Since few people enjoy the wet swim that accompanies a wet exit, here we’ll introduce a way to stay in your boat. These are called bow rescues. Essentially, you are going to use the bow (or stern) of a buddies boat to help you right your boat. To demonstrate (and this is pretty hard to describe), we’ll take turns grabbing the nose of a boat near us (hopefully this boat will be perpendicular to us, which will provide the most stability for that boat.) We will then lean to our side and try to place our body flat on the water with our ear on the surface of the water. At this point our boat will probably be mostly upright, maybe slightly tilted towards us. Next we will use our abdominal and oblique muscles to twist our hips to get our boat to flip on top of us. (If you are leaning on your right side, then you want to bring the left side of the boat towards your left hip.) Now, to recover from this situation, you want to do the exact opposite….you want to “snap” your hips to right the boat.
Do the hip snap correctly! To do the snap correctly, you want to (a) do it quickly and with good strength (b) keep your body (especially your head) in the water until the boat is upright and stable (c) use your hips to make the boat flip…do NOT push on the nose of your buddies boat (soon it won’t be there!)
Here we will practice this technique a bunch of times. Note, you will want to try this from both sides of your boat.
Twist #2 - Now, let’s assume that you aren’t near your buddy when you flip. Well, you still want to try this technique. Here is how it is done! When you flip…drop the paddle, and immediately slap the sides of your boat three times as hard as you can (the harder the louder…) Next, start running your hands back and forth along the sides of the boat (by the way, you are crouching forward and holding your breath, right?) Hopefully, someone has heard your call and is racing towards you. You should soon feel your boat get knocked by your buddies nose. At that point, do your best to grasp the nose of their boat and get your head to the surface for a quick breath. Now relax, take your time, get yourself positioned just like in the previous exercise, and finally execute a beautiful hip snap. Now get up, and go hand paddle over to your paddle.
As usual, we will spend at least 15-20 minutes trying this out. You really want to get a good hip snap, and it helps to be comfortable with the bow rescues when we move into more advanced techniques.