Night Paddling

Many paddlers—perhaps most—are reluctant to venture out at night. This is not unreasonable. After all, at night it’s harder to see almost everything that’s not lit up. In fact, it’s often difficult even to see the people we’re paddling with since few of us have running lights on our kayaks. Still, mariners have been making night passages and landings for thousands of years and, for most of that time, doing it without electronics or navigational aids.
Some passages might even be safer if you make them at night. Generally, the winds—even steady trade winds—tend to blow less at night than during the day. And when the wind dies down, so do the waves. A boisterous trip with a tough surf landing during the day can be a gentle paddle after dark.
Night paddling will also get you away from the madding crowd. A night paddle can transform a busy tourist spot into your personal paddling paradise.
Sometimes you have little choice but to make a night entry into a bay or onto a beach you have never visited before. Mind you, no one (or almost no one) really wants to approach an unfamiliar shore in the dark. But there are circumstances that can force you into choosing between staying offshore all night (no fun in a kayak) and making a night landing. And if you paddle enough, you may find yourself in this sort of predicament, so it’s a good idea to at least learn the basics of night navigation when you can control the conditions. Navigating in the dark is a skill that can be acquired with practice and some forethought.
Personal Preparation
Every ocean paddler should be able to read a marine chart, use a compass and plot a course. The ability to use a GPS is an advantage but should not be used as a substitute for more traditional skills. You should also be able to brace and to perform various forms of self-rescue. If you are prone to motion sickness during day trips, then it’s possible that you’ll be affected even more by motion during night paddles.
Night paddling is an art and depends on many factors. Your skills with a kayak will help determine where it is safe for you to paddle in the dark. Around your local lake is one thing; around an offshore island is another thing entirely. If you aren’t safe on an exposed coast in the daylight, you are likely to be much less safe at night.
You can practice some night-paddling skills during the day. You can recognize sea state and wave direction by paying attention to the way your hips move in a seaway. Waves hitting you from one direction will feel different from waves that come from another direction. At night, you may not be able to get all this information from visual cues, but you can still sense the patterns of the waves and your orientation in them. Maintaining your balance in waves relies in part on having a visual horizon. Getting more attuned to the rhythm of the waves can help you anticipate the motion of your kayak and compensate accordingly to keep upright.
It’s vitally important to learn how to see the world at night. We’re accustomed to dealing with the lighted world; if it’s dark we light it up. Just 200 years ago, it was not practical to illuminate streets or outdoor spaces or even brighten up the indoors, so most people went to bed when it got dark. Not anymore. We don’t have to deal with the dark unless we want to go for a romantic stroll in the moonlight down a deserted beach. It’s deserted because it’s dark. Everyone else is inside watching TV.
Using a flashlight or headlamp when walking along a path at night makes good sense, but using one to light your way while you’re paddling is not a very good idea. For one thing, it destroys your night vision (and the night vision of everyone the light shines on), but more importantly, it doesn’t show you much and what it does show you is usually not that important. After all, if you’re not heading in for a landing, right in front of your kayak is almost always water and waves, and they generally don’t tell much more than you already know.
There is no white centerline to follow, so most of the time, it’s better to keep all lights off and keep your night vision intact. Ship captains don’t navigate with headlights on for a very good reason: They need to see what’s in the distance. Use a flashlight when you must—when closing in on shore—but otherwise let your eyes adjust to the available light.
Except on the darkest of nights, it’s surprising how well you can see shapes and landmasses in the dark once your eyes become accustomed to the low light of stars and the moon. In the daytime, landmasses are seen in detail and depth, but at night they’re often just a dark smudge or silhouette. Practicing at night when the location and the weather are safe and you already know where you are is a way to become accustomed to using those shapes to help you navigate. So the first step in learning to paddle in the dark is to go out and give it a try.
Retroreflective Patches
It’s important to prepare your boat and gear for night paddling. If things go missing in the dark, you’ll want them to show up clearly when you scan the area with a flashlight. Retroreflective material, available in adhesive tape and fabric ribbon, is embedded with glass beads that reflect light directly back at any light shining on it, creating a bright reflection. Without retroreflective patches, anything that gets washed off your deck will be virtually impossible to spot even with a flashlight.
I also put retroreflective tape in long horizontal strips along the aft gunwales of my kayak and a couple of vertical strips along each side of the bow. The different orientation of the tape on bow and stern will let others see immediately which way I’m headed if they flash a light at me. For safety’s sake, I put several strips on the hull of my boat so it can be seen if a searchlight hits it when capsized. I place these where they won’t get worn off by beach landings and launchings.
I recommend putting adhesive retroreflective strips vertically on the upper arms of your dry suit or paddling jacket and horizontal strips front and rear on your PFD. Most PFDs will not raise you out of the water very high, so strips on the PFD’s shoulder straps may be the only part of the PFD visible above water if you wind up out of your kayak and in the water. A few retroreflective dots on your paddle and your helmet or hat wouldn’t hurt and would make it easier to find these things if they get loose.