Strap-in or Lash-in your gear

[eckilson]

Until my trip on the West Branch of the Penobscot this was a theoretical question. This is not a place where you would expect to have a swim since it is almost all flatwater, but we did. There is a short section of quickwater toward the end of Big Island. We went up on a rock, and over we went. First time I dumped with a loaded tripping boat.

I was in the stern and was able to quickly flip the boat over gear and all and wade it to shore. My partner in the bow had a little tougher time bouncing off rocks, but he eventually got to shore. I did have to unload the boat to get it empty, but we were quickly on our way.

Back to the original question, do you strap in or lash in your gear. We had the gear strapped in, and it did stay in place providing some floatation and making it easy to flip the boat back over. If lashed gear started floating out of the boat it would have been a lot more difficult. At least on rivers, I am now clearly in the camp that says strap-in your gear.

Not sure what is better on a lake. With the gear strapped in you can probably get the boat flipped over, but then what do you do? Tow the boat and paddlers to shore, try to paddle the swapped boat, try to empty it and bail it out? I guess it depends on where you are in the lake, but none of it sounds easy.

What do you do - strap-in or lash-in?

 

[tketcham]

Maybe it's because I started out as a whitewater paddler but I've always strapped gear into the bottom of the canoe. I've never actually capsized a canoe on a trip but we did get swamped by big whitecap waves on a reservoir of the Columbia River once and we just barged our way to shore and dumped out the water and kept going. Happened several times until we reached the take-out. I'm convinced that having the flotation of the packs & dry bags strapped into the canoe kept us from actually tipping over, with all our gear floating around in the lake.

 

[scoutergriz]

I rarely strap my gear in except in lake crossings. virtually everything is in a dry bag and if you z-fold the top before rolling the excess very little (if any) water can get in- I proved this to a class that didn't believe me by filling the bottom of a 30L dry bag with a sleeping bag then piling my kitchen gear on top, doing a z-fold, and then rolling the last 4-5 inches- that bag floated in a small pond with the opening down from breakfast until dinner and the sleeping bag was still bone dry.
On rivers or small ponds with no current I don't tie in because I'd rather pick up a yard sale than fight to upright and bail a canoe full of gear- in a river the gear eventually grounds itself or snags along the shoreline and is easily retrieved, in a pond it generally stays in close proximity or slowly drifts down wind. I do generally tie small, lightweight gear to a larger pack and ALWAYS have my spare paddle tucked under bungees because it's no fun chasing your paddle when you're up the creek without one...

 

[Pseudonym]

On any whitewater trip, I securely strap my gear into the canoe so that everything remains a solid unit in any capsize. That has served me well through countless flips and swamps. I remember a Bill Mason video in which he extolled the virtues of a loose lashing, because it allowed him to easily empty a swamped canoe by letting his packs float in the water, next to the boat and attached by lashing, as he turned over the boat to empty it, but the risk of entanglement freaks me out too much. Getting a leg wrapped in a lashing seems like a good way to drown.

Oftentimes, I end up paddling a borrowed or rented canoe that I can't outfit exactly as I would like, so I rely on the seats and thwarts as the attachment points. Here's how I strapped in my gear on a recent trip with a borrowed canoe:



In the stern, the attachment to the rear thwart is hidden by my pack flaps. The brown pack is a resolute and lovely one made by @Art D

Over 50 miles of regular Class III rapids on the Grand Ronde, we flipped twice and fully swamped twice but didn't lose anything.

In my own canoes, I like to glue D-rings into the bottom of the boat, so that I'm not putting undo pressure on the thwarts and seats. Fair warning: one of our other boat's lost their yoke in a capsize, presumably because the gear lashings pulled it out. In the photo below, we've begun implementing a makeshift repair with a piece of driftwood. We later wrapped the yoke it with gorilla tape and also taped the strap to the underside of the boat to reduce the risk of it snagging. It lasted the rest of the trip and perhaps the next.


Yes, you can paddle a completely swamped canoe more effectively than you might think. I've edited the canoeists faces to protect the innocent, but here's a good example. They were laughing their heads off the whole time!


On a lake crossing, I would use the lashing strategy because, at least in theory, one could right an empty boat with less water therein and then determine whether or not you can retain any gear. That said, if you capsize or swamp a canoe with a tripping load in the middle of a lake, the conditions that caused said calamity likely preclude you from any real self rescue aside from swimming. I've lost gear that way before.

I've been burned on Chesuncook. Twenty-one years ago, I was a young man who didn't know any better and we were a big group, setting out across the lake from the Village, having just snacked on some of their legendary fudge. We were "supposed to" camp on Gero island but never should have left shore given how the wind was coming up. About halfway across, canoes started swamping and we did our best to tee rescue one another until we were all too swamped to help anymore. Thankfully, someone from the village had their eyes on us and came out in a power boat to save us, one boat after the next. The calamity divided our group on each side of the lake, with half of us camped on Gero Island for the night and the rest back at the village with tents pitched on someone's front lawn. I lost my own bag of personal clothing and did the rest of the trip (through Chamberlain, Telos and Webster Brook to Mattagamon) with little more than the shirt on my back and a few precious borrowed items. Learned more than a few lessons that day!