Here’s another excerpt from the Kayak Chronicles. This one focuses on the most famous of all kayak skills: the roll. -Woody
(photo courtesy of The Mountaineers)
“Ok,” Bob said. “Remember what I told you: feel for the surface with your blade, sweep the paddle, snap your hip and keep the bowling ball in the water.”
Bob was standing behind me in about three feet of water, while I sat in a small, plastic whitewater kayak, holding a paddle in both my hands and trying to remember all of the advice he’d given me.
“Feel the surface. Sweep the blade. Snap the bowling ball,” I replied.
“Right!” Bob sounded confident and I was hoping some of it would rub off on me.
I turned sideways, holding the paddle along the edge of the kayak, took three deep breaths and held the final one as as I dunked my whole body under the water.
Being upside down underwater is a very disorienting sensation. Directions like “up” and “down” become irrelevant you just want to get to the surface. Currently I was suspended underneath it, and now the challenge was to get myself back above it without getting out of the kayak. I was, in fact, attempting to roll my kayak.
Rolling a kayak is the gold standard of kayak skills and it was my goal to roll a kayak by the end of my first summer of guiding. Whenever I told someone I was a sea kayak guide, they would ask, “Can you roll?” I would usually say something like, “Well, the roll really isn’t necessary in every situation. There are other means of self-rescue. You’ve got paddle floats and the eskimo rescue…” At some point, the listener would nod, their facial expression saying, “This dude doesn’t know what he’s doing,” and then they’d ask me about orcas.
Bob was another guide who had a lot of experience whitewater kayaking. Bob had what is known as a “bomb-proof roll,” which I guess meant that you could throw a bomb at him and he could still roll his kayak (though I would think in such a situation being able to paddle really fast would be more useful than rolling, but I digress.)
There was a small pond on the property where we camped out for the summer. We affectionately referred to our little plot of land as Tortilla Flats, a reference to the Steinbeck book in which a group of ne’er-do-wells make their way through a mostly indifferent world via acts of kindness, minimal skill and dumb luck. This pretty much summed up my experience so far as a sea kayak guide. I was hired because of my knowledge of natural history, and knew next to nothing about kayaking. Thankfully, the large, double kayaks used by the clients were very stable and rarely did we worry about them capsizing. On the other hand, I had already capsized once while paddling a single kayak during a day trip, and I did not want that to happen again. When the capsize occurred, I had only been guiding for a week or so, and had no clue how to roll the kayak. I could’ve performed a self-rescue, but opted instead to call for help from one of the other guides. I was co-leading the trip with Bob and Randy (another guide), and Bob was able to assist me in getting back in my kayak.
Since then, I had begun leading my own trips and I was paddling with as many as eight other clients, all of them in Uber-stable double kayaks and me in a single. Those bigger boats just cruise over swells, but the smaller singles can flip like a rubber ducky in a bathtub, if not handled correctly. Not wanting a repeat capsize – I was determined to learn how to roll.
Which is how I found myself underwater, hanging upside down staring at the muddy bottom of the little pond at Tortilla Flats.
I tried to remain calm as I pushed my hands skyward, and I could feel the warm air above the water’s surface. I counted to three and then yanked the paddle around the side of the kayak while simultaneously pulling down on blade. The combined forces caused the kayak to heal over and my body began to leave the water. I could feel air on my arms and then my neck and then my mouth was free and I was breathing!
“BLEH! YAK! YELP!”
Instantaneously, the kayak and I spun back around throwing me unceremoniously into the water again, this time with a lot less air in my lungs.
“AARRRGGHHH!!!” Went through my mind.
I tried to calm myself again, reset my position in the kayak and attempt another roll, but after about ten seconds my lungs were screaming for oxygen, and I popped out of the kayak.
“You were so close!” Bob said, smiling at me. He was standing up to his waist in the water, his broad, bare chest still white while his forearms were darkened from a summer working on the water. A few of us had the day off, and Bob had agreed to help me learn how to roll. Another guide, Dani, was sunbathing across the way on a patch of grass. I could see Bob’s eyes wander her direction as he gave me feedback on my roll.
“Really?” I said exasperated. “It didn’t feel like it.”
“Yeah, you’re doing great. You just have to remember to keep the bowling ball in the water,” he said, as he steadied the kayak so I could climb back in for another round of self-inflicted water-boarding.
Right – the bowling ball.
For anyone learning how to roll a kayak, the single hardest thing to do is keep your head in the water until the very end. Everything comes out of the water before your head – your hips, your arms, your shoulders. Your head is the last thing to leave the water. For pedagogical purposes that were beyond me, Bob referred to the head as “the bowling ball,” maybe because, like a bowling ball, the head is a heavy object and if you try to lift it out of the water before the rest of your body, its weight will pull you back in. This is precisely what was happening to me. Logically, I understood the need to keep my head in the water. The challenge, of course, is that my body REALLY wanted to take a breath of air, and although my rational brain may have understood the physics of the situation, my reptilian brain was screaming for oxygen and was taking over as soon as it got a chance.
This issue is common for most people learning a new skill, particularly one that involves dealing with frightening situations. In skiing, it’s facing down the slope. Most new skiers are scared of facing down the slope because they’re worried that they’ll lose control. However, when they face away from the slope, the skis’ edges no longer grip the snow and they end up shooting out of control across the hillside, producing the exact outcome they were trying to avoid. In essence, you have to do the thing that your body doesn’t want you to do. For some people, these things come naturally. Randy, one of the other guides, was able to roll on his first attempt. His body didn’t seem to care about the whole “need-for-oxygen-thing.” But for most of us, learning these counter-intuitive skills requires training and practice, and it doesn’t feel good at all the first few times you do it. It requires patience and repetition so that your body learns to trust a new behavior. Thankfully, Bob had lots of patience. I, however, was beginning to lose mine.
I tried the roll again and this time I just flailed mercilessly before popping out of the kayak.
I stood up slowly, clumps of mud in my hair from landing on the bottom of the pond.
Bob laughed and pointed at my head, “That’s a good look for you!”
“Yeah, some people pay a lot of money for this kind of treatment at a spa,” I said, bending down to get a handful of water and clean out the gunk out of my hair.
Feeling dejected, I said “I think I might be done.”
“Come on. You can do it,” Bob put a hand on my shoulder and continued. “You’re working the next two weeks straight. When else are you going to practice your roll?”
He had a point. This was a pretty ideal situation and I wanted to take advantage of it. So I nodded and said, “All right. Let’s do this.”
“That’s the spirit!”
And with Bob’s encouragement and the help of his strong arms, I climbed back into the kayak.
I fastened the spray skirt to the coaming, and turned around to check with Bob whose attention had shifted to Dani and her swimsuit.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Oh you bet I am,” Bob replied.
I held the paddle alongside the kayak, took three deep breaths and dunked.
And then my mind went blank. I didn’t think about feeling the surface, I didn’t think about my hip snap. I only had one thought – keep the bowling ball in the water.
My arms spun the blade across the water’s surface, I pulled my hip up to my side and my body began to rotate. I let my neck go limp as I envisioned a hairy bowling ball sitting in a puddle and the next thing I knew my whole body was whipping out of the water.
“YEAH!” I heard Bob yell.
And then a split second later my face was back in the water.
I had rolled the kayak, all right. I had rolled it so well that I rolled it right over onto the other side. Instead of doing a 180, I did a 360 and ended up back where I started.
Thrilled but completely exhausted, I climbed out of the kayak.
“That was great!” Bob gave me a big hug.
“Wow,” I said. “When you do it right, it’s actually pretty easy.”
“It’s all about form, not strength,” Bob said. “Ready to do it again?”
I nodded and climbed back in the kayak. I spent another hour flipping and flopping in the water. By the time I was done I felt pretty comfortable rolling on my right side – my “on-side” roll, as Bob called it.
“Now you’ve got to work on your ‘off-side’ roll,” Bob said.
“That will have to wait for another day,” I said. “I’m ready for dinner. Beers are on me.”
“Oh yeah,” Bob replied, grabbing one end of the kayak as I grabbed the other. “Sounds great.” And then looking back across the pond to Dani, he added, “Mind if I invite someone?”