Posts

I've mentioned a couple of times how the Hand of God rescue was coming up in training. This rescue is useful as a rescue for unconscious kayakers who have flipped over. It's tricky – the "swimmer" can't help you at all, so it requires excellent leverage and a good amount of force. Practicing it involves waiting upside-down in your boat until a rescuer grabs you and flips your boat over, like the hand of a god descending to save you. As you may recall, being upside-down in the water has really challenged me in the past. So to be frank, I'd been dreading the Hand of God rescue for days. It kept being delayed, building up the suspense and nerves. But today was the day. It was our last training drysuit session, so this was our last chance.

Our top priority as guides is always keeping our clients safe. One key way we do that is by understanding tides, weather patterns, wind, and waves. After slowly putting some of these things together, today we had a culminating lecture discussing wind, waves, and currents in our area. There's way too much to put in one post, but my favorite discussion had to do with coastal convergence.

A few days ago, we started to discuss purposeful interpretation. This is crucial to our job as kayak guides: interpretation is how we share this area with guests and shape their experience here.

Interpretation means different things to different people. One definition I really like is from the National Association for Interpretation: "interpretation is a mission-based communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meanings inherent in the resource." See, our job isn't about teaching. It's about creating connection, about leaving guests with an emotional response to this place. And just like with public speaking, there are techniques you can use to make that happen.

Today was our first "real" kayaking day trip during training. I mentioned it briefly previously, when we had to cancel because of weather. But today was the day! It dawned bright, clear, and early. The weather turned out to be perfect, a solitary clear day between giant storms. Tides were fairly small and fine for our plan. In summary, it was an ideal day for a kayaking day trip!

Here at KAW, our most popular trip is our Aialik (pronounced eye-Y'ALL-ick) Glacier day trip. On the trip, we paddle right up to the face of Aialik Glacier. Aialik is a tidewater glacier, which means it comes right up to the ocean and drops chunks of ice in it. Today we had the chance to learn more about tidewater glacier dynamics from Luke Rosier, which was lovely. My favorite portion was a discussion of the tidewater glacier cycle, which causes tidewater glaciers to advance and retreat cyclically over centuries.