Boats and safe water travel

Drowning is quick and quiet. A person in trouble cannot shout or wave; they bob upright with the mouth at the surface for 20–60 seconds and go under. Most drownings happen within a few metres of safety.

• Teach everyone to float face-up and swim 25 m before they work on water — children first.
• Nobody on the water alone: two boats, or one person watching from the bank.
• Cold water kills before cold does. Sudden immersion below about 15 °C brings a gasp and fast breathing for about 1 minute: keep the face out, breathe, hold anything that floats. There are then about 10 minutes of useful movement in the arms, and about an hour before hypothermia brings unconsciousness — the 1-10-1 rule.
• Wear something that floats on cold or fast water: a buoyancy aid, or a float made from sealed gourds, a closed dry bag or a short dry log.

A log lifts the weight of the water it displaces minus its own weight, so what a raft carries depends on how light the wood is:

• Dry softwood — pine, spruce, fir, cedar — weighs about 350–550 kg per cubic metre, so each submerged cubic metre lifts 450–650 kg.
• Green wood can weigh 800–1,000 kg per cubic metre and floats almost awash. Season the logs, or use dead standing trees, which have already dried.
• Bamboo, closed at every node, floats high and is the lightest raft material there is.

Worked example: eight dry pine logs, 25 cm across and 4 m long, hold about 1.6 m³ of wood and lift about 850 kg fully submerged. Load to no more than about 400 kg, so the deck stays above the water.

Lash the logs to cross-poles at both ends and the middle, top and bottom, and check every lashing before each trip: natural-fibre rope stretches and shrinks as it wets and dries.

Full build, with drawings: log raft.

The dugout is the oldest known boat — the Pesse canoe from the Netherlands is about 10,000 years old — and needs no joints and no fastenings.

1. Choose a straight, sound log with no rot at the heart, at least 60 cm across for one or two people, of a light, easily worked wood.
2. Shape the outside first: flatten the bottom slightly so it sits upright, and taper the ends.
3. Hollow with fire and adze. Burn a small fire along the top, keep wet clay or mud on the edges so it cannot spread, scrape out the charcoal, and repeat. Fire does most of the work; stone tools are enough.
4. Control the wall: about 2.5 cm on the sides and 5 cm on the bottom. Drill small holes from the outside to that depth, plug them with pegs of a different-coloured wood, and carve inside until the pegs show.
5. Keep it damp and shaded while working and afterwards. A dugout left in hot sun splits along the grain.

A narrow dugout is fast but tips easily. For loads, beginners or open water, make it wider or add an outrigger.

Full build, with drawings: dugout canoe. For one person crossing a river, a coracle takes about two days and 30 laths.

A narrow hull capsizes when its weight rises or shifts to one side. Stability comes from width, weight kept low, or outriggers:

• Outrigger: a float — a light log or a bundle of bamboo — fixed on two or three poles lashed across the hull, well out to one side. It resists being pushed under and being lifted, so the hull cannot roll far either way. A float on each side lets the boat carry a sail.
• Two hulls joined by cross-beams: very stable, and more work.
• Ballast: stones laid in the bottom lower the centre of gravity. Nothing heavy goes above the gunwale.

Fit a sail only when the boat is stable without one — the sail is what tips it over.

The outrigger is drawn and dimensioned in the dugout build; the numbers behind stability are in the boats guide.

• Capacity: for a small open boat, the number of people is about length × beam ÷ 15, both in feet — the US Coast Guard rule of thumb — or about 0.7 people per square metre of length × beam. A 4 m × 0.8 m dugout carries two, not three.
• Freeboard: loaded, the lowest point of the side must stand clear of the water by more than the waves you expect.
• Low and centred: heavy things on the bottom along the centreline. Sit; never stand. One person moves at a time.
• Get in and out by stepping into the middle while holding both sides.

Most boating deaths on rivers happen at a few kinds of place, not in rough water:

• Weirs and low dams. Water falling over a weir forms a recirculating current below it that pulls anything on the surface back into the fall and holds it there — a buoyancy aid is not enough to escape. Keep well clear above and below; carry the boat round on the bank.
• Strainers: fallen trees and debris that let water through but not a boat or a body. The current pins a swimmer against them. Stay wide of trees in the water, especially on the outside of bends, where the current carries you onto them.
• Floods: a river in spate runs several times faster and carries whole trees. Do not launch on a rising river.
• Crossing on foot: moving water above the knee can knock a person over. Cross at a wide, shallow stretch, facing upstream, leaning on a pole or in a line of three holding each other.

People drown trying to save someone else. Work down this order, which keeps the rescuer out of the water:

1. Reach: lie flat on the bank and hold out a pole, branch or paddle.
2. Throw: a throw line — a buoyant bag packed with floating rope — or anything that floats. Throw past the person so the rope falls across them, and get low and braced before they take the weight.
3. Row: go out in a boat and let them hold the stern; do not haul them in over the side.
4. Go: swim out only if trained, and take a float to hand them — never offer your own body.

Keep a throw line and a long pole at every landing. Someone pulled out not breathing needs 5 rescue breaths first, then CPR: drowning is a breathing emergency before it is a heart one. See first aid.