The importance of learning the "high-side"

YouTube - Rafting Disaster Video

The "high-side" is one of the most important "moves" you can teach a paddle crew. I say this because it is possible to flip a raft by "low siding" in places that simply don't seem possible.

I know this from experience.

I took some friends down the Tieton River a couple of years ago and managed to flip my raft on a rock that if you were to see it, you would simply not believe it possible. It doesn't appear to have enough water flowing into it to flip a full sized raft, but take my word for it, it does.

This flip was totally and completely my fault. Yes there was a series of circumstances that led up to the flip that were not in my control, but I was the captain, and the bottom line was that I didn't prepare my crew adequately. One extra sentence in the safety talk, and the flip would not have happened.

That sentence was the one about high-siding.

For those that don't know, when a raft runs up on a midstream rock, everyone in the boat typically needs to move quickly from wherever they are in the boat to the "high-side." That means literally what it sounds like. The problem is that the high side of the raft is towards the rock, and instinctively we tend to want to shy away from the rock.

So on this particular trip, when the raft ran into a rock sideways, and I was yelling "HIGH-SIDE!" there was some confusion amongst the crew. This was exacerbated by one of the crew yelling, "MOVE AWAY FROM THE ROCK!" His command was more clear and more intuitive, so that is what everyone other than me (and Mino the Dog) did.

So the raft flipped. Of course, because of the powerful persuasiveness of anecdotal evidence the next time I did a trip, the crew was treated to a 45 minute safety talk featuring a lengthy description and a few dry runs of high-siding.

In this video, many of the swims could have been avoided by better high-side training. It starts kind of slow, but gets much better in the middle.