Capsized: Learning From a Crisis

Something to hold onto

If you had asked me a month ago what I would do during a potentially disastrous boating accident, I would have probably said: “Panic. Definitely panic.” Well, it turns out I’m wrong.

During a weekend with friends on the Connecticut coast, I made a series of mistakes that left me in a small, tipsy kayak, separated from my kayaking partners, trying to paddle home while fighting rising winds and waves with whitecaps. That’s when I sagged sideways into a wave and capsized. Out of the boat, I began bobbing up and down 100 or 200 yards out from an inlet. My life jacket – an old model powered by compressed air – failed to inflate. So I grabbed onto the kayak with one hand, casting about for what to do with the other. My flip flops floated away as I grabbed my orange baseball cap out of the water (easier to spot me from a distance). I also took hold of the paddle, which was just beginning to drift away.

That’s when things could have gotten really bad.