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Waders and Drowing, again....
Despite the same nonsense repeated again and again and again, wearing waders is not going cause somebody to drown if they go head over heels in a big river.
The water in the waders is the same weight as the water outside the waders. Water in your waders isn't going to bring you down.
Scuba suits work by water going in and staying (then your body heat warms up the water inside the suit). Anybody ever hear of a scuba diver drowning because he's wearing a wet suit?
In other news, Catskills don't float on the tips of the collar and tail with the hook out of the water.
-Steven
The water in the waders is the same weight as the water outside the waders. Water in your waders isn't going to bring you down.
Scuba suits work by water going in and staying (then your body heat warms up the water inside the suit). Anybody ever hear of a scuba diver drowning because he's wearing a wet suit?
In other news, Catskills don't float on the tips of the collar and tail with the hook out of the water.
-Steven
Replies
I would think of fisherman as an emerger - with floatant you float, without you slowly sink and a scuba diver as a foam beetle with just enough lead to sink it
1. Steven is right - the water doesn't have any "weight" that drags you down.
2. There wasn't enough air in the waders to float my legs up. Whatever air was there was offset by the weight of my legs, I guess, but they didn't really float.
3. The wading belt doesn't really stop the water from coming in as much as you'd think. In one instance in particular, I fell in wearing waders in the winter. The rush of ice water against my nards confirmed for me that the wading belt wasn't slowing the water down much.
4. The main problem I experienced with going into the water with waders on is that wading boots are clunky, cumbersome, and make it harder to swim.
5. Steven, if you pee in a scuba suit, does it help warm you up faster?
bd
Sea water is a natural floatant to some extent. Some seas, like the Dead Sea, are so salty that people eat breakfast out there on floating tables.
The air trapped in the bottom strikes me as a fallacy as well. If you fill a jug with water, does air get trapped permanently on the bottom? I don't think so.
Mike
This is absolutely true. Water is heavier than air.
But presumably, by the time you're in such a position, you're going to be pretty much safe.
while I am not neccessarily disputing your overall concept ... this I have to say is playing a lil fast and loose with the facts
the volume of water that enters into a wetsuit on a diver versus the volume of water that can fill a pair of waders is siginificantly different ... buoyancy of an object is based upon water displacement if the volume of water inside a set of waders combined with the ability of a anglers clothing to absorb water and add to that the amount of water absorbed by any external gear then an angler in waders exceeds that displacement then an angler can most certainly sink
also the neoprene in a wetsuit is actually millions of small cells and they don't all fill up with water and a wetsuit is not completely water tight as there is an exchange of volume inside with water outside ... the more minimal the better but unlike a pair of waders that can just keep filling until full using the wetsuit as a comparison isn't exactly same-same
no
but after a week of that the dogs in customs can't smell the Cuban cigars wrapped up inside them in your luggage
An old acquaintance and colleague of mine, a skilled outdoors-man and a far better fisherman and writer than I could ever hope to be, Datus Proper, died while fishing. Most likely he slipped, hit his head and thus drowned in a few inches of water just off the bank in Hyalite Creek, near his home in Bozeman, MT..
Sad, but there are far worse ways to go.
Ya hitting your head or falling from a height, etc all while alone
fact is any activity has risks
This seems a little off to me. As in "this guy was over confident or over familiar, and he died because he got careless and that wouldn't happen to me."
The fact is, none of us are 100 percent vigilant all of the time, and stuff like this could happen to any of us. The fact that this guy died instead of any of us just means we're lucky, not good.
bd
Unless you're fishing naked, which is a picture I'd like to immediately forget, wearing or not wearing waders adds nothing to the equation. And I doubt waders absorb sufficient amounts of water to cause a problem.
Lee Wulff jumped off a freaking bridge in waders to prove this, yet the myth goes on and on.
The only caveat is that if your waders fit loosely at the top you should wear a wading belt. The danger is not how much water enters, but that that you can lose control as filled waders act like a reverse drift anchor, pulling you in a swift current.
All of Proper's other books are well worth reading - Pheasants of the Mind, The Last Old Place and Running Waters.
http://www.amazon.com/Datus-C.-Proper/e/B001K7ZPFW
A drift anchor (AKA sea anchor) looks like a wind sock. You let it drift behind a boat on a lake or at sea to stabilize and slow the drift. If loose-fitting waders fill with water in a swift current they can pull the angler downstream rapidly.
Another analogy: a drift anchor is like a parachute brake on a dragster, but full waders in a rapid current would be like a spinnaker.
I think I might have read Running Waters - I've definitely read two books by him. I'm pretty jealous you knew him.
I'm not buying the drift anchor thing. I'm having a running discussion with Ross on the home page about this.
Here's a question for you. If a sailboat was in a current that was the exact same speed and direction as the prevailing wind, would the boat go faster than the current?
http://www.sexyloops.com/articles/killerwader.shtml
But he makes a number of good points. Not sure if swimming a across a pool measures drag in the same way as the current of a strong riffle, but something to think about.
I had to swim across a deep pool last year (got in to one of those positions where you can't go forwards and can't go backwards). I don't remember any serious drag.
I think the sailboat would go faster than the current if it had enough sail. This would vary greatly by hull design.
BTW - I hardly knew Datus Proper. I think we had lunch in the State Dept. cafeteria once, organized by a mutual friend who knew we both fished, and I ran into him in the corridors a few times. We never fished together or got to know each other beyond that.
not talking 'absorbance' but rather the volume that will fill a pair of waders ... not matter how you try to splain it as the weight being the same it interferes with the wearers ability to displace water which interupts buoyancy
comparing it to a diver and neutral buoyancy and saltwater is wayyyyy off
You ever swim with waders on? It ain't that hard and you don't sink. That's a fact as experienced by yours truly dog paddling one handed while holding my fanny pack in the air.
F-cking beavers.
When you are negotiating the current, even swimming at a downriver angle, until you make the eddy, the current is dragging you wherever its headed, which means dragging you towards the sweepers its piled into the outside bank alot of the time.
This force is much more difficult to fight with waders on because of the wind sock effect. Add in no life jacket and youre in real trouble if you arent a really strong person, both from a swimming perspective and from the perspective of negotiating the near death experience youre going to have when you get jammed into those sweepers.
If you dont believe me, try swimming out of the sweeper before youre on the rocks just above axtell bridge on the gally next time youre out here, even without waders youll have a hell of a time. I dont think I would try it with waders on.
You're waders are filled, more water isn't getting in creating a windsock effect. You're effed, as you noted, even without the waders. I doubt you're more effed.
I think Ralph on the FFM thread makes some very good points. Especially about the reversal of the white water norm of feet first floating, think he's dead on there about turning around if you aren't in a rapid. But that also made me consider something I've never thought of. If wearing a wading belt (that's tight) I wear one of those large back brace ones, it might be a good idea to undo your shoulder straps in a swept away situation.
No one that I noticed has mentioned the tactic of wading up to your belt right off the bat and redoing your belt with all the air pushed out of your waders...this is helpful with drag just wading the rest of the day.
I think the presumption on all this academic discussion is that a wading belt is being used and intact ... the odds of that happening 100% especially in swift water is about nill
as for the sailboat question ... think of it this way ... when drift diving along a reef wall the dive boat is usually drifting with the current as are the divers at depth most often when the divers surface the boat is in the same spot
uhhh no
the surface area on the Outside of the waders whether filled or not is what the current is catching and creating that affect ... plus even when filled that effect will still occur because water cannot compress and it is pushing that larger volume along as well
I think your presumption about displacement and equal weight are incorrect ... especially when involving complex currents and water column that is not moving uniformly
To illustrate in a way that you can reproduce easily. Take a bucket with a handle to your gill pond, wade in, submerge it and then slowly spin yourself in a circle dragging the bucket in your hand. You will notice there isnt much drag effect, that at a slow enough speed, the bucket feels like its at an equilibrium with the still water.
Then spin as quickly as you can and you will notice the drag coefficient increase significantly on the bucket, making it tiring for you to drag the bucket at the higher speed for long. That is the sea anchor effect that made the person jammed in the logjam feel like he weighed 1000lbs in purnell's anecdote and why the guy had his waders ripped to his ankles in Bob's madison river anecdote.