Tips to Kayaking

I would rate this article 2 out of 4 because its content is important to know when kayaking, but I found it was very brief, and missed important facts. Kayaking can be a dangerous sport, and it is important that you know the important information to keep yourself safe while you are out there. This article brings up many tips. The first tip it gives you is to fix the frayed ends of your deck lines, which is something that can easily be fixed. Although I agree this can be important, it is not worthy of an entire paragraph of the article, and seems like common knowledge. The next tip they give is to have a deck line with a larger diameter so that the line can be used as a handle that you may need to quickly grab the kayak, or use it to lift it on shore.

One of the better tips the writer gave was to put reflective tape on your boat and paddles so that you can find them in the dark, or so that other people can see you in lower visibility conditions. He also suggests to have a whistle on you for safety so that you don't need to waste your voice. Bringing a dry bag was also a good tip because it is nice to have extra clothes later when you've gotten wet. He then suggests useless information like don't put wet items in your wet bag because they will stay wet. There are a few other tips that he gives, but I found that most of them were common knowledge or things that weren't that important.

The last tips that he gives are things about what you can do while you kayaking such as kayak fishing. One thing he says is to have a break-away line so that if you catch anything really big, then the line breaks before it tips your kayak. He also suggests to bring larger binoculars so that you can see things easier in your bobbing kayak, but I think this is a bad idea because any extra weight is inconvenient when you are kayaking, especially if you portage.

Overall, I found that this article was helpful for a beginner, and also gave some good tips for people kayaking in the ocean or larger lakes. For your average lake kayaking and portaging though, these tips were not very useful, and most of the time very obvious.

Reference: http://www.paddling.net/guidelines/showArticle.html?227