Your Sea Kayaking Vacation: A Few Safety Tips

One of the surprises of a winter getaway sea kayaking vacation to tropical or otherwise distant waters is now that you're far from home, your database of timetables and paddling distances doesn't apply to where you're vacation. Come the hour or two before dusk, you're in somewhat of a pickle. Perhaps you don't know how brief dusk is on those new waters, not unusual for paddlers traveling for the first time in latitudes further south.

In more southern waters such as Florida, sunsets happen fast: a faint wink on the horizon and now the sea is DARK. Other areas, such as in Alaska, Seattle, and Cape Cod, the tides may run harder than you expected, or in directions counter to your return.

Any of the above can keep a vacationing paddler out after dark. Even the uniqueness your vacation place can hold us out after dark: intrigued by the locale, you walk the shoreline a little further, snorkel the reef a little longer, poke around in shoreside town an hour more.

Regardless of why you get caught out after dark while sea kayaking, here are some basic guidelines on what to anticipate if you're caught out on the water after dark.

In remote areas, the problems boil down to fear, anxiety, and disorientation, even if the possibility of getting run down by a powerboat is unlikely.

The fear of not being able to see arrives first: of not being able to anticipate the effect of passing swell or breaking waves; of not being able to see land; of not being able to track paddling companions; of not being able to gauge speed, distance, or forward progress.

Normal input about where you are on the water - your proprioception of whether you are drifting or rocking, tipping or leaning, moving forward, sideways, or back - no longer comes by way of vision.

At night in isolated waters, physical reactions tend to take over. Straining for visual references on which to focus, you discover your eyes do not help. You experience greater fear.

Flipping the headlamp on to glance at the chart, whether for reassurance or simply to cease peering ahead into darkness, you discover that what little night vision you had, you've lost. The darkness grows deeper.

Not to get too dramatic, but the above is, typically, when loss of balance, dizziness, even vertigo kick in. Straining for a reference point to fix your eyes upon, you feel suspended in air, without foundation.

This is quite dangerous. You will have lost the ability to think straight, to assess your location and your situation.


So before you take that sea kayaking vacation, paddle at night a few times in your homewaters first, to checking whether you are prone to nighttime vertigo in a kayak, the loss of balance, the fear that begins in the pit of the stomach and soon spreads to your awareness and better judgment.