So no matter what kind of whitewater canoe you use, you want to make sure you outfit it for safety when you’re paddling. One of the most important things you want to make sure of with your boat, is that if it does flip over, it doesn’t fill entirely with water and so we use air bags, flotation bags on each end of the boat to keep that from happening. If you keep those blown up they’ll displace most of the water in the boat and prevent the boat from wrapping about rocks quite so hard, getting damaged if it swims, if you swim. The other thing you want to make sure of in a whitewater canoe is that you have panniers or some way to grab the boat from the end, these pannier ropes should be about the length of the boat and what they do is allow you to grab onto the boat if you’re going for a swim or if a rescuer needs to grab the boat, they can grab the pannier rope and they can haul the boat to safety. In order to keep the pannier ropes from getting tangled in things, you want to wrap them up, coil them up like this, and put them under a piece of shock-cord on the deck, that’s the ideal way to do it. Another option, if you don’t have a piece of shock-cord on the deck is to take the coil and half hitch it through itself, around the grab loop, not quite as easy to grab in a quick situation, but it’ll keep it out of the way. You want to also make sure with your pannier that you don’t put a knot in the end of it. If you put a knot in the end of the pannier and it gets caught in the bottom of the river and the knot gets caught between two rocks, it can cause a real problem and it can be a real safety hazard. Finally in these boats you want to make sure that there’s no way that you can get caught in the boat by accident if you flip over, so you want to make sure that all the ropes are tight, that everything is out of the way, and if you do have any thwarts, for instance, like this that you might put your foot under you want to make sure that those thwart are high enough and out of the way that you can’t get your foot caught in the boat if you flip over, because that has been a common cause of entrapment in canoes, is people getting their foot, their heel especially, caught underneath a thwart and they’re not able to get out and the thwart collapses on their feet, so make sure that all those things are, are uh, set on your boat and you’ll have a good safe canoeing day.
