Freesteel Blog » Random events leading up to a purchase of a sea kayak

Random events leading up to a purchase of a sea kayak

Thursday, May 24th, 2012 at 7:29 am Written by:

Becka has joined us to the Liverpool Canoe Club because she wants us to make more use of these torture machines where you paddle with your ever tired arms all day and never take a break to go diving or anything more fun like that.

Apart from the threatened mono-activity, the club is completely friendly and lent us the boats to take on their weekend trip to Anglesey.

But first there was a small matter of a rescue practice day at Plas y Brenan (not Plas Menai) with the North Wales Cave Rescue Organization.

Learning how to rig hauling ropes so you can pull them past knots

And how to get packaged up in the stretcher.

The funny thing is, the group leader said, is that once the casualty is in there, the psychology of the rescue team changes and they no longer see it as a person any more, it’s just an object to be carried. You have to learn to give it respect, and not just step over its face carelessly or leave it propped up on a rock for an hour and ignored while you mess with the ropes.

This was a lot more pleasant than that underground practice we did earlier. It made it seem that a rescue might be all right and not something you want to avoid at all costs.

If we had time we should have tried manoeuvring that stretcher through a sequence of partly open passenger car door windows whilst simulating a broken knee by packing a sock full of spiky hawthorn branches around the victim’s leg so that they screamed every time someone jigged it.

Then it was off to Anglesey again.

The hoards went out of Trearddur bay on Sunday and south as far as Rhoscolyn Head in flat calm conditions. Had a bit of a domestic with Becka as she was unwilling to carry on to Rhoscolyn Beacons with a breakaway group because it was “too hard for us”, in spite of the fact that we were there exactly two weeks ago in exactly the same sea and tidal conditions (confirmed by the presence of a dive boat on Main-y-Sais) as part of a far longer sea paddle with less experienced kayakers and on our loaded sit-on-top kayaks which she has been dissing so much for the past few weeks as being too slow and cumbersome in relation to the proper sea kayaks we now happened to be in.

Luckily we found someone random to help practice rescues and rolls closer in to the bay, which cheered us up a lot before the drive home.

After an angry not-used-to-this-crap stuck-in-traffic morning drive to Runcorn, we are now the proud owner of an ex-demo Scorpio LV sea kayak (as tested on the muddy canal just outside the shop).

The garage has experienced a serious rearrangement to make way for it as leaving it on the stairs is not a permanent solution.

1 Comment

  • 1. Freesteel&hellip replies at 2nd August 2012, 10:16 pm :

    […] Then there was testing out our rescue stretcher, which is not quite of the quality of the one they put me into at the North Wales Cave Rescue Organization practice […]

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