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Recently, I’ve been studying for a pilot’s license and came across an interesting way to think about attitudes that might get you into trouble. These attitudes appear in the FAA’s (Federal Aviation Administration) Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge and are described as a predisposition that motivates a person to respond to people, situations or events is a manner aligned with the attitude. They identify five hazardous attitudes that interfere with decision making:  anti-authority, impulsivity, invulnerability, macho and resignation (see page 2-5). You can look for these attitudes in yourself and your paddling partners. Once you identify that you know they exist, you can overcome a hazardous attitude by redirecting the attitude…

In 2013 while on a multi-day backpacking trip in the Maroon Bells, Ty Soukup tried a standard freeze-dried meal for dinner. He got sick. Earlier in the year, he had started the paleo diet, a diet which according to Google definitions is “based on the types of foods presumed to have been eaten by early humans, consisting chiefly of meat, fish, vegetables, and fruit, and excluding dairy or grain products and processed food.” If you’ve had a typical freeze-dried backpacking meal, you know that they’re full of salt and potatoes or pasta. Those ingredients don’t align with a paleo diet. Literally sick from standard freeze-dried backpacking meals that didn’t align…

There are several Facebook paddling groups that I find enjoyable and both approach safety in two different ways. The approaches couldn’t be more polarized. One group focuses on safety and understands safety. The other group rallies against safety. Two recent posts demonstrate the difference. In one group, a respectful safety conversation was had after someone posted about safety. In the other, people railed against the original poster and eventually the post was deleted by an admin. The Post in the Pro Kayak Safety Group The first post was in Inland Seas, Kayaking the Great Lakes from one of the most experienced kayakers in North America and he posted a photo taken…

Throughout the years, PaddlingLight has provided information on cold water and winter paddling, so if you are a long-term reader, you’ve probably read articles. But if you just started to read PaddlingLight or came here via a Google search, you might not understand everything that goes into cold water paddling or expedition paddling. While this web-a-zine often covers philosophy and gear more now than skills, but skills are more important (we do and have covered skills as well) than both. One skill that we haven’t covered often is the need to field test your gear. While I think that many long-term paddlers take it for granted that we’re going to test…

Selecting the gear you bring on a kayaking trip feels like a balance between comfort, weight and size. But, when selecting the right, modern gear, you can camp in comfort without having to carry significant weight or bulk. As you learned in How to Pack a Sea Kayak Part 2: Packing Your Kayak, a sea kayak has different compartments used to store gear. Within those compartments, you store different gear types to make certain gear more accessible than others. For example, if you store you paddle on the front deck, it makes it hard to access gear from the front hatch during the day, so you could stash your camping gear…