"riverman" wrote in message ...
Hey Wilko;
Feedback thoughts interejected. Of course, they range between '20-20
hindsight', meaning things you would have known to do IF you had known
beforehand how the day was going to turn out, and '20-20 foresight', meaning
things you should probably have done beforehand, or differently. I'll label
them HS and FS. The FS's are the important ones.

Hey Myron,

My own post has been eaten by the Freeler newsserver, and I only saw
Chris Webster's reply to it untill I decided to have a look at RBP
from Groups.google.com. Hence the delayed reply.

We decided to take things slowly, and since Cornelis was the only one
who had ever paddled this creek before (a dozen or so times), and
because it had a portage where several Czech paddlers had already died,
I agreed.(*)

HS: Normally, the TL is a combination of the person with the most experience
AND the most experience on that river. Did you ever discuss with Cornelius
if he was comfortable leading the lines at this level?

We did talk about it at the beginning, when he more or less took
charge without me objecting much, because of his dozen or so trips
worth of experience on that river. It wasn't untill later that I
realized this wasn't much help, and not the smartest approach at this
water level. Good lesson for next time though. I usually do lead the
trips I'm on.

We went from eddy to eddy, Cornelis leading, me and klara following. At
first the waves were pretty big, but there were relatively few holes,
and despite the boils and swirling eddies, it wasn't very difficult (to
Klara and me).

Then the rapids became longer and steeper, and I could see Cornelis
picking some lines that made me cringe. I deliberately picked the
easiest line, and Klara followed me without a problem.

FS! Whenever I find that the TL is choosing lines that are not what I would
choose in their situation, I always find the opportunity to ask them how its
going. At this point, you should have had red lights going on in the back of
your brain indicating that maybe all was not well with Cornelius.

Yeah, they did go off, and I made a remark about his lines. He
indicated it was okay, he was just getting used to it. I didn't see
much wrong with that explanation, having paddled a lot more difficult
stuff with him before. Still, a good lesson for the next trip.

As we got closer to the "Czech rock" rapid, Cornelis took the careful
approach and landed us on river left. We portaged around the badly
undercut rock (with a big red cross on top of it), and put in again.

FS: and here was a perfect opportunity to check in with him. Since the river
did not have many eddys, you missed out on much river conversation, so you
should have specifically been looking for an opportunity to converse to
present itself.

We already exchanged some of that in eddies, but nothing he gave as
explanation made me worry about him being in over his head there. Not
an excuse, but I also think in retrospect that him swimming there was
not because of his paddling skills lacking but mostly because of his
fear...

Now I knew something was wrong and I accelerated towards him. As I got
closer, I saw his head next to the boat. I hoped he was still in, but
alas, he had bailed out. What also bothered me was that I didn't see his
helmet!

As I got closer I noticed that his Prijon helmet had completely lost the
outer shell, revealing only the black foam liner underneath still
strapped to Cornelis' head. Oops! (**)

BIG FS! From your description, I would have been instantly suspect of a head
injury. Someone who just came through a big breaking wave, came out of their
boat and came up with a shattered helmet... from this moment on, I think
your top priority should have been to rescue him and assess if he had any
head injuries. That would have dictated your next actions.

Little clarification: The helmet wasn't shattered. The only thing that
had happened is that the outside plastic layer had come off, being
attached to the (hard foam with minicell liner) inside to which the
straps and such are attached. Since the design is pretty bad (I had a
very similar design helmet from the same brand: Prijon), I had told
him several times to get a new one.

He responded promptly to my questions and instructions during our trip
to shore, and as I got him to shore, he stepped on shore without
swaying or staggering, and his words din't come out garbled. As for
medical attention: Klara has had six years of medical school (one more
before she's a doctor), she knows what to do. My need to rush after
the boat also had to do with the difficulties we had had with the only
portage, the unknown to me rest of the river and the high speed of the
flow. I (wrongly) assumed that following the river on shore would be
nearly impossible and I didn't want to have to go through some mean
rapids with a boat on a cowtail.

I turned my boat and offered him the stern, as he grabbed it, he let go
of his boat (***).

That seems fine to me. Gear is cheap.

But it would have been *really* easy for me to get it also to shore
right there and then... Besides, not having his car key, phone with
all his contacts, credit cards, money and other stuff on his body, but
instead in his boat made that lost boat suddenly very important and a
lot less easy to replace. :-(

I got him to shore, asked him if he was okay, and
told him that I would get his boat before the Lake at Bled! Then I
looked upstream to see Klara and quickly went after his boat, signalling
"Stop! Stop! Stop!" to Klara, hoping that she wouldn't follow me.(****)

Sorry, friend, but this was a major error. Assuming the potential of head
injury, you should never leave him unattended. Even without the potential of
injury, you should have *ensured* that Klara had stopped so that your party
did not get separated. (I say 'your', since the HB is now out of service and
you're the next most experienced.) Then, you should have agreed upon a plan:
even as quickly as shouting to Klara "I'm going after the boat, you and
Cornelius make your way down to me!" It seems like, from this moment on, the
three of you had no idea what each one was doing.

Correct. Although I didn't (and still don't) see the head injury
aspect that heavily, but then again, I was there and I had his
response to go on.

As I finally got to shore, I emptied Cornelis's boat, and I noticed that
he had a dry bag in the back of his boat. Thinking it would only contain
his wallet, I took it out and clicked it around my PFD for safekeeping.
I wondered about the difficulty of moving around on shore, thought about
how he had responded when I last saw him, and then decided to get his
boat to the nearest road, considering from his response that our day of
paddling was over. (*******)

I don't understand this. He is upriver, she is upriver with him (hopefully,
if she got your signal), and you decide to leave and go somewhere else? I
would think the priority, now that you have stopped the situation from
deteriorating (*), would be to regroup.

I was pretty confident that she had seen my signal, being that close
behind me, but stopping a little bit longer could have solved that
uncertainty for sure.

The very steep shore combined with the high water looked like it was
very difficult to move along the river, I knew from the shuttle that
there were asphalt roads on both sides of the river, at varying height
above the water.
Considering the problems we had had portaging, I considered moving
about 150 metres up to the road to be a lot easier than moving along
the river for maybe one or two kilometres.

(*) I look at river emergency situations like this: first, you stop the
situation from deteriorating. Then you regroup and assess the damage, and
last, you start the recovery. You do this first for health-related issues,
then you do it again for materials-related issues.

When the situation was that he was swimming and might have had a head
injury, his boat was going downstream, Klara was upstream and you were
chasing him down a large wave train, your first priority would have been to
stop the health situation from deteriorating by getting to HIM, and getting
him out of harm's way. Once you assessed that he was not suffering an injury
(assess damage), tell Klara where you are going (regroup, make a plan) then
go after the boat. Once you got to the boat and gear (stop deterioration of
material goods), you needed to assess what was lost or needed, and regroup.
It feels to me at this point that you started off a solo recovery journey to
get off river without letting your comrades know what was going on.

I don't think there was much (if any) risk of a head injury (despite
the description of the de-capped helmet giving off a different
impression :-)), but I sure could have lessened the consequences of
the rest of the actions considerably by regrouping.

I quickly picked up some white rocks and branches and created an arrow
pointing up the slope, before grabbing Cornelis' kayak (********) and
starting my climb up the hill. That was not easy, and I slipped and fell
a couple of times before making it up to the road maybe 150 metres
higher. All the time I was thinking about what I would do if I was Klara
and Cornelis.

Ahh, there it is. You were wondering what you would do if you were them, and
they were wondering what you would do if they were you....no one knew what
anyone else was doing. Best bet would have been to wait for them, or work
your way back upstream on foot to meet them coming down.

My biggest problem was the apparent inaccesibility of the shore there.
Looks like Cornelis found that to be a lot less impeding... In another
geographical situation I would probably have acted like you suggested,
staying close to shore.

If walking upstream was impossible, then I would have gone up the cliff and
looked along the clifftop for the first place they would have emerged,
assuming that they also would have found the shore impassible. If I never
found them, and daylight was still strong, I would have gone back down to
the river and looked for them. If daylight was fading, then I would have
started 'rescue' procedures, because now plan A and plan B, which were
tacitly agreed upon, had failed and I would have suspected that they were
lost, or trapped onriver.

We were on the river roughly from 16:00 hrous onwards, finally
reaching my car at the put in just before dark.

As long as all parties stay along the shoreline, then they can find each
other. If anyone goes inland, its pretty much guaranteed that every person
is on a self-rescue mission, with an outside hope that they will meet up
somewhere. And any group, especially one dealing with an incident, is
stronger as a group.

Agreed.

Wilko

http://wilko.webzone.ru