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Hello. Sea kayaks are unstable. At the roll over its very dangerous. Better swimm with a thick wetsuit. It wii provide very good flotability.

Was there in 1969 summer course K21 = this video brought back some great memories = Awsome

This series of sea kayaking videos is excellent. Many videos concentrate on technique, but few emphasise seamanship, as this series does. Highly recommended for any sea kayaker.

Extremely useful! Thanks 🇨🇮

What an incredible series! These are the best videos about kayaking that I have ever seen. Calmly and thoroughly presented, dense with knowledge, experience and science. Thank you so much! Love from Norway 🇳🇴

Those kayaks looks like they are moving pretty quick

Great set of prizes! Have learned alot from your videos. Just about to start Kayak fishing and may also learn to Fly fish. Still in the research phase. Thank you for all your help.

Great videos 👍👌

Excellent video. Thank you .

The Sea Kayak community needs a John Dowd more than ever today.

Excellent video, I learned a lot!!

Brilliant,thanks 👍

I was there in May 1974 - To Starve - To Freeze - and Not to Heal - the modified moto. It was great - certainly pushed me beyond my limit.

I did the Standard Mens Course in July 74. Except for the first bit in the snow, 75% of this video is almost exactly what I experienced. I rappelled down that rock face. First on my own, then with Tom strapped to my back. The early morning run and dip in the Similkameen. The obstacle course. Going over the wall. Glacading while crossing a snow field between Cathedral Mountain and Lakeview. An increadable three day solo, beside Joe Lake. I found a lot of peace and inner calm there. The dining hall, and the sense of family. I’m pretty sure I spotted our instructor Robyn in two of the scenes. Jumping off the trussel to begin our white water day. Guys on “the run” across the road. This course had a huge impact on me. I was advised to try this course by my old high school teacher. He took an afternoon off, to take me to a presentation by Adrian Todd at the University of Waterloo. I had my photo taken specifically for him standing on the summit of Cathedral Mountain. Through life’s twists and turns, I finally sent him that photo 35 yrs. later. Between him, and this course, my life was drastically changed. From a self consciousness, withdrawn teenager, to a guy who looked forward to challenge and the future. This course taught me that almost anything is possible , if you face your inner fears, and embrace change. I later had to do a safety course that involved firefighting, full gear and oxygen tanks , putting out huge fires, and how to launch and maneuver a lifeboat on the open sea. Most of the guys were really scared. I was mostly curious. I already knew from experience, that with a good instructor, and proper training , many things are not as scary as the fears you impose on yourself. Thank you Ken Cressman for starting me down this path, it’s consequences were more far reaching then either of us thought at the time. Thank you Outward Bound for a life altering experience. The results of that month , have followed me for a lifetime.

This Video is FANTASTIC !!! Direct in the facts. If you are beginer, you MUST WATCH, if you are advanced it'll be a great opportunity to remember all you need to kayaking correct and safety. CONGRATULATIONS!!!

So grateful to you for this very thorough series! Excellent presentation. I could listen to John for days on end!

What an EXCELLENT tutorial! Thank You for all you give to the paddling community!! Bought my first Sea Kayak today, and am taking some classes locally here in the PNW. So excited!

Wow so knowledgeable, so much to know. Thanks

This is an incredibly useful video. I’m a complete novice to using charts and I plan on reading a book to supplement what I saw here. But some of the practical tips shown in the video are very useful.

Enjoying this video! I’m going to take lessons soon and this is giving me a sneak peek at what to expect.

Thank you John & Tina for this video. It literally saved my life. I watched this a month ago with my husband. We are beginners. Kayaking for 7 months now. We were just out on a flat water lake. I was practicing turns with my sea kayak when I looked away for a sec my paddle went under the kayak pulling me into the water. Not good because water temp was 45F. I managed to roll up, but since I do not own any wet or dry suit I was in layers of heavy clothing. Their weight sucked me right out of the kayak.My PDF kept me from going under. My husband followed this video, drained my kayak & set it up for me to reenter. Though that wasn't going well since I had cold water shock and could barely lift my arms or breath. So to make this short I remembered John & Tina's demo & managed to get half way up and my husband dragged me the rest of the way. We both thank you all very much for your instruction. Since we never took classes or practiced a rescue this video is the only reason I survived. With sincere gratitude, Joy

Does anyone know what dry suit he is wearing

This is great tutorial. Thank you.

Great video! Thank you!

Awesome!

Love it!

A lot of narrative Americans and Inuits show these people how to use kayak how to build them and nothing they teach today is in what those native Americans ever taught Western people this is to keep the pecking order that we're Superior than you and you must listen to us or you'll die mentality so they keep their place they earn their money as experts everybody's an expert just a matter of time

I can't wait until I do ocean kayaking in a few years, it looks amazing

which make and model of vhf radio do you recommend for a guide to carry that is able to fit in a PFD and has good range? Thanks. This 3 part series is awesome!!

Very informative video. Thank you for sharing.

Very helpful! I thought, after 500 miles of paddling experience I know everything! Nope!

.. you burned a tent on the beach for comedy??

Brilliant thanks. Really needed this information as just starting out. Thank you 🙏 😃

Really useful and helpful series. Thanks for putting on CZcams.

I have no intention of ever sea kayaking. However, I find the series as interesting and engaging as any top-ranking shows on Netflix. It is also oddly calming.

Awesome video for beginners

Excellent ! Grande! Thanks for sharing this wonderful video!

Excellent video !

No paddle tether for rough water?

Great video John. Thanks for making it.

Great series, the music reminds me of Marshall Tucker

很棒!

“Uncle sam’s got his finger on the switch” AHAHAHA

Great stuff , as an enthusiastic beginner i've watched quite a few videos on technique etc and this is hands down by far the most informative , and in a very digestible format . oh and that smooth voice...well done.

Really helpful. Danke vielmals!

An excellent intro to sea kayak navigation. I really got a kick out of Lee's method of measuring shoreline and other distances with a pencil and piece of paper! I've spent 65 years on the ocean in everything from a 6' boat built with scrap lumber and seams sealed with liquid tar through much larger power vessels I've piloted as a professional boat captain and I've never seen that clever trick before! Although I've been using GPS for decades as a professional charter boat captain I must admit I often miss the good old fashioned ded (deduced) reckoning methods I used as a sea kayaking guide here in Maine. Just how accurate was that method? Well I come from a nautical sort of family, my uncle was the captain of a 700' oil tanker, my cousin was the captain of an 1,000' container ship, and my brother was the captain of a charter sailing vessel. All of them used very sophisticated electronic navigational equipment and were more than a bit skeptical as to just how accurately I could navigate a kayak with a compass and time/speed/distance calculator. So we set up a test. On one of those infamous pea soup fog Maine days I paddled a 21.5 mile course with 8 course changes using only those two basic tools. The fog never lifted and yet I hit every waypoint and at the end of my 7 hour journey I pulled right into the dock I'd left from. Should have seen the look on my brother's face... Truth is compared to many other vessels sea kayaks are simple as pie to navigate. The confounding variables of wind direction and speed shifts that greatly complicate sail navigation are gone, the mind numbing roar of engines is absent, and the paddler is left free to concentrate on getting to where he wants to go. Wind and current drift do at times present problems but both those can be tamed with experience. For me it's sad to see GPS taking over...another human skill lost to high tech! And GPS is not without its own difficulties. As is the case with all electronic devices, particularly those used in a salt water environment, they have been known to malfunction. Garmin, I'm told, has a file folder full of my complaint letters as a result of the numerous difficulties I've had with their devices over the past several decades. Additionally interfacing GPS data with the data on paper charts is not itself without problems. What many do not appreciate is that many of the paper charts still in use were originally drawn based upon data gathered with hand held sextants which, put politely, induced a certain margin of error into the plotting process. Many years ago I took a course in GPS navigation taught by an experienced sailer and computer scientist. Over the course of the course much was made of the absolute accuracy of GPS which at the time was 15 meters unless the Feds turned on SA. Hoping to introduce a reality check into the course I asked the instructor one night if he were willing to humor me for a moment. When he agreed to do so I asked him to draw a simple pencil line on the border of the 1:47,000 scale chart he'd been using. After he'd done that I asked him to estimate the width of that pencil line using the chart scale. His face turned slightly red as he announced that the pencil line was between 10 and 15 yards wide! In other words the pencil line was itself less precise than the theoretical accuracy of GPS! But it gets worse, much worse! Remember, please, that many charts feature shorelines, ledges, and various navigational hazards whose location was plotted using data collected with a hand held sextant on the deck of a rolling vessel and then plotted on the paper chart with a pencil whose line was 10-15 yards wide using a protractor where the index lines were themselves less than pinpoint accurate. I misspent years of my youth working for my father's land surveying company and so have a fair understanding of the realities of field accuracy. Using surveying equipment that (at least in theory) measure angles in parts of a second rather than parts of a degree it's easy to lose track of reality. So we had a hard and fast rule we followed. The rule states simply that the degree of accuracy claimed could only be as high as the degree of accuracy that could be repeated when laying out that particular point in the field. So what's all this add up to when using a GPS in the real world? Well lets just say that when attempting to correlate points on a paper chart with readings taken with a GPS all I can say is good luck with that project! For instance let's say that there is a rock you are going to pass by that is barely covered at the tide stage you are paddling. Using a pair of dividers and the chart you determine the rock's "precise" lat/lon and you input that position into your GPS. Surely this will guarantee that you won't hit the rock, right? Not so fast! Remember that the data locating that rock was obtained using a hand held sextant. That data was then plotted on a paper chart using a protractor where the line marking each degree was itself several yards wide and then drawn on the chart with a line itself 10-15 yards wide and that on a fairly large scale chart. We live in a world of technological illusions and GPS is one of them. This is not to say that they are not a reasonably accurate and dependable tool, but it helps to keep in mind that despite readings in parts of a second the actual field accuracy when used with chart data ofttimes leaves something to be desired. As they used to say on the TV cop show Hill Street Blues, "Be careful out there!" P.S. So given all this how did I manage to ace the paddle navigation test mentioned previously? Simply, maybe even humbly, put it's called "cancellation of errors." In other words for part of each leg I was off course to the north, and for part of each leg I was off course I was off to the south...the errors canceled one another and presto I hit the next mark! As with most things skill counts but luck matters!

Biggest fault I used to see when I ran a sea kayaking tour company here in Bar Harbor, Maine was people not pushing with their upper hand thereby losing half their stroke force potential. This is often accompanied by pulling the shaft of the paddle towards the body. I used to tell my students to imagine that the center of their paddle shaft was mounted on a gimbal around which the paddle rotates. The center of the paddle shaft should remain almost stationary over the boat with the blades rotating around that. Do not pull the paddle shaft towards you. As for the Rules of The Road there is a widely accepted belief that paddle driven craft have the right of way. That is simply not true! When the original Rules of The Road were written paddle driven craft were hardly ever encountered and the rules don't even mention them let alone give them the right of way. As John Dowd says in this video "I give way to anything bigger than me." Speaking of rules one of the primary rules I followed during my many years as sea kayaker here in Maine was repeating the rule "Don't tip over!" each time I got in my boat and pushed off from the shore. Happily in more than a decade and many thousands of miles of paddling I never did tip over. This isn't to say that practicing self rescue techniques isn't worth while but rather to stress that avoiding the need for their use is of primary importance. Why? Well I can remember standing beside John Dowd at kayak symposium here in Maine we both spoke at in the 1980s as he yelled "I'd bloody well like to see you try that in four foot seas!" as we watched paddlers demonstrating a rescue technique. I couldn't have said it better myself!

I did my course in Keremeos in 1978. I see my instructor, Liz, doing her course in several clips, here. I'm interested in seeing if any other viewers did their course in the summer of 1978 as my photographs and journals are limited. Please be in touch.

This video series is amazing. I just got my very first sea kayak after borrowing and renting them for years. John Dowd has a great voice too.

about 25 things I saw in this movie would now be called dangerous, inappropriate and made illegal. Probably racist as well. We have lost so much, in so few generations. How sad. My 1979 experience taught me so much which my kids can no longer imagine, just how much growth being seriously challenged can bring. The skills, though rusty, have stayed with me. The confidence gained has altered my path through life. Now they just give out hollow labels. How so, so, very sad.