How To Use A Swim Line To Self Rescue A Canoe

Description

Securely attaching a throw line to the stern of your canoe has the advantage of being used as a swim line should you capsize. This cane allow you to self rescue by getting yourself to the bank and holding or better still, retrieving your boat.

While training on the Tryweryn, I needed to use my swimline after a somewhat silly capsize... You can see the rest of what happened in the video :-)

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Tags: swimline,canoe,canoeing,self rescue,white water,white water saftey,white water safety and rescue,River Tryweryn,capsize,swim,swimming,rescue,recovery,paddle,paddling,rope

Video Transcription

we've been training on a short section of river for most of the day but we hadn't yet run this upper section ray Goodwin and I were a little bit concerned about the water flowing river left onto the rocks for some of our group so he thought river ice was probably the better option we could just drop down over the drop gently and then scoop back into the main flow and it all was going well until now that hadn't been my plan obviously but my job now was to quickly make my way to the back of the boat and grab my swim line which is a throw bag carabiner to the back of my boat and once freed I'd make a big effort to get to the bank as quickly as possible this water was moving quite quickly and I was concerned my boat was about to go over another set of Rapids and rocks I couldn't hold the boat on my feet the rocks were slippery but getting it around the tree gave me a friction and allowed me to lean back and stabilize myself at the same time ray Goodwin came down to join in you'll see him just at the top of the bank in a second through the drop of water on my GoPro perfect line is a rock so you either have to go really really really tight right or go a bit too far left so left it was but first I had to sort my boat and it was held just above this so I needed one of my team to get down to my boat turn it over and then we get it back up to me Cheers yeah yeah I'm a firm believer in getting back on the horse as soon as you can after you've fallen off it I'd get a chance to run the whole section again a bit later on but for now I was going to finish the short section I had left to do

after me being used as a crash-test dummy the first run down the other guys were going to go left of the rocks in the center but it did require coming down pretty central over the weir to miss the rocks on the left and spoons does a good job here next up was ad and he allows the water above the weir to take him quite a long way left find out what happened next in the linked video