Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Label your gear!

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I am a sloppy guy. The last 2 pool-sessions in Alphen reminded me of this annoying characteristic again. I missed a sprayskirt at the end of the each session. After a little quest I could retrieve them - they got mixed up between the sprayskirts of the club. My fault: I should keep my gear better together. No drama, sometimes I just get a bit tired of myself. This weekend (just before the next pool session) I finally labelled the sprayskirts with my name - in order to make at least the puzzle afterwards(which one is mine? They are all black...) less complicated. Of course I should have done this much earlier, so simple and it makes live a lot easier, but when you're sloppy like me: you often neglect these kind of simple things!

Besides sloppiness, there are more profound (Safety) reasons to label your kayak gear. It can avoid search and rescue efforts when there isn't actually a person missing. Contact information can also help rescue teams to narrow the search area in the case of an incident. Sherri Mertz published an interesting article about the recent "Label your gear" campaign of the US Coastguard. Click here for Sherri's article.

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