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A Paddle
A raft
A place to set up your raft in a near vertical position
A grab handle on your thwart.
Distributing your weight
Body position
What to do with your hands
In this lesson, Trevor is taking a look at body positioning for steep, vertical drops. We want to take a look at a technique for running drops over half the length of your boat in height, and over 50 degrees in steepness. We’ll be taking a look at some concepts of biomechanics and how running vertical drops can influence the way you sit and brace yourself.
Body Positioning
Boofing is one technique to help you navigate vertical or near vertical drops; however, as these drops become taller boofing becomes less of an option due to the risk of back injuries from a hard landing. Running vertical drops can significantly increase your risk profile when you are rafting, so you want to make sure your body position is on point when you are running these kinds of features. Our team opts for the triangle approach to running steep drops. We want to make a triangle between our hand and foot positions; our hands make two corners of the triangle with our feet as the final downward facing point.
Within this approach, we want our body to be laid back along the outer tube of the raft with our head in line with our spine. In a triangular grab you can take a hit from almost any direction and still maintain contact with the raft. This is especially useful on larger drops if the raft turns sideways. By maintaining contact with the raft, you are less likely to sustain an injury, and with your body position laid back you are also less likely to receive a whiplash type injury. When you are in this position there are three options you can take with your feet; generally your feet will both be in front of you, but depending on how you orient them, you may have different results upon impact.
Foot Position
The first position is the two-feet-under-the-thwart approach. This can give you the maximum amount of locked-in security, however this comes at a significant risk if the floor separates from the thwart. If a separation opens up, you could slide under the thwart; then when the boat comes back together at the bottom of the drop, it can place enough force on your lower legs to cause significant injury.
The second position is two feet forward while bracing off of the thwart. When you are falling, your feet will be on top of the thwart helping you to absorb the impact at the bottom with your legs. The drawback to this tactic is that your feet could slip off of the thwart sending you forward into the front compartment, and potentially causing a shoulder injury. Additionally, you could end up in a stern stall with the downpouring water standing the bow of your boat in the air. If this is the case you have nothing to help you brace against your weight falling backwards or the curtain pulling you out of the raft. If you end up falling off sideways you will face a similar problem with this foot positioning.
The final position that boaters can use is to have the inside foot tucked under the thwart, and the outside foot tucked into the corner of the thwart/tube/floor intersection. This allows a little bit of both benefits from above. The foot bracing against the thwart can help absorb the impact while preventing the foot tucked under the thwart from sliding forward. The foot tucked under the thwart can help keep you in contact with the raft when you impact the bottom of the drop, increasing your ability to stay in during the aftermath of the drop. This position does share a little bit of both of the risks for the two-foot positions listed above.
In any case you should understand the risks with each possible foot position so you can properly handle what might happen at the bottom of the drop. Not every drop is the same, and it requires you to understand how your landing will play out to determine what the best course of action is.
Hand Position
For larger vertical drops and waterfalls, we recommend having some sort of grab strap in place. There are a variety of different rigging systems that can work; however, it is important that you have something for your inside hand to grab onto when you are running drops. Our team prefers smaller handles that can only accommodate your hand. With these sorts of handles, taking a palm-up approach can help you use larger arm muscles to avoid injury, though the risk is never zero that you could get injured from the drop.
For the outside hand we often have a lot of people discussing the fact that we let go of our T-grips. This is where the importance of good form and perimeter lines can come into play. By reaching out and pointing the T-grip towards the bow of the boat, the grip will plunge into the water and the blade being on the training edge of the boat will help prevent the paddle from flying off in a random direction. The key is to grab the perimeter line with several of your fingers. By grabbing a perimeter line, you achieve several things with your body position:
The first and most obvious benefit of grabbing the perimeter line is that the paddle should remain in the general area of the perimeter line rather than a person’s face. Another benefit of grabbing the perimeter line is that it gets your body lying flat against the tube. This helps to spread out the load by first keeping your body from rolling inward, thus helping to avoid a twisting back injury on the landing. It also helps to share the load by allowing your other arm to absorb a small amount of the impact and spreading some of the stress away from the thwart attachment.
When to use this positioning
For steep drops we want to look at drops that are more than half of the length of the boat. So, if you have a 10-foot raft, any drop over 5 feet is what you want to be concerned with. This is because boats tend to fall as they reach the halfway point of their length. When they start to teeter on a vertical drop, anything over half the length will cause the raft to plunge vertically over the drop. Any drop less than half the length of the boat will cause the boat to teeter and “bridge the gap” or reconnect with the bottom at a less than vertical angle.
Safety Tips
Running very steep drops is a difficult and dangerous prospect. Attempting to run drops like this should only be undertaken by expert boaters with solid experience. This video is no substitute for hands on training, however here are some safety tips to keep in mind if you do attempt this.
Understand your body position and practice getting into position quickly and efficiently.
Take time to develop a system for how you place your feet and hands to absorb the impact
Develop a system for how you will be rigging to keep you in the raft.
Make sure you have multiple layers of safety and an evacuation plan in place. Having people with medical experience standing by with first aid equipment should be a top priority.
Make sure you do not lock out your knees to help reduce the strain of the impact on your knees.
