Kayak skills class

[NoNo]

A summer-long class sounds fantastic! There was only one other person that already owned a kayak, and she had had it for 10 years and never felt confident using it alone. Every one else was doing a "try before you buy", trying to figure out if it was even something they'd enjoy before they put in the money. That makes more sense than my method of buy first, ask questions later

[Cataboo]

hrm. I sort of did the opposite of you guys - I decided I wanted a kayak, ordered one online and freaked out when this 16 feet long thing arrived in the driveway. Of course, I'd just started grad school and didn't have that much time to use it. But took it out and played. I just made sure to wear a life vest.

When I really started heavily kayaking - I just went out and paddled. I did have a bf to paddle with, but I quite often went on my own. We just read articles or watch you tube videos and practiced things. The first time the boat accidently flipped over, then it was time to do a wet exit - which... you know, if you're hanging upside down from your kayak in a river, getting yourself out of your boat is pretty much instinct. After a fall in each when we had to use paddlefloats to get ourselves back in, that just inspired a session of sitting around practicing falling out of and getting back in the boat. When reading up on it, it sounded like it was way faster to just swim into your boat upside down and flip yourself up with the paddle - another thing to practice.

When it was time to roll, I just went to a practice session at the local pool, watched other people do it, and then just sat in the water doing what they were doing over and over till I got a roll.

If you're on a 20-40 mile paddle, you really learn quickly what will work and what will not for your paddle stroke, if you're arming it - you definitely can't do that long of a paddle without exhausting yourself, so just going on long paddles pretty much fixed that. I did switch to a wing paddle early on, and wing paddles will pretty much reward good form and stroke and try to flip your boat if you paddle badly.

When we wanted to go up to Maine and paddle, we decided we needed way more experience in surf and waves than what we currently had - so we just took the kayaks to play in the surf and waves for a couple of days straight till we had the skills.

So... I guess I've been heavily kayaking for about 4 years in a ton of conditions, otherwise kayaking for about 8 years? I had my first skills weekend of lessons last month.

What I did find in the classes were a fair number of people who knew an awful lot about kayaking in theory because they had spent their time taking every single skills class they could... but in practice of going out and actually paddling and practicing what they've learned in conditions, they weren't at all confident because they hadn't tried it and didn't have the experience to back up the knowledge. So... in addition to taking the courses, make sure to use the skills... It's one thing to wet exit, roll or self rescue in flat water or in a swimming pool. It's a completely different thing to do it in choppy water or waves. So practice doing things in the latter, because quite often people haven't actually practiced doing rescues in anything other than flat water.

But be safe, carry all the gear, signaling equipment, etc. If you're not comfortable going somewhere on your own, don't go by yourself. While I'm pretty confident in my ability to handle most conditions, rescue myself, and always have a cell phone and marine radio, laser pointer (flares are kinda useless) and such with me... I'm much less likely to go out in open water by myself. And I will stay much closer to shore by myself on open water.

I know in the DC area there's a great group of paddlers - various paddlers meet in various locations to paddle for a few hours after work together and then go get dinner, so every evening it's possible to join one of those groups. There's at least 2 meetup.com kayaking groups that are very active down here. If there's anything like that around you, that's a great way to hang out with more experienced paddlers and learn.