When it comes to rolling, I think sea kayakers are like Steve Carrell’s character in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin—they can go a long way through life without ever doing it. Perched precariously on the surface as we are, there’s a feeling that eventually it’s going to happen—we’re going to flip and need to know how to roll—but the pressure to be ready for that day that may never arrive can become an obsession and a debilitating fear.
Learning to roll a sea kayak is hard. You’re doomed from the start because the very conditions most likely to flip you are also the ones in which you least want to be practicing. should a sea kayaker ever flip over on a trip—god forbid—that makes for a truly epic moment. Witness Southern Exposure, Chris Duff’s book about his expedition around New Zealand’s south island. It includes a map marking the location of every capsize.
We paddle through the worst stuff with our teeth clenched, hoping nothing goes wrong, and then practice our rolls on sunny afternoons in calm water by the beach where we can call a buddy over to perform a t-rescue when we blow our hip flick, bring our head up first and start carping for air. And thus we never really get it.
That was me a few years ago. To celebrate my 30th birthday I did a long expedition on the open coast, and at the time I had no roll. A strong brace and a “please don’t flip” mantra kept me alive, but the fear of capsizing took the fun out of some of the most spectacular parts of the trip.
ROUGH WATER PRACTICE
It takes rough water practice to really nail the roll. What finally taught me to roll after years of failure was moving from the ocean to the river. A whitewater paddler would never map out every spot he capsized; rolling on the river is like falling down while learning to snowboard—it’s just what you do. You flip again and again at the worst possible times, when the waves are big, the eddy lines are a mess and the water’s full of air and boils.
For a while I harboured sea kayaker fears—what if I flip over, what if I swim? I blew some rolls and pulled the skirt and swam through a few big rapids, but in time the roll became a reflex and my fears vanished. Then I went back to the ocean and found my entire outlook had changed. As competitive roller Cheri Perry says in the new movie This is the Sea 3—describing how it feels to be the master of 30 rolls—“I was afraid of capsizing. Now I’m not afraid of capsizing.”
Now every time I roll up I feel like celebrating. Celebrating that I’ve beaten the fear, that I’ve finally got the skill, and that I’m back up on the right side of that thin line we float on—the side where the air is. I feel like Steve Carrell at the end of the movie, doing his post-virginity Bollywood-style dance number to “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” rolling feels good, and I wonder why I waited so long.
This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2007 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
