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What to Wear for Cold Water
This decision depends on water temperature, air temperature, your paddling skill, your experience on and in cold water, water and weather conditions (wind strength, direction), proximity to shore and who you are paddling with. Don't dress less carefully because you put any responsibility on others for your rescue (not a good mindset). Paddling with groups that have a strong “watch out for each other” ethic you should still be at least as prepared as you would be paddling solo. Otherwise you are putting unfair responsibility and risk on your fellow paddlers and at the very least reducing their freedom to enjoy their own outing. And If you are responsible for other paddlers, particularly less experienced ones then you may even need to dress and prepare more carefully for more potential water immersion in order to assist in someone else's rescue.
- Paddlers Who Got Too Cold But Lived to Talk About It
- Bellingham Coast Guard Rescue Dec. 2022
- Paddlers Who Did Not Survive Cold Water
- When Conditions Changed
- Doug Tompkins's Death in Chile Dec 2015
- A Very Sad Accident November 15, 2007 incident
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Recommendations from/for Experienced Boaters
Canada
- Vancouver Island, BC, CA
- Victoria and nearby
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Norway
- What Norwegian Paddler Sune Wendelboe Wears Through the Winter (plus additional winter paddling advice)
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USA
Midwest/Great Lakes
(water temperatures in the Great Lakes get close to freezing in the winter and cold water (~5.5º C/42º F) from the deep can well up from the depths anytime of the year depending on weather. Paddling conditions are also often “oceanic”)
- Lake Michigan
- Lake Superior
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Pacific Northwest USA
- Bellingham, WA, USA
- Columbia River (the Gorge) OR/WA, USA
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San Francisco Bay Area
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Recommendations for Average and Novice Boaters
- There is no universal formula for what is right for you. This is an education process. Experienced paddlers can take years to develop their scale which evolves and changes with experience, skill, and new paddle clothing options. Please start on the conservative end of the scale in terms of water temperature and weather conditions and incrementally test how long you can survive in the water given what you have on and where you are. Is that long enough for you to have a good chance to swim to shore (probably not at all easy in rough conditions and much more than a short distance from shore)? Or long enough for you to have a good chance to be rescued?
- Read DJ's Cold Water Checklist and practice that thought process and pre-test approach.
- Safely tests - find ways to safely test your paddling skills and clothing choices for on water conditions that you can expect
- Test your “in water skills” such as remounts in rough water, radio use, ability to use other signals (and their effectiveness - can anyone hear your whistle more than 25 yds away in a 20 mph wind? upwind, downwind?)
- More examples of some individual preferences:
- Read cold water safety incident stories involving cold water to learn more about the difficulties that can spring up in cold water paddling. And read other incident stories to gain a greater appreciation of other difficult circumstances that would only be amplified in a cold water setting. These stories should help you to avoid false confidence or reliance on untested assumptions.
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Available Clothing Options
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Dealing With/Minimizing Overheating
There are various suggestions sprinkled around the wiki about ways to minimize overheating when you are dressed warmly enough to protect yourself during immersion. We are now going to try to collect and centralize such comments and suggestions here.
- Avoiding Overheating When Weather is Warm but You Are Dressed for Cold Water Immersion National Center for Cold Water Safety
- Having removable/adjustable clothing like warm hats and hoods that can be removed or adjusted
- Hoodies that are part of wetsuits can be pulled down to release heat
- Cooling down if needed
- Taking a dip in the water/Practice remounts
- Sticking your hat in the water and back on your head.
- From Jim Schulz:
- “One thing you can do to help keep from overheating in a neoprene wetsuit is to wear a long sleeve SPF shirt on the outside of the wetsuit. It will keep the sun from heating up the black neoprene and you can also get it wet if you need to which will help create some evaporative cooling (Ed: These will work better on days when there is sunshine which are also the kinds of days when you will have the greatest tendency to overheat. And cold water on your outside shirt could also add a bit of conductive cooling. Cotton works very well for evaporative cooling. Every thing needs to be kept in balance - if you are downwinding, you may find that you are kept sufficiently wet to not require or want additional cooling). These were suggestions given to us on a web meeting from the director of the National Center for Cold Water Safety, Moulton Avery (see article link from the Center above) and has worked for me on sunny days when the water is still very cold. He also recommended wearing thin neoprene gloves under pogies which I don't do but I do sometimes carry some neoprene gloves with me on downwinds just in case. On really cold days depending on how far I have to walk to the put in, I wear winter gloves to the put in then stash them in a dry bag on my boat then paddle with pogies then put them on after the paddle to carry the boat to the car. This is something that creek boater taught me!”
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