How to Exit a Flipped Boat when Whitewater Canoeing

Video Transcript

"When things go wrong in the river, you flip in a canoe, when you can’t roll up its time to exit the boat. Exiting the boat in the river requires a couple of things, the first thing is, that its important to do is to tuck, you want to tuck forward so that you’re protecting your face and the front of your torso because the back of your head has a helmet hopefully and the back of your back has a life jacket, and the life jacket and the helmet are going to give you some pretty good protection from things on the bottom, so that tucking forward is a great thing to do, to really protect yourself and keep yourself from getting banged up as you’re exiting the boat. So the next thing to be concerned about is your toe blocks, you want to make sure that your toe blocks, which allow your feet to push your legs forward into the outfitting are loose enough or have some way for your feet to slide off them when you need to exit the boat. Uh, you want to make sure also, when you’re uh, able to, when you’re sliding backwards into the seat that your thigh straps will easily slide off your legs, so that if I just slide backwards a little bit in this seat, you can see that my legs are free from the boat and now I’m going to fall right out of the boat, there’s no way for me to stay in the boat, and that’s the ideal, of course we talked about before in the outfitting section, you want to make sure that any loose ropes, anything inside your boat is tied down and is secure so that it’s not going to snag your feet or your legs on the way out of the boat. Once you are out of the boat, you want to get on your back, float on your back, your feet up and pointed downstream, and you want to focus on getting upstream of your boat, uh, if you’re downstream of your boat, you risk getting caught between your boat and a rock and that’s a bad place to be with a boat full of water that could weigh a ton or more, and uh, you know a rock that’s not going to move and it’s going to basically turn you into a rock sandwich. So, um, also hold onto your paddle and any other gear that you can and try to aggressively swim yourself over to shore. We’ll talk about that in the next segment and give you a little demonstration of swimming in whitewater with gear and how important self-rescue and aggressive self-rescue can be. "