Mystery of dead kayakers. This bugs me.

[piscator]

Must a been aliens....

But as a former white water kayaker it's easy enough to get trapped under flow through debris and you drown in place.
...



...

The right side of that pic has strainers and current big enough to do the job on a SOT.


That's just what happened: they got fucked up in a strainer or a sweeper that got them all.

[mistermack]

I think a sit-on-top would just float straight over a strainer. I can't imagine any natural strainer that would trap all three. Once you were in the water, yes, it could keep you under.

Maybe a mini tornado flipped all three off their kayaks. Still can't see why they couldn't just get back on though, if that happened. Or swim to the bank.

I might invest in some swim flippers for my next experiment with kayaking. You never know.

I've never understood why lifeguards don't use them.

[macdoc]

Not if it's cold - takes no time to be incapacitated.

One reason most kayakers wear a shortie wetsuit. Just came across mine the other day.

[mistermack]

Not if it's cold - takes no time to be incapacitated.

One reason most kayakers wear a shortie wetsuit. Just came across mine the other day.

I used to windsurf quite a lot years ago, and got myself a made-to-measure wetsuit.
It came in bits, you glued it together, but it fitted perfectly.

The only thing was, you could choose the thickness, and I chose the thickest, as the price difference wasn't much. When you jumped in wearing that, you popped up like a cork!
It was too thick really, it was very warm, but a bit stiff.

I have one now, much thinner.
I would wear it in the kayak if I was going to try white water again. Which I won't.
Nice calm flat cruising is all I'm interested in.

Having said that, I would have gone with these guys, probably, if I had been around. The river looks pretty innocuous.
I certainly wouldn't go down a stretch that I didn't know about though. They had apparently done this paddle before, so it doesn't seem there were any fearsome hazards.
Posters on that kayaking thread said that they had done that stretch and there wasn't anything nasty there.

[mistermack]

I think I might have worked it out.

Their car was parked about fifty yards upstream from this bridge in Hexham. I'm thinking that instead of getting into the river BELOW the bridge, they got in above, and thought they'd run the fast water below the bridge :
Their bodies were found miles downstream, but I reckon they only made about fifty yards of the trip alive.

[piscator]

[FBM]

The linked article in the OP mentioned unpredictable weather and storms. Lightning strike on the water nearby them?

[mistermack]

[mistermack]

The linked article in the OP mentioned unpredictable weather and storms. Lightning strike on the water nearby them?

I suppose that's quite feasible. I don't know much about how lightning behaves when it hits water though.

You would think it would just go to earth, rather than flow across the surface. But electric eels can certainly knock a man unconscious or even kill.

Maybe lightning would have left some tell-tale marks though.

[FBM]

All it would have to do would be to strike close enough to stun them so that they lose control, flip over and drown. A indirect hit may not leave obvious signs. http://www.mikeholt.com/mojonewsarchive ... 020716.htm

[mistermack]

All it would have to do would be to strike close enough to stun them so that they lose control, flip over and drown. A indirect hit may not leave obvious signs. http://www.mikeholt.com/mojonewsarchive ... 020716.htm

I certainly think it's a very feasible answer. They would probably need to be pretty close together, for it to knock all three out, but that could have been the case.

From an electrical point of view though, your kayak is an insulator, and the water encircling it is a good conductor. You would think that the electricity would follow the line of least resistance. A bit like a car, or plane, the lightning goes around, and doesn't harm the occupants. That's just guesswork though.
You would need examples to study, to get a better idea.

I have a feeling though, that if there was lightning activity in the area at the time, it would have been mentioned and suggested as a possible cause.

There is a report of a dog walker, who saw them at a spot called ''devil's water'' and they were ok then.
One of the bodies was found less than a mile downstream from that, so you would think the dog walker would have heard and seen that lightning strike.

I'm not so sure about the dog walker though. He apparently said that the canoeists would have entered a ''fast flowing gorge'' further down, and there is no such thing. So it might be a witness that is best ignored.

[FBM]

Well, as I'm sure you know, when you're kayaking you're being splashed by water constantly. There's no clear dividing line between wet and dry, so I'm not sure that the kayaks would have been effective insulators. Anyhoo, it's just speculation. Maybe the autopsies will turn up something.

[mistermack]

http://travel.aol.co.uk/2012/08/16/kaya ... -in-essex/

This is the only case I can find on the net, of someone killed by lightning in a kayak.
He was significantly burned, it looks like a direct hit.

Can't find any other cases worldwide, so it does seem to be very rare. I'm surprised, I would have expected more than that.
Maybe thundery weather puts people off anyway.

I did once read that if you are out walking, and suspect an imminent lightning strike, stand on one leg, or keep your feet tightly together.
Apparently, if lightning hits the ground near you, it kills by flowing up one leg, and down the other. The further apart your feet are, the worse it is. That's why cattle and horses get killed.

Another thing you can do is get out a pointy umbrella, give it to a friend to hold, and get as far away from him as possible.

[FBM]

The umbrella idea rocks. I will keep that in mind...

[MiM]

Wouldn't the most obvious explanation in a case like this be that one of them got into trouble, then the two others tried to help, from where things started escalating...