Ken wrote:

I too am a large person and worried about an open water re-entry. I'm very
interested in your experience.


I assume that by "large", you mean that you have a lot of body fat.
Assuming that's the case, you need to use the buoyancy that it creates
to your advantage. The biggest problem I see when people are having
trouble with self rescues is that they try to come straight out of the
water vertically, which simply doesn't work. The heavier you are, the
more weight you have to try to lift and the more difficult it is to haul
yourself up. Stirrups and similar gimmicks encourage this poor
technique. They're also a great way to break a paddle and create an
entanglement hazard.

The key to self rescue is to float yourself to the surface face down
(lying in the water on your belly) with your legs on the surface, then
slide yourself up and across the aft deck of your boat. Perhaps a
better way to look at it is that you're pushing the boat down and
pulling it under you. This uses your natural buoyancy to keep you on the
surface and your weight to push the boat down. A boat with a low aft
deck really helps, though most boats sized for larger people tend to
have high decks, which compounds the problems of re-entry. One thing
that can help with a high decked boat is to flood the cockpit to get the
boat lower in the water. I'm not fond of this technique, since it
requires more pumping out afterward, but it's preferable to not being
able to re-enter the boat.

--
Regards

Brian