Who's diving off of a kayak in 10' seas?
A few years back I was freediving occaisionally off my surfski, reefs off of Lake Worth public Beach...Horseshoe, Pauls and Casino. These are awesome reefs, about 40 to 55 feet deep, and about 3/4 of a mile from the beach....With a group of freedivers, each with their own kayak( mostly scupper pros), we would normally pick days that were flat or 2 foot seas or less....However, on more than one occaision, we began with very calm seas, and mid way through our freediving, it would start to blow, and a storm would move in....On one occasion, this happened so fast that our first real impression of changing weather, was seeing what looked like bullets being machine gunned into the surface as we headed back to surface from the bottom......At first, we elected to ignore this, as the diving was still awesome....After 20 minutes more, the storm was becoming brutal, the kayaks were pulling on us from the huge wind( we tow them while diving), and we all decided the big 6 foot and growing waves were killing the fun....so we aborted.....And once on the boats, the storm had gotten so bad we could not see which way the shore was....but the predominant wind was from the east, toward the shore, and this was the way the waves were headed, so this was the way we paddled.....
My surfski is made for surfing big waves between Islands in Hawaii type conditions, so this was actually kind of fun, until I realized that the waves were actually headed "out to sea", as the wind had turned....I had to alert the others, well behind me, and then the new course in was with the waves quite sideways to us, and not nearly as much fun.
Again, the surfski can handle anything imaginable, so it was just inconveniance. The scupper pros were not tipping, but they were wallowing in the big side waves.
By the time we reached shore, the surf had ten footers. This was not hard to come in on, as long as you time the wave, and make sure you stay pointing nearly straight in---if the boat gets more than 30 degrees sideways, the wave will overcome the rudder and you will be pushed sideways and have a nasty minute or so of being rolled. If you don't get up to speed and gain the ride on the wave, you can have your rudder go through the back end of the wave, and then you are ultimately in danger again of getting sideways---but most people with surfskis have tried play-days in the surf before, so this is more of a fun thing, up to 6 or 7 foot waves....Tens or bigger means you risk having the boat destroyed if you miscalculate and it gets thrown in sideways.....and then there is also the dismount prior to being thrown on the sand by a huge wave....also not good for the boat....
But my point was, weather can come up suddenly, especially if you are on an offshore reef. Alot can change in wave height in 30 minutes or an hour, especially in a full blown storm. It is nice to have a kayak that can handle anything we are dumb enough to end up in
Here is an article I did on the surfski as a Freediving platform, years ago....
SFDJ
---------- Post added September 10th, 2014 at 08:52 AM ----------
Here is an excellent video showing a Fenn surfski doing ocean waves in a tidal current environment--we have this type of environment at the Boynton Inlet in S Fl --of course a=ours is alot warmer than this one
Start at about a minute or so in to the video.
[video=vimeo;97145503]http://vimeo.com/97145503[/video]
---------- Post added September 10th, 2014 at 08:55 AM ----------
So Yeah...Kayaks are so last year.....
Surfskis are the way to go!!!
In Boca Raton Fl, we have Venture Sports/ Bruce Gibson, as the top distributer of Surfskis in South fl....
