing that you have 700 backyards.

The guide works well either from an armchair-dreaming perspective, or as a counterpart to the Gazetteer, that you keep in your car to consult when you’re out and about. At home, I find myself going back and forth between the full-color maps in the guide and my charts, just trying to get a broader sense of the possibilities. I’ve encountered discrepancies between this guide and the Gazetteer, and since I’ve gone to launches listed in the Gazetteer only to discover that they were actually on private land, I would tend to believe that this state-issued guide is correct. And, unlike some listings of boat launches that favor powerboaters, this guide lists places that aren’t launches at all, but kayakers who don’t mind a little carry could read between the lines. The guide also lists hiking trails, which is useful, both as a back-up plan, and to add further dimension to your experience of a place.

If you drive around a lot, you could think of this as a guide to places where you can stop to pee without having to buy another coffee. At eight bucks, the guide could pay for itself in just a few pee-stops.

Two weeks ago I gave my first public slideshow presentation in support of AMC’s Best Sea Kayaking in New England. Hosted by Island Heritage Trust, it took place on a wet, blustery evening in the lower level of a church, with 15 or 20 people in the audience, most of whom I know, but not necessarily in a kayaking context. Anticipating that I will be speaking to a lot of people new to the sport or who hope to get into it, I talked a bit about my personal journey into sea kayaking. As someone who values modesty, I later found myself replaying in my head many parts of it, wondering how full of myself I might have sounded; there’s a fine line between bragging and telling your story for the benefit of others. But I didn’t notice anyone falling asleep, and they even laughed once or twice. And there have been subsequent questions about what kayak to buy, so perhaps my story has helped spark the imaginations of others.

Before my talk, the publisher was kind enough to provide me with an uncorrected proof… as if, in the literal sense, I needed to prove to the audience that the long-awaited book really did exist. And then, a few days ago, UPS showed up with the real thing:

It has been a long journey.