The day I learned to respect fog and shipping lanes

The worst of the damage was done on my first kayak crossing of Lake Vänern. I had been making my way down the Dalslands canal for about a week, and as I got closer to the great lake, so grew the scepticism of the people I met. "Really?! You're just going to paddle across? You do know that she eats up a couple of Germans every year?" they would tell me. Being only eighteen, my answer came easily: "Well, I didn't embark on a kayaking trip from Halden to Stockholm because I wanted to stay safe, now did I?" I wasn't too worried about it. If you go into the Dalslands canal system, you'll see more Germans in canoes and kayaks than you can count, and watching them struggle to maneuver their craft on the glassy smooth surfaces of the upper lakes, it is no wonder that some of those who venture onto Vänern do end up dying. At the time, I considered myself somewhat closer to the Inuit, who use kayaks as a viable means of transportation around the icy waters of the North Atlantic. "If they can harpoon a whale from a kayak while surrounded by ice bergs and growlers, then surely I can get across this pond" I thought. Only after sailing to Greenland myself have I grown to apreciate not just the tremendous hardiness of the Inuit, but also the general cheapness of life in those parts.

Despite my cockiness, I had a bit of a lump growing in my chest on that bright and sunny morning as we got out of our sleeping bags on Hjortens Udde ("Deer point") to make the crossing. Memories of the tremendous bonfire we'd built the night before mixed with the mental imagery of Germans suspended face down by their life jackets. "That was a great night yesterday. I hope we'll live to see another!" said Per Otto, only half joking. Once we sat down and started going, however, it all became much too easy. The lake lay ahead of us like one great big unbroken mirror, and we powered across with long, easy strokes. The only valuable lesson we learned was that going up onto the Hinden reef to stretch your legs is worse than just keeping on going, as it is a smelly, bug infested and thouroughly inhospitable place. I also came away with the not so valuable impression that crossing Vänern is a piece of cake, and this would come back to haunt me.

My second Vänern crossing was a much more constructive lesson in risk assessment and proper planning. This time I had brought Magnus Hansen along for the ride. I wasn't scared at all, and to my enduring shame I even laughed at some of the people who tried to warn me. I wasn't even worried when the news struck that four tourists in two canoes had perished in light weather on the lake, only a few days before we had scheduled our crossing. We camped a bit further into the bay than I had with Per Otto, and as morning dawned there was a breeze blowing from the SW. It was supposed to freshen somewhat, but it didn't seem particularly bad to begin with, so we set off after a quick power breakfast of oats and jam.

It quickly became apparent that the tall pine trees on the shore had been shielding us from the wind, and as we made our way into the bay it started hitting us with increased force. Having it on our quarter meant that it was more of an aid than an impediment, until we were a couple of hours into it and lost the protection of Hjortens Udde. That's when the important difference between an offshore wind and twenty-odd nautical miles of fetch was driven home to me. In a short time the waves quadrupled in size, and they started tossing us around. I had to use a lot of rudder input to stay on course, and we had to work harder with the paddle to maintain balance and momentum.

The conditions steadily deteriorated during the next hour. The waves grew to a size that obscured the horizon when we were in the troughs, and now came with angry heads of white froth. The conditions were such that I couldn't focus my attention on the compass, and with land beneath the horizon all around us, my only visual reference was the direction of wind and waves. The resulting zig-zag course combined with the sea state to make our going painfully slow, and at times our VMG was well under three knots. We were getting tired as we passed the midway point, and I was having private doubts about the wisdom of our undertaking, but then a thin gray stripe appeared across the blank horizon ahead of us. We both cheered loudly, and then things went to hell very quickly.

Keeping a kayak upright under such conditions has nothing to do with stability as most boaters think of it. It is all about dynamic forces, and can be compared to riding a bicycle. As a wave pushes you over, you lean your hips into it and dig your paddle down on the opposite side to right yourself. Another important part of the equation is to maneuver your craft so as to avoid the brunt of the shit coming your way. However, with my kayak being 6.5 metres in length, having a straight keel line, displacing over a quarter of a ton fully laden and moving ahead with the all the speed and grace of a drifting log, that wasn't much of an option. We were struck by a particularly nasty breaker, and as we leaned into it to stay level, the aerated water at the crest swallowed the whole length of the kayak, and our paddles found no bite in the foam.

With no time for further analysis we found ourselves submerged and upside down. "Well, that took a big dump on a beautiful day!" said Magnus when we popped to the surface, either side of the capsized hull. I couldn't think of a way to disagree. Somehow I hadn't counted on this happening, and it didn't take much time for me to realize that we were in a very bad situation indeed. Bit by bit, it dawned on me that I hadn't brought any emergency equipment at all. No bilge pump. No flares. Not even a pail to bail out the water. We quickly established that my hat was useless for bailing. After that we tried pretty much everything, to little avail, and we started losing hope. Thankfully, although we both admitted it later, none of us said it out loud. There are few things more detrimental to the soul than thinking that you are going to die surrounded by a blank horizon, and such things are better left unsaid.

Desperate times bring forth desperate measures, and in the end we resorted to using the cooking pot. The only problem with that was that it was packed all the way into the bow. Have you ever crawled head first into the hull of a flooded kayak in open water? If not, you can just take it from me that it's not a fun thing to do. Even with the pot in hand, the task of bailing proved near impossible, as the waves crashed over us and re-filled the kayak every five-ten seconds. In the end we soved the problem by having Magnus push the stern so that the bow pointed into the weather, while I lay across the fore deck to break the waves with my body while I bailed from the front cockpit.

On his part that was such a Herculean feat of strength and endruance that to this day it leaves me deeply humbled. There is no doubt in my mind that if I had brought anyone else along for the ride, we would both have died that day. By the time we were back up and going, we had spent about eighty minutes in the water. Do you have any idea what it means to spend that amount of time struggling in water at fifteen degrees? If you're a doctor, you'll say that it means you're approaching unconsciousness. To me, having near zero body fat, it meant that I was at the bitter end of my rope. Or so I thought.

Once we had removed as much water from the kayak as was practical, we gathered up whatever equipment was still floating in the immediate vicinity and got going. We still had enough water on board to double our displacement, and this meant that the waves were breaking heavily over deck and slowly filling the hull back up. As I felt the water level slowly but steadily creeping up my thighs, I started resigning my last vestige of hope, but I retained my deepest resolve to go out fighting, and increased my pressure on the paddle. Still, the colors of the world were graying out, and I knew then that I was failing. Magnus felt this, and knowing he had no hope of survival if I quit, he pushed the one button he knew would bring me back to life.

The thing is, I like singing and Magnus doesn't like to listen. This had been an ongoing theme between us for a long time, so I was stunned when I heard his broken, unmusical voice utter the first phrase of Eric Idle's classic: "Some things in life are bad \ They can really make you mad" I perked up and joined in. "Da-da-da always look on the bright side of life!" Thus, singing and whistling, we made it into the relative calm water north of Hindens Rev. The last part of the trip is hazy in my memory, and many of the details are missing, but I do remember when the bow crashed onto the rocks on the shore of one of the islets west of Kållandsø. I also remember qutie vividly that I was unable to move my legs, so that Magnus was forced to tip the kayak on its side to extricate me and drag me up on land.

Usually when I've survived a traumatic experience such as this, I'm perversely happy about it. I somehow find a way to be grateful for the wisdom it brings. However, this one just left me drained and shameful that I could have made such horrifying mistakes. I learned a valuable lesson, but to this day the price almost seems too much to bear. What's worse, I didn't learn the right lesson, as my next Vänern crossing would demonstrate.

Fast forward one year, and you find Magnus and myself camped near the same spot, preparing to cross Vänern the next morning. This time we had all the necessary equipment on board, and the weather report sounded promising. We had a fantastic time, got ourselves thrown out of a midsummers night party and crashed in the tent with much too few worries on our minds. Morning dawned on a mirror smooth lake, and in the still air we hurried to pack our tent and get going.

Just as we were paddling away from shore, the fog came down. I didn't even stop to think about it. Sure it was a hassle, but we would be navigating by compass anyway, and we even had a GPS. Much more important was the dead calm, which still seemed set to last through the day. To stop and wait for the soup to clear would have put us at risk to windy conditions, or so I reasoned. As we kept going, the fog got heavier until we could barely see a boat length ahead. It was so bad that we nearly crashed into a little motor boat with a family on board, which had anchored in wait for clear weather once the skipper realized that he had blundered into shallow waters. We stopped for a chat, and they invited us on board for coffee. We talked for a while, and I showed the skipper how to enter waypoints into his GPS (of which he didn't seem to understand much), but he elected to hang around nonetheless. They even offered us to wait with them, but we were anxious to get going.

"Don't worry, you'll see that it clears up just nice once we get a bit further out" I told Magnus, who was having second thoughts when we got going again. I was in the rear cockpit with the rudder pedals and the compass, while Magnus was up front with the chart and the GPS. "What are these pink lines?" he wondered after a while. "Oh, those are just shipping lanes out of Vänersborg" I said, and we continued in silence for a while. "Aren't we supposed to worry about those?" I thought about it for a second. "Well, I guess, but I haven't seen much shipping going that way. And besides, even if there is one ship every hour, which I doubt, the risk of getting hit by one isn't all that bad. If the width of the ship is, say, sixty feet, we only occupy that space for much less than a minute. It boils down to a fraction of a percent."

We kept on going in an uneasy silence, and the fog got even thicker. Mathematic risk assessment aside, zero visibility creeps me out. Always has, always will. We had just made it into the southbound lane of the separation system when my ears picked up a faint throb. For a moment I hoped that it might be a helicopter, but no, it was the unmistakeable exhaust note of a very big engine turning at only a few hundred RPM. Magnus had heard it too, and he turned around. "Is that what I think it is?" he wondered. I just nodded, and we sat and listened for a while. The sound seemed to fill the air around us, and it was impossible to tell where it was coming from. Very tentatively, we kept going at slow speed, straining our ears.

The exhaust note was joined by the swish-swish-swish of a large propeller transmitting its vibrations through the water and into the hull of the kayak, and there was no doubt that it was getting closer. A minute later, another sound was added to the mix, this time a faint rumble, like a waterfall. I was increasingly certain that it was approaching us on the port side, which was bad news since we were almost in the middle of the southbound lane. It was impossible to tell if the ship was going to pass ahead or astern, and I was suddenly acutely aware that with the clutter controls turned up for the fog, the ship's radar operator didn't stand a chance of spotting a fiberglass kayak on the surface.

My instincts told me to go full steam ahead in a mad dash for the separation line, but logic told me to stay still until I had some kind of an indication of the ship's location. The rumble of the bow wave grew sharper, as we could hear drops of water hitting the surface, and in an instant it seemed like it was on top of us. I thought I heard voices, and then the sound passed in front of us. Seconds later we were struck by the wake, an indication of how incredibly close it had been. We breathed a collective sigh of relief, then we kept going forward. A short time later the powers that be waved their magic wand, and the fog lifted. We saw the ship then, a Vänermax cargo carrier, completely oblivious to the drama that had just played out a few meters off their starboard side.

Although these two incidents have taken a chunk out of my ego, they have taught me a few valuable lessons. First, I'm not invincible, and I need to act accordingly. Otherwise, I risk not only my own life, but also that of those who choose to follow me on my adventures. Bringing basic safety equipment along for a major crossing is pretty fundamental, as is respecting an uncertain weather forecast when I'm unfamiliar with the local conditions. Through the clarity of hindsight, it is shocking to see that I had to get into an accident to fully understand that. Second, never focus just on the factors which you know from experience, but take a step back to consider the full picture. Keep in mind that your experience might be downplaying the stuff that hasn't already smacked you in the face. Third, and perhaps most importantly, my risk assesment was badly flawed. Risk equals the probability of an event, times the consequence of said event. Rolling a thousand-sided dice for the end of your life is just plain stupid.

I'm sharing this with you in the hope that embarassing myself might save someone having to figure out the same thing for themselves. All of these are things I knew well beforehand, but I had to see them for myself before I really got the message. That's pretty fucked up. But you know what's more fucked up than that? Magnus still wants to join me on another major kayaking trip. Understand it, those who may.