Longtime kayak designer and paddler Corran Addison of Soul Waterman (inventor of the world’s first planning hull, in fact) recently had a brush with—and lesson learned from—an entrapment situation while riding on the back of a Personal Watercraft (PWC) while helping another kayaker get to shore at the Lachine Rapids on Canada’s Saint Lawrence River, between the Island of Montreal and the South Shore.
While the co-founder of Riot Kayaks and 1992 slalom Olympian once held the world record for highest waterfall run in a kayak (a 31-meter vertical drop into Lake Tignes in France in 1987), this incident was admittedly one of his closest calls on a river…ever. The lesson learned, he says, is “Never get complacent on a river, because it’ll bite you.”
Read Corran’s Facebook Post About His Experience Below:
“And now for an equally exciting, but less desirable story from the weekend.
I’ve been driving PWCs around the Lachines since the early 2000s. I have hundreds of hours on them out there, and I am as home in those rapids in a kayak, on a surfboard or a PWC as I am in the shower. It’s my second home.
This story is about how quickly things can go wrong.
Just after lunch on Sunday, Alicia Pedersen began to experience great pain in her right arm and shoulder, After enduring the pain for an hour or so, she decided she wanted to go back to shore to rest, but she was unable to paddle back, nor able to hang onto the sled handles to get a ski ride.
So I opted to sit on the front of the sled, facing backwards, and hold her kayak while Eric Chretien ran us back to shore. a simple enough task. To prevent myself from sliding off, I braced my feet on each side of the kayak against the grab handles, and we took off.
Halfway up the rapid upstream of big joe, we hit a funny surging wave, and the ski rolled over almost 90 degs (not driver fault, he’s a great driver, those rapids are weird). I slid off the side of the sled, but in the process my right foot slid into the handle, and as I twisted off the sled on my fall, doing almost a full 360 rotation, my foot wound into the handle, crushing it and trapping it.
Monkey (that’s Eric’s nickname), gunned the ski to stabilize it, and continued to try to gun it up the rapid, not knowing that I was dangling alongside completely under water, with my foot trapped.
It’s hard to have a real grasp of time in a situation like this, but I was teabagging alongside long enough to try several times to release my foot, twisting and rotating my body, and then to stop trying and to just relax, hoping to conserve air as long as possible until Eric would notice my predicament and stop.
In this relaxed state, I had again enough time to realize that after all my exploits, this might be it: this was how I was going to buy the farm. Right as this alarming thought entered my mind, the power of the ski cut, as Monkey realized what had happened.
Alicia was hanging onto the half tipped sled for all she was worth, and even with Monkey helping me, it still took a good 15-20 seconds to release my foot. He pulled me back onto the ski, as we washed down a rocky line to the base of the rapids.
If I’d been dangling under the ski, I could have ben crushed – assuming I wasn’t already drowned.
In the end, I escaped with little more than a severely bruised foot, with both Alicia and I shaken up, but no harm was done.
But this was a startling reminder of just how serious places like the Lachines are, and the element of danger that’s introduced with toys like a PWC (which are a real convenience).
I will continue to operate a PWC in the rapids, but this was a good and needed reminder never to get too comfortable out there. Things can go sideways very quickly.”