Kayaking Journal – 04/16/05 -- Weissport to Lehigh Gap

Here is the Chinese version （中文版請進）

On Saturday, April 16th, I felt that finally I became a true member of the Lehigh Valley Canoe Club: I attended my first trip on the Lehigh River, and this trip was on the club calendar. I was very proud. This trip is not one of the “Beginner Series” trips, but it is rated as Class I-II, which should be easy enough for a beginner. Chris once told me at the side of the pool that “you will not have problems” and my friend Nick commented that it would be “a good learning trip.” Therefore, at 10 am, I was at the meeting point. Sharp. The leader Jeff, who looked like a nice guy, was in his wet suit which had two man-made holes open up at the knee area in the back. Other fellow kayakers, all greeted to me, this newly joined member, and encouraged me that “you will have a lot of fun” when I told them that I was fairly new to this sport. Jeff also made sure that there would always be someone looking after me which made me even more relaxed.

The weather was nice, but just a little bit windy, plus the water was cold. I listened to Nick’s advice and put on my paddle jacket. This paddle jacket is made of waterproof material, and at the wrist and the neck area, it has very tight gaskets to ensure that no water can leak through the jacket even when the kayaker is extremely active on the water. Under the paddle jacket, I had my wet suit, which is made of mostly neoprene and partly nylon. A wet suit traps a thin layer of water when it gets wet, after the kayaker warms up that layer of water, it serves as an insulation layer to keep the person warm. This trip was indeed very interesting to me: it had enough sections of waves to get me concentrated and excited, and none of them was too long for me to survive. And when we boated on smooth sections, we just drifted through and even laid back and watched the birds fly by. I am a backpacker so I usually watch birds from above when I rest at vistas close to the summits. It gives me a brand new feeling to observe birds from a different angle – at least I do not just know the color of their backs.

The first wave got me very nervous. Before we entered that area, Nick kept reminding me to “keep paddling; never stop paddling.” This was indeed the key. If you feel that you are losing your balance and just freeze there, you are destined to tip over. But if you keep paddling, and keep your paddle in the water, you have a better chance to do something, and change your fate. Going through waves is a fascinating experience: I felt that I could never be perpendicular to the water surface, sometimes I leaned to the left; sometimes I leaned to the right; but as long as my center of gravity was leaning forward and my paddle was doing its work, I was stable, although I kept being driven up and down. I felt that I was even more stable than on pure flat water. If you ever sit in a play boat in a lake, or in a pool, you will understand what I am talking about. Because a play boat always seems to tip over in the next second, especially when you are not moving and there is a mild breeze.

I soon changed that principle to “keep paddling; keep breathing,” because I had a tendency to hold my breath when I was shocked or when I was nervous. This habit of holding breath is not a life-threatening one if I am always having my activities on a land; however, it is not the case on a river. I want to make sure that I will have enough breath if I have to go under water. Although my instructors always told me that it only takes 2-4 seconds to do a wet exit or a roll, it never hurts if I have more time to calm down and rescue myself. Rivers are crueler to a beginner, just because a beginner does not understand them. When passing waves, my fellow kayakers knew how to sneak around holes. To me, dealing with waves was already quite a mission, never mention that I could possibly have time to read the holes and get around them. As a result, I kept paddling through whatever was in front of me – bitter or sweet.

People said they worried about me, they saw me driving the boat directly into a hole. The cold water wall hit me from above my head, and swallowed my entire boat unemotionally. I blinked my eyes, kept paddling, and tried to steal some breath. I was glad that I still saw the sunlight after several harsh attacks, and I laughed. It was great. “Is the water cold?” asked Jeff. “It seems that you enjoyed it so much otherwise you would not have such a big smile.” I nodded positively.

Another ruthless thing a river does to a beginner kayaker is unexpected appearance of rocks. Advanced kayakers can observe the current changes or some other natural phenomenon to predict the locations of rocks; to me, the only way to discover a rock is to actually see it, and it is usually too late. Once a heavy wave brought me toward a rock, I opened my mouth but before I could make my scream, the rock was too close. Luckily, right at the moment, the rock principle flashed in my mind, “If you cannot avoid a rock, lean toward it instead of trying to get away from it.” The concept is straightforward: always make sure the water is hitting the bottom of your boat. Only by leaning toward the rock, one can tilt one’s boat in the way that has water hit the bottom of the boat. If you are so afraid to hit the rock and eagerly lean away from it, the force of water would turn the boat over.

After passing through so many sections of waves, here came another. “This one looks easy, should be a piece of cake,” I mumbled. As usual, because of the cold temperature, I felt the current, starting from my butt. The current flew smoothly through my whole body and reached my mind, and “SPLASH,” just like being hit by an electrical shock, I dropped my paddle. “My paddle,” I yelled helplessly. Damn, I could not believe I dropped my paddle; this is such a horrible horrible horrible mistake. What an embarrassment. Without a paddle, I could only tug myself toward the boat, and let my body move with the rhythm of the current, and wish the wave I just entered was the last one. Arlene was the first one who noticed my awkward doggy crawls, and helped me regain my paddle.

Later, all the fellow boaters smiled at me, and assured me “that was definitely not an uncommon thing.” I therefore could drag my boat up to the shore to the lunch spot with an eased mind, but another thunder hit me really hard. I found my both hands swollen to almost twice as big as usual, “this is not because of the cold.” Indeed, that was because of the paddle jacket; the gaskets at the wrist area were too tight for my body liquid to circulate till the fingers. This soon became my excuse of dropping my paddle, as you might predict. The importance of an outdoor lesson is reconfirmed that one should always check his/her gear before he/she heads out for any outdoor activity.

The last challenge of this trip was to sneak through the dam area. A dam is a man-made construction, therefore a drop created by a dam is always consistent, and usually goes across the whole river. The kind of drop generates a hole or a strainer, which sucks nearby objects in, and keeps them there forever. Fortunately, the dam we passed on that day left a narrow passage on the river right, in other words, the dam did not extend all the way to the right bank. Jeff warned us never to underestimate the danger and requested us to take that passage one by one, and at the same time he got out of his canoe and was standing on the shore holding his throw rope to give assistance if necessary. I looked back at the drop after I kayaked by and entered an eddy. The drop looked small, who could imagine that if stuck there, one can become a hamster in a cage running its wheel forever until the last breath.