Half Slice Warning
Kayakers these days enjoy 40 years of improvement in boat design. Better outfitting makes it easier to fit the boat, short boats pivot quickly, planing hulls electrify surfing, and highly rockered bows make the boats skip over the top of holes. We love these new boats.
Enter “half slice” kayaks, currently the rage. A half slice has a low volume stern and a regular or high volume bow. This smaller stern makes the boats more playful on the river, allowing blasting, tail stands and other tricks. Unfortunately the smaller stern incurs a risk, and newer paddlers may not recognize it.
Consider the April 2023 drowning of Gavin Jostad, a beloved 17 year old from the Hood River area who died this April while paddling on the South Yuba in California. His low volume stern got sucked into a sieve. He was a good paddler, really good, but only as experienced as a person can be at such a tender age. He must have had a sense of the risk. He’d resuscitated a buddy who would have drowned but for his decisive actions. The question is, did he fully realize the risk incurred by paddling a boat with a smaller stern? And do you? The word on the river today is that Gavin might still be alive if he’d been in a full-volume boat.
There are pro boaters out there who can paddle class 5 in half slices and make it look good. On Youtube you can see paddlers running huge drops and boofing nasty pourovers in half slices, all the while pulling stunts that use that slicy stern. They make it look so fun.
Older boaters remember squirt boating, and later the advent of “full slice” playboats. We remember when folks started getting pinned in the river because their boats were low volume. We remember when “creek boats” became a thing because people realized just how much having more volume in a boat keeps it on the surface and out of pin spots.
Low volume boats spend more time down in the water where the rocks are, and are more prone to pinning or getting sucked into sieves. Half slices are no exception. You may paddle a half slice with a big fat bow that works for creekin’—as long as you are going forward, as long as you are in control. But we all know that sometimes the river takes control. That fun stern is a liability.
It does not serve us well to be casual about risks. You may think you’re a good enough paddler to run the same rivers in a half slice that you run in your puffy boat. You might get away with it for a long time. Rather than continuing to push your luck, maybe a conscious choice about what you’ll paddle in each type of boat will prevent the eventual bad outcome.
Lee Baker, who taught the recent LCCC Swiftwater Rescue class, suggests that when paddling a half slice we limit ourselves to one class lower whitewater than we normally enjoy in our full-volume craft. This strategy keeps you amused when you’re paddling on runs that are easy for you, while also lowering your overall risk. Using bigger boats for harder runs helps keep your risk from creeping up when you’re paddling anywhere near your edge.
To keep your paddling time lighthearted, be conservative in your boat choices. You just might get to keep paddling a long time—and keep the same crew.
