The essential concepts of river PPE: Gear guide for whitewater paddling and rescue

Learn essential concepts for how to dress for whitewater canoeing, kayaking, and raft guiding.
Let us know if you have any questions or comments :)
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[@AcrylArtca]

Wow tons of info! Should watch this a few times! Thanks Willa!

[@LucasPetersson]

Thank you for the very good and professional advice! Greetings from Belgium 👋

[@ericjudd9088]

Kudos for all the information shared. It's nice to see someone who has ignored that stupid plastic knife mount on the PFD and mounted it high where the likelihood of it getting snagged is almost nil. By the way, nice knife choice! Great safety suggestions! Keep up the good work! Eric at KayaksNStuff

[@Evan_Le5]

You awesome people make such great content. Even the stuff from 10 years ago has been so helpful, I watch through a couple times a year🙌 thanks for helping me get out there safely

[@borealriver]

Thanks very much :) That’s great to hear.

[@wildernesscanoeassociation]

Thanks Willa!

[@Obliticus]

Great info! What brand/model is the rescue knife you are using?

[@borealriver]

It’s the CRKT Bear Claw - a lot of our instructors really like the NRS Pilot and Co-Pilot knife

[@Obliticus]

@@borealriver Thanks, I'll check it out. I don't care for the NRS knives because they use, relatively speaking, poor steel. 420HC is pretty much bottom barrel in US steels and you can do much better.

[@borealriver]

@@Obliticus Interesting, thanks for sharing. On our river rescue courses, we do a drill where students have to swim out into the current, grab a rope that's anchored to a rock, take out their knife, and cut off a small piece. We find that those with the NRS Pilot and Co-Pilot knives consistently are most successful with this whereas those who have some of the other knives really struggle. So as far as outcome goes, these knives seem to work great. But please let us know if you find something that you like and we'd love to test it out.

[@lindik6172]

@@borealriver Many thanks for the name of the knife! It seems to me that we have a number of problems with this in Russia. Personally, I used a knife not designed for this and fixed it exactly like yours, but I had to saw off its tip, now I know exactly what to look for. In general, I needed a sling cutter in an accident only once, in 2021. Then no one in that group owned a slingshot, they had to take out a knife and hand it to me, it seemed like they had been doing it forever. Unfortunately, I seem to have learned the lesson from this situation alone.