Thanks for posting this, Derek! We can all be glad that it ended well (more or less) and we can learn from the experience – but man, what a scare! I’m so glad you’re all okay.
Just yesterday I was thinking that maybe I should write a post or make a video about cold weather packrafting, and you’ve spurred me into action. For now, here’s a related cautionary tale:
When I was younger and more foolish than I am now, hanging out by the ocean with some friends on a cold winter’s night, I accepted a challenge to swim to some nearby pilings and back. I was a strong swimmer, having completed life saving courses at my local pool, and I had gone swimming in some pretty cold water before, so I thought it would be easy. I made it to the pilings just fine, slapped one with my hand and turned for shore. About halfway back I was astounded at how quickly my body began to shut down. I had been fine for a minute or so, and after that my brain was still functioning fine (other than getting myself into the situation in the first place), but beginning in my hands and feet my muscles quickly weakened to the point where they barely moved. In a matter of seconds the weakness progressed into my larger muscles as the blood fled from them towards my core, and for the last bit of swimming I was in panic mode, only able to make clumsy, inefficient strokes. Fortunately I reached shore before my limbs ceased to function entirely, but if shore had been much farther away I think I would have been unable to keep my head above water. I shudder to think of the horrible death that would have brought, being fully conscious yet so paralyzed that I’d be unable to stop myself from drowning.
What I learned from this experience is that you can’t rely on endurance or fine motor skills to get you out of a cold water situation. If someone had thrown me a rope my hands would have been too weak to hold on to it, and my fingers would have been unable to tie it around my body. In a packrafting situation, if I hadn’t been wearing my PFD I wouldn’t have been able to unfasten it from the packraft or climb into a boat or anything like that.
Sometimes you’ll see me post pictures or videos of me paddling without a visible PFD, and I should really stop doing that, because what you can’t see is that I’m paddling in conditions where I’m 100% confident I can swim to shore if something goes wrong. Anytime I’m in moving water or the water is too cold to be comfortably submerged in, I’m wearing my drysuit and/or staying so close to shore that I can simply stand up if something goes wrong. Now my early New Year’s resolution is to never again post pictures of someone packrafting without a PFD.
I have more thoughts on this topic, but this is already turning into a long post, so I’ll save the rest for the blog.
Thanks again for posting, Derek. I know your Voyageur was probably over-pressurized when it failed, but I’d still be interested to know exactly where the failure occurred in case there’s a design change that could reduce the risk of something like this happening again. Feel free to email me directly, if you like. Thanks!