The Incident Revisited

The report on the Noorderhaaks incident is now available in English.
"Read and Shudder!"

In the meantime I had an enjoyable "Peddelpraat Sea Camp" first week early August. At which the Den Helder KNRM (Royal Netherlands Lifeboat Institution, the guys that came out to our rescue) gave a Sunday evening presentation on hypothermia and the use of flares.

Then before we knew it, we were invited to be on their Wednesday evening training session at which six of us practiced with the Lifeboat crew on how to get paddlers in/out their kayaks on-board. Watched by the forty of us from the dock.

For the lifeboat crew it is standard practice to get 'swimmers' on board, but a person in a sea kayak poses some challenges as you might also get a glimpse of from our incident report. For us how to deal with hydro-jets...

All this (and more) because of the incident on 13 June. It took quite a bit of time to get the (English) report out and now even more work to be done to add safety stuff to our sea kayak syllabuses? New chapters!

More to be said? Better let you read the Incident Report first!

I'm swimming into deep water
Would you help me one more time?
I'm tryin' all my best to keep live goin'

I'm swimming into deep water
Would you help me one more time?
I'm drowning but I'd like to stay around
'round for awhile

(Swimming into deep water - Don Rosenbaum)