I heart mondays

Mondays, for all of their sucktasticness have a few redeeming qualities. The first of which is the star trek enterprise marathon. Yeah, I'm still a geek. The second of which is that heroes is on, and heroes rocks. The third of course is that its almost tuesday, and the shield is on on tuesday, and the shield is the most rocktastic show ever created.

Paddled again this weekend. I guess I'm getting pretty close to the point where I'll be ready to work as a guide.

Kayaks have a tendency to flip over. They do it pretty often. A skilled paddler can turn one over with no problem in the heat of some nasty rapids. I'm a less-than-skilled paddler. I'm good enough to paddle a rapid, and good enough to nail my roll every once in a while, but not every time. The biggest fear that I ever hear anyone talk about is "oh my god, what do you do if you flip over?". What indeed. There are 3 options, stay in the boat and flip it over, get out of the boat and swim to shore dragging your now filled with water, 3000lb boat behind you, or stay in the boat and drown. Clearly there are only 2 feasable options.

The fact is that you have about 30 seconds, give or take, to get your boat sitting right side up before you bail. That's a lot of time, but not enough when you're upside down and panicking.

So, I says to myself, self? Why is there no device that would allow a kayaker to breath safely when their kayak flips over? Honestly, you're basically sitting inside a sealed air tank, and you're only about 2 feet removed from the surface. I wonder if kayakers are just too macho to use such a device, or if noone has invented one yet? I think I'm going to work on creating a hose that can slip down through your spray skirt into your boat(where there is fresh air), with a mouthpiece on the end similar to a snorkle but closable so water doesn't pour in. Using this device, a kayaker would be able to try their roll once or twice and if they fail, they could pop their air hose, take a couple breaths and give it another shot, greatly lengthening the amount of time that you can remain underwater safely. It would be a good beginner thing to help ease the tension of being upside down and out of air and only having a moderatly sucessful roll.