So before you go anywhere on the river with a canoe, you want to make sure you have a few essential items with you. The first and most essential item of all is your PFD, your personal flotation device. This is a, uh, life jacket, something that you wear as a vest, you want to get one that’s comfortable, that’s going to be able to support you, if you, if you fall our of your boat or you go swimming and virtually all of these are Coast Guard approved so that the U.S. Coast Guard approves the vest based on their design, based on the amount of flotation that they have in them and you’ll see that in the inside of the back of every vest there’s a Coast Guard approved insignia and that will tell you what type it is. These are type 3, um, or type 3.5, and type 3 or type 3.5 are the kind you want to use for whitewater canoeing generally. The other benefit of the vest is that they protect your back and your spine from an impact if you go swimming and they also give you some warmth, so if it’s cold out wearing your life vest actually can keep you warmer because they have a fair amount of insulation in them. You want to make sure that your life vest fits properly and one way to do that is to, when you put it on cinch down all the straps, this happens to be a rescue vest, so I have a quick release tow harness on it as well which I cinched down and then have either yourself or a friend lift you up by the shoulders, and if you come with the vest that’s good, that means that it’s on nice and snuggly, if you don’t, if the vest come up and starts to ride up to your ears or rides up in front of your face, it’s on too loosely and you want to tighten it up, because if you go for a swim you want to be in the vest, you don’t want to have the vest coming off you and you have to either pull it back on or lose it. The other most important piece of safety gear for whitewater canoeing is a helmet, and if you have a good helmet that fits your head well and it’ll stay on well, it’ll protect your head from those occasional bumps on rocks when you flip out of your boat or even from your T-grip, if it happens to errantly hit you in the head, which they do occasionally do. There’s a variety of different types of helmets, um, this one’s for people with a more round head, um, this one gives you a little more protection; it has some ear flaps and is pretty tough. But depending on where, where you’re going to go and what your, what kind of needs you have, you can choose a different kind of helmet, but make sure it fits well, and make sure that if you’re on whitewater you do have the helmet with you.
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