In the past, there has been an early fall surf gathering at Wilderness State Park in Northern Michigan. This year, it was called off for reasons that I am unaware of. In it’s place, Michael Gray organized a surf fest in Empire. That was this weekend.
Attendance was in consideration, but looking at the forecast for the area, the waves were supposed to be 2-4ft. which was not convincing enough for my tastes. Add to that the fact that I got obsessed with some circuit theorizing and stayed up until 5:30 on Friday, and you find me, not in Northern Michigan for the weekend. Not the point of this post.
Saturday, Josh invited me to attend Pulaski days, which involved all the Polish halls in GR throwing a three day party. Being 3/8 Polish, I feel that I have a claim to celebratory rights as well as a reason to support the local Polish halls. But… also, not the point of this post.
Sunday, that’s today, the forecast for Lake Michigan near Grand Haven was 4-7ft. waves. That was for the latter part of the day. First, at 2:00 a group was organized to paddle about half a mile of the Grand River through downtown Grand Rapids. This was planned to correlated with the Grand Rapids ArtPrize – to see the art from a different point of view as well as something of a public show of support for restoring the rapids to the Grand. In reality, this means putting in a series of whitewater features of interest to kayakers and fishers. It looks like a substantial portion of the funding has been raised and as soon as the effort has tax exempt status, more should become available.
We paddled for an hour or two, playing on the little waves formed by the dams across the river. Cruised through downtown, saw some art, got in the news. The story was covered by Fox 17. Josh is shown assembling his paddle, and I think we are both in the from a distance shot at the end. I’m pretty sure I’m the one at the very top with the blue boat and white paddle.
Now for your featured presentation: 4-7ft. waves at Grand Haven.
After the ArtPrize paddle tour, Josh and I headed West to Grand Haven to catch some end of the day waves. The forecast is not always accurate, but in this instance it was. A substantial portion of the waves were hitting 4ft. or more, with some at least to 6 and probably 7ft. As it is a known phenomenon for waves to be claimed larger than they actually are. To qualify these claims, figure I sit 3ft off the water when in my boat, from this position, I saw many waves which were over my head by several feet and prevented me from seeing anything but sky beyond them.
Sometimes we go out there and are able, with some effort to catch waves. To me, the mark of waves getting big for surf is when there’s really no effort needed to catch them in a sea kayak. This happened often today – if I was not making a concerted effort to paddle out, the waves were going to surf me in. Josh and I both got a number of good, and thanks to the size of the waves, fast surfs. Some of these were fast enough to jet out in front of the wave and then have to wait for it to catch up.
Josh had the first combat roll, I had the second* and he had the third. About and hour later, we were both good and tired, something which doesn’t take long when you are intentionally putting yourself in the most difficult to make forward progress paddling situation you can find on a lake.
I had decided to claim I was done for the day when I was riding out the little bits of waves that made it past the sand bar break to the shore. Josh had also made this decision, but he happened to be off shore at the time. Shortly thereafter, he happened to be out of boat. I turned and paddled out to help him, realizing just how tired I was and how slow the going was.
When I got close enough to start assessing, I came to the quick realization that, given our intentions, I had not donned my tow-belt and thus had no good means of snagging his boat, which had gotten away. I also noted that I had no contact tows available had I wanted to use one. Josh was paddle swimming for shore when I got to him and we started a toggle-tow for shore. We then proceeded to back-surf in, me pulling him along and bracing through waves, him performing the function of a quality sea-anchor. I think it was the best rescue scenario we could have put together – I wouldn’t have been stable enough with him on my boat, I wasn’t going to be fast enough to recover his boat, and being backwards allowed me to watch him and see what was about to hit us.
We got to shore, pulled up the boats and did what any good kayak instructors would do: started discussing what had happened, how it was handled and what we might learn from it. Josh mentioned that it would really suck to have had to paddle swim all the way to shore and brought up the lack of tow-belt for clipping to his kayak before it was torn away by the waves. I noted my lack of any gear (tow-belt, contact tows, spare paddle) useful for rescues. This was all dismissed as not a big concern, since we were just playing near the shore. I made a comment something along the lines of “Yeah, even without the tow equpiment, but given how close we were to shore, just swimming was a viable option given that we have PFD’s on.” at that moment patting my chest where my PFD should have been.
The moral of the story is this: don’t rush and double check that you’re outfitted appropriately for the day.
