Christopher Cunningham - Sea Kayakers More Deep Trouble

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I am especially grateful to all of those kayakers whose mishaps brought them first to Sea Kayaker magazine and then again to these pages. It is as easy for them as it is for us to look back and see what they could have done differently to avoid the trouble they found themselves in. These stories arent news reports. Most come from the people who suffered the consequences of their mistakes, yet they still have the compassion for the rest of us to share their stories as cautionary tales for the benefit of other kayakers. Like you and me, they didnt intend or expect to come to grief. While it is easy to avoid shortcomings in equipment or lapses in judgment, it is not so easy to escape being human. We all make mistakes.

Thanks to Molly Mulhern of International Marine for patience and persistence through the years between her suggesting we do this book and my delivering it to her. A special thanks also goes to Kat Wertzler, the assistant editor at Sea Kayaker. She was instrumental in gathering and formatting materials for the book and keeping track of all of the contributors. Without her considerable skills and cheerful can-do attitude, this book would not have happened.

Christopher Cunningham

F ollowing the publication of Deep Trouble in 1997 I heard from many kayakers who had read the book and said it put them on a path to safer paddling practices. Several of those who found the book valuable bought five or six copies at a time and handed them out to friends and acquaintances who were just getting into kayaking. Deep Trouble also had a profound effect on my own approach to kayaking. I was familiar with all of the stories in the book, having read them as articles in Sea Kayaker, and I took to heart much of the advice offered in the Lessons Learned. I credit those articles with many of the improvements I made to my skills and additional gear I now carry. Individually, those twenty-two stories put my focus on technique and equipment, but taken collectively in Deep Trouble, they revealed something more to me: insight into human nature. In More Deep Trouble we present twenty-nine more stories of incidents that have occurred since 1997.

When reading these stories, please keep in mind that they reflect the technology that was available at the time they were written. Electronic devices evolve rapidly, adding new capabilities and becoming more readily available with each passing year. In the years encompassed by Deep Trouble, handheld VHF radios went from being bulky, heavy, expensive, and easily damaged to now being compact enough to fit in a PFD pocket, submersible, and costing less than an average paddle. Satellite-linked distress-signal and messaging devices are also now practical and affordable. GPS, of course, has transformed navigation. While modern electronics have vastly improved our ability to communicate and convey information, the kayaking skills we acquire through education and practice remain central to paddling safely and the responsibility of every paddler.

Lapses in safe practices, shortcomings in equipment, and gaps in knowledge are often easily corrected. Its not as easy to escape being human. It may be natural for us to distance ourselves from those whove suffered misfortune. Thats particularly easy to do when the kayakers in these stories have skills and training that fall short of our own. The last chapter in this book, however, comes to us from one of the strongest, most capable kayakers I know. Even the best of us can make mistakes that will seem, in retrospect, painfully evident and avoidable. Ive added one of my own fiascos also to that last chapter. Recognizing my own lapses in judgment makes it much easier for me to be sympathetic to the kayakersno matter what their abilitieswhose mishaps appear in these pages and in