East Coast Views : After Dark

October-November 2005

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Adam Bolonsky

Headlamps and light sticks are a great help in the dark. These light sticks have been cut in two and epoxied.

One of the frequent surprises of a winter getaway is that because you’re away from home, your internal database of timetables and paddling distances no longer applies, leaving you vulnerable to finding yourself in somewhat of a pickle in that crucial time just before dusk. Here in New England, dusk often lasts more than an hour, leaving us plenty of time to get back to shore well before dark. In the more southerly latitudes where vacationers tend to paddle, sunsets often happen fast: a faint wink on the horizon and then suddenly the sea is DARK. Sometimes an offshore breeze can also fill in, and once it does, a vacationing paddler may be paddling against a stiff breeze to get back to shore. Adverse currents may run harder than at home too. Or, sometimes it’s the uniqueness of a new locale which keeps us out after sunset. We walk the shoreline a little further than we should, snorkel the reef a while longer, poke around the village for an hour, two hours, then three or four....

Regardless of why you happen to find yourself facing the prospect of paddling after dark, here are a few guidelines for dealing with what is one of kayaking’s most disconcerting circumstances.

Darkness presents a unique set of problems and challenges, not the least is doing everything you can so you don’t get run down by a power or sailboat. Kayaks sit very low in the water and their visibility, minimal even in daylight hours, is further reduced by darkness and the perspective of powerboat operators and sailors, who typically sit at the stern with rigging or bow in their way. Add into the mix the likelihood that other night boaters are either peering intently into the darkness for the next navigation marker or blithely cruising along over open water, and you have the potential for a kayak rundown. Or it could be you who doesn’t see a vessel approaching, even one showing requisite green light to starboard, red to port, white at mast or stern.

“If green and red, collision ahead.”

Case in point. While fishing in Boston Harbor a few years back, my companions and I found ourselves in the midst of a school of striped bass that were feeding on herring off the southeast side of Long Island, a shallow area of flats where no boat other than a kayak really has any business. Because night fishing tends to yield larger fish, we fished until long after sundown, then faced a hairy series of channel crossings to City Point, our put-in. Hugging the southwestern side of the island on a counterclockwise course, we picked our way around the island until we faced the several channels spread out before us.

Squinting into the first channel, peering as far into either end of it as we could, we realized we had a problem. The lights on shore and those of the cars on distant Day Boulevard, the floodlights of industry and commerce along the Dorchester shore, all combined to create a crazy quilt of lights impossible to sort out. Gauging the speed and direction of distant car lights to be too sinuous and fast for boats, and checking repeatedly whether we could see red or green bowlights moving in the difficult- to-gauge depths of darkness before us, we flipped on our C-lights and struck out on what we knew was the correct compass course.

It was then that a sailing yacht, ghosting along in absolute silence, its red port bow light obscured by a sagging spinnaker, bore down upon us. With our eyes so keenly focused on the lights low on the water around us, we neither saw nor heard the sailboat until the subtle bishhhhh of its bow wave startled us. With our C-lights, rear deck lights and headlamps, we hadn’t anticipated a large and silent boat, its running lights high above us, to appear from out of nowhere.

In such cases, avoiding boat channels altogether is one tactic. Do you know where they are in the area where you will paddle during your vacation? Hugging the shore as close as possible is another. As for open water, there’s not a whole lot you can do except equip your rear-deck light with a long-burst strobe or firefly light that won’t be mistaken for a Coast Guard-designated rescue and emergency strobe, deploy light sticks fore and aft, and make securité calls on VHF ch. 16 to alert others of your presence.

In more remote areas, the problems are far different, if no less daunting, and boil down, really, to two phenomena which are highly subjective and dependent upon a paddler’s nerves. They are fear and anxiety on the one hand, disorientation on the other. Siamese twins of thought joined in the paddler’s consciousness, each tends to arouse a reaction of raw emotion or unintended reflex, with the unfortunate truth that one tends to activate the other.

In more remote areas, where the possibility of getting run down is less an issue, simple fear arrives first: the fear of not being able to see; the fear of not being able to anticipate the effect of passing swell or breaking waves; the fear of not being able to see the shore; the fear of not being able to track the proximity of paddling companions; the fear of not being able to gauge speed, distance, or forward progress. Time becomes warped. The eyes do not help. Instead, their use tends to make one more keyed-up and nervous. Normal input about where we are on the water—our perceptions of whether we are drifting or rocking, tipping or leaning, or moving forward, sideways or back—no longer comes by way of vision. Instead, the input comes by way of sensations we feel in our legs and hips and pit of the stomach.

At night in isolated and lonely waters, such physical reactions tend to take over. Straining for visual references on which to focus, and discovering that our eyes are useless, we experience fear. We may flip our headlamp on to glance at the chart, whether for reassurance or simply as a break from peering ahead into darkness, but when we switch the headlamp off, we discover that what little night vision we had before, we’ve lost. The darkness grows ever deeper.

Reflective, woven deck rigging, and reflective patches on PFD and paddle.

This is, typically, when loss of balance, dizziness and vertigo can kick in. This can create intense feelings of a loss of physical groundedness, a reaction that only fuels fear by making us feel even more vulnerable, even less in control of our environment. Straining for any reference point to fix our eyes upon, our bodies tend to feel suspended in air, without foundation.

Scandinavian studies of the 1930s abound with Inuit kayak sealhunters going through the same reactions, capsizing and drowning from kayakangst in daylight when the color of the water seamlessly matched the color of the sky and horizon, windless days without wave or swell when a blank gray made the world seem to disappear, rendering the paddler so psychologically disoriented that he falls, in a moment, into physic panic. He simply loses it. He capsizes and, because the Inuit did not swim, drowns.

A FEW AIDS TO NIGHT PADDLING

• Keep your boat well-illuminated: a C-light on your PFD, a rear deck lamp, light sticks (don’t use green or red unless you drape green to starboard, red to port, as only that color placement lets other boaters know which way you are pointed), a Coast-Guard-approved (or not) strobe you can flip on should you hear an unseen or unseeing boat approach. Being well illuminated will reduce the likelihood of being run down. Test your light gear first, however, and at night, to see whether it ruins your night vision and reduces your range of awareness to the tiny expanse of real estate between you and your bow.

• Once you are under way in darkness, try to keep your eyes focused on a fixed light onshore, if traffic is less a factor than darkness. A single floodlight or flashing radio tower strobe or revolving lighthouse beacon will do the trick. If you focus on a fixed light that doesn’t move or waver, the visual input will help you maintain your balance and tamp down a lid on your anxiety and fear.

• Study your charts thoroughly beforehand, making sure you memorize, before you set out, the flash pattern of a least two or three of the major navigation lights (if any) you may expect to encounter after dark. In true darkness, these will be the only references available to keep yourself direction-oriented. Staring at your deck compass for orientation will both degrade your balance and render your night vision useless.

• Should you find yourself paddling in unfamiliar waters near sunset, seek out on shore (before darkness falls) a light you can fix your eye on in darkness later, a light so distinctive by either its brightness or color, or both, that you can readily distinguish it from any other. From that moment on, use that light as a reference. Fix in mind where it lies in relation to your destination and to any features—rocks, shallows, islands, etc.—which you’ll have to cross or go around, features you can anticipate because you’ve carefully studied your chart beforehand and have created in your mind’s eye an outline of the coastline.

• Paddle at night first only in calm weather and in familiar, untrafficked waters, if only to discover whether you are a paddler prone to nighttime paddling vertigo, fear, or dizziness.

• Avoid boat channels and areas prone to swift currents or shallows that produce breaking swell, boomers, or combers. Paddle well up- or downwater of reefs, rocks, and sandbars so that you avoid having to deal with breaking waves or whitewater.

• • Finally, if necessary, make securité calls on VHF ch.16 to announce your presence to others (check local jurisdictions for specific channels and licensing requirements). Your call should describe what you are (one sea kayak or the number of kayaks), your location, your call sign, estimated transit time, compass heading and destination.

© Text and photos by Adam Bolonsky. He’s a native New England sea kayaking instructor and sea kayak fishing guide based in Gloucester, Massachusetts.