Safety Tips for Whitewater Canoeing Groups

Video Transcript

"When you go paddling on a river you don't want to go by yourself. Paddling alone means that there's no one there to help you if something goes wrong. On rivers things do go wrong sometimes, hopefully those things that go wrong are minor and things that you can deal with on the spot, but it always helps to have other people around. The minimum group size on a river is 2, 3 paddlers is much better and groups 3 to 7, 8, 9 are usually pretty comfortable and provide a lot of support for paddlers in the group as well as providing enough experience in the group hopefully. The more experience, people can help, the less it's carrying people down the river. When you are in a group it's important to stay close to each other and to stay in contact. The way to do that is to designate a lead boat, a sweep boat and everyone keep track of the boat behind them. The lead boat is the boat that goes down the rapids first. The lead paddler should know the rapids better than everybody else, should be the most experienced boater and should certainly have sense of what's coming up and be able to read the rapids well ahead so that they can stop the group if they need to, pull the group over if there's a particular hazard they need to be concerned about. The sweep boat should also be a very experienced paddler and could be somebody who's more experienced in first aid training, more trained in first aid in river rescue. Since the sweep boat will be the one coming down onto incidents as they happen. So the sweep boat would carry the first aid kit and would be able to come down onto an incident and hopefully help out and keep the group together. No one ever passes the lead boat and the sweep boat never passes the boats in front of it. In addition, each individual boater needs to keep track of the boat behind them. If you look behind you frequently and keep track of that boat, then you can pass signals from one boat to the next and make sure that every boat, if they do get in trouble it's supported by the other boats in the group and no one's out there paddling alone."