Two days after a kayaking guide and one of his customers died after waves swamped their boats off the village of Corea, the state’s kayaking community is taking stock of the sport’s inherent dangers, and paddling on.
It’s a beautiful, mildly breezy day on Casco Bay on Friday, and Oxford Hills resident Saphire Robinson is getting ready to put an open-cockpit kayak in at Portland’s East End ramp.
This is her second time out ever, and she says the deaths of a New Jersey man and his Maine guide Wednesday has sharpened her awareness of the risks involved.
“I can swim and we have life vests. And if the water’s too choppy you shouldn’t go in anyway,” she says. “So hopefully we’ll keep an eye out, make sure the waves don’t get too choppy and if they do we’ll just come back in.”
But she says she has not thought about wearing a wet suit.
It’s at least 80 degrees in the sun, and Robinson, like many paddlers out Friday afternoon, wore just a swimsuit and T-shirt under her life vest. But Casco Bay’s water temperature is hovering around 56 degrees, only four degrees warmer than the waters off Corea, where the capsized paddlers are believed to have succumbed to hypothermia.
“We really emphasize with people to dress for immersion. The water is really, really cold,” says Sara Freshley, a manager at Portland Paddle, standing in front of a rack of wet suits the company rents alongside kayaks and paddle boards from a waterfront cargo box.
Freshley says for short trips near shore, the company doesn’t push the wet suits, but anything farther merits consideration of a wet suit or dry suit, or at least a layer of noncotton undergarments that provide insulation when wet.
And every trip, she says, requires a thoughtful combination of gear suited to the conditions, paddling and rescue skills, and awareness of how variable Maine’s offshore weather can be.
“But you can have all three of those things and things can still go wrong,” Freshley says. “I mean you are taking a risk just getting out on the water.”
Those risks apply even when you are a trained, state-certified guide, like Gouldsboro resident Ed Brackett, who died in Wednesday’s accident. Details the one survivor of the tragedy gave to the state marine patrol indicate the trio, none of them in a wet suit, were surprised by a sudden, strong squall that flipped their boats and took them out to sea.
Christopher Strout, the new president of the Maine Association of Sea Kayak Guides and Instructors, says it was a bit of a shock to learn that one of the victims was a guide.
“There hasn’t been an incident like this in, you know, forever,” he says. “This is the first time anything happened like this where a guide died on a trip.”
Accidents involving relative novices are more common. Two young women died in a kayaking accident in the frigid waters of Casco Bay in 2010. Two men died a year later in separate kayaking accidents off Mount Desert Island. And earlier this month a teenager who was not wearing a life vest lost his life in the Presumpscot River, just above Casco Bay.
Note: Kayaker Saphire Robinson, interviewed for this story, did not rent her kayak at Portland Paddle.