Sheet 03 · Practice
What eleven Tuesday rescue evenings in the harbour taught us
We spent eleven Tuesday evenings between September and December deliberately falling out of kayaks in a corner of the harbour, and the results rearranged what we think is worth practising.
Part 01
Why we moved practice out of the pool
For three winters we did our rescue practice in a borrowed pool, in warm water, in swimming shorts, and everyone got quite good at it. The first time somebody actually capsized on a cold trip, in April 2023 in eight degree water with a light chop, almost none of it appeared. The swimmer could not get their hands to work the deck lines, the rescuer took nearly a minute to come alongside because the boats kept blowing apart, and the emptying of the swamped boat, which takes twelve seconds in a pool, took well over a minute with a wave slapping between the hulls.
Nothing that happened was dangerous, because it was close to shore and everybody was dressed properly, but it was a clear enough lesson that we moved the whole thing outdoors. Since the autumn of 2024 practice happens in a corner of the harbour behind the breakwater, in whatever the evening provides, in the clothing we would actually be wearing. It is less pleasant and enormously more useful. Skills that hold up at eight degrees in the dark with wet sleeves are the only ones that count.
The corner we use has a stone quay on two sides, four metres of water, a ladder, and a slipway forty metres away, which means the worst case is a cold walk. We go in pairs, never alone, and one person stays out of the water on the quay for the whole session with a throw line and the car keys. That last detail sounds trivial and is not: at the end of the second evening we were all cold enough that nobody wanted to be the one to fetch the car.
Part 02
What eleven evenings actually measured
We timed things, because otherwise the evening becomes a set of opinions. Each pair ran the same sequence: capsize, wet exit, signal, rescuer approach, empty the boat, re-entry, pump out, back under way. We wrote down the total in seconds and a one-line note on what went wrong. Over eleven evenings that produced about ninety timed runs, which is not science but is enough to see a shape.
The headline number is that the standard assisted rescue, where the rescuer lifts the bow across their deck to drain the water and then holds the boats together while the swimmer climbs back in, averaged one minute forty at the start of the autumn and one minute five by December. Most of that improvement came from two small things, not from strength. The swimmer learned to stay at the bow and push it up rather than hanging on at the cockpit, and the rescuer learned to approach bow to stern rather than side by side, which stops the boats from being blown apart before contact.
The second number is less flattering. Every run that took over two minutes had the same cause, and it was never the rescue technique. It was the swimmer being disorganised in the first fifteen seconds after the wet exit: losing the paddle, ending up on the wrong side of the boat, or trying to talk before getting breathing under control. We now spend the first ten minutes of every session on nothing but the fifteen seconds after coming up, and the long runs have mostly disappeared.
Copied off the sheet
- Assisted rescue, autumn average: 1 min 40, falling to 1 min 05 by December
- Every run over 2 minutes was lost in the first 15 seconds, not the technique
- Swimmer at the bow, pushing up, beats hanging on at the cockpit
- Rescuer approaches bow to stern so the wind cannot separate the boats
Part 03
The rescue we quietly stopped relying on
Two of us can roll a kayak reliably in flat water and have been able to for years. In the harbour, in November, in full winter clothing with a hood on, one of those two rolled successfully on eleven attempts out of twenty, and the other on fourteen. That is not a rate you plan around. The hood changes what you hear and how the head feels, the extra buoyancy of winter layers changes the hip movement, and being cold before you go in changes everything about how the first attempt goes.
We have not stopped practising it, because a roll that works even half the time saves an enormous amount of trouble. What has changed is that a roll is no longer anybody's plan. The plan is the assisted rescue, and the roll is a free attempt you get on the way there. That sounds obvious written down. It was not obvious to the person who had spent two winters being quietly proud of their roll and discovered in a cold harbour that the good version of it lived indoors.
The re-entry and roll, where the swimmer climbs back into a swamped boat and rolls it upright, came out worse. In winter clothing our best rate was about one in three, and the failures leave you in a boat full of water, tired, further from a solution than when you started. We practise it twice a winter now, as a last resort worth knowing, and nobody counts it as a skill we have.
Part 04
The evening that went wrong and what we changed
On the seventh evening, in early November, one of us got a cramp in a calf immediately after a wet exit and could not swim usefully. The water was nine degrees, the quay was fifteen metres away, and it was resolved in under a minute by a tow to the ladder, so nothing about it was serious. But three things in that minute did not work. The throw line on the quay was in a bag with the flap done up. The person nearest had their own boat between them and the swimmer. And nobody at first said clearly what was happening, because the swimmer's first two sentences were about being embarrassed rather than about the leg.
We changed the session format the following week. The throw line now sits loose in an open bag on the quay edge, the shore person stands rather than sits, and every session starts with one round of saying a problem out loud in a full sentence, which sounds ridiculous and has made a real difference. 'My left calf has cramped and I cannot kick' is a sentence that produces help. 'Sorry, hang on' is not.
The other change was to the order of the evening. We used to do the tiring things first while everyone was warm, which meant the hard rescues were always practised in the best conditions. Now we do fifteen minutes of ordinary paddling, then the difficult work in the middle when people are a little cold and a little tired, and finish with something easy. The times are worse and the numbers mean more.
Part 05
What we will run differently next winter
Eleven evenings was about right for keeping momentum and slightly too many for keeping enthusiasm, so next season we are planning eight, spread from late September to early December with a gap at the end of October when the light goes and everybody is tired of it. We will keep the timing and the one-line notes, because that log is the only reason this write-up contains numbers instead of impressions.
Two things are going on the list. The first is towing, which we have practised twice in five years and which is the answer to a tired paddler far more often than any rescue is. The second is landing a swimmer and a swamped boat onto rock in small swell, which is the situation we are most likely to meet for real on this coast and the one we have never rehearsed, because the harbour corner has a convenient ladder and rock landings are where things get broken.
What we will not do is move it back indoors, however cold it gets. The whole value of these evenings came from the gap between what we could do in a pool and what we could do in the clothes and the water we actually paddle in, and that gap only shows up outdoors.
Wind speeds are the mean we agreed on at the slipway and not a gust figure, water temperature came off the thermometer on a deck line, and the times are the ones the day actually took. Where a later trip contradicts this sheet, the newer sheet says so and this one stays as written. Corrected 8 Sept 2025.