Did anyone here ever experience this:

\"kayak angst\" ?

Tom Carroll, who circum-kayaked Long Island in eleven days in 1993, describes it like this: \"I began to feel as though my sense of balance had left me. The sky and the water were a dull silver in color. I had trouble finding the water with my paddle. I experienced the strange sensation of gliding through a silver tunnel, drifting suspended by an unseen force. A trusty low brace kept me upright and I soon realized that the ripples made by the brace in the gloss like water brought me a sense of orientation. This form of spatial disorientation or kayak angst, as it was known to the Greenlanders, would be an experience I would not soon forget.\"
(from www.answers.com/topic/kayak)

I just know the feeling that after a long time on the water, or even just looking at the water, the earth sometimes seems to move, but this kayak angst phenomenon seems a bit extreme...

I've never experienced the \"Kayak angst\" though I have felt like I was still moving several times after exiting my boat after a long run. I can relate however to that bizarre feeling when one has difficulty distinquishing the horizon line or earth mass from air. While climbing Mt Rainier we experienced several storms and white out that made it very difficult to distinqush ground from the air, it all looked the same, and after several days the whole thing got to be a bit spooky. Esspecially considering that on multiple occassions we were crossing areas laden with cravasses!

Paddle on in to the abis, reality is little more than our own perception:think:

Maybe if you smoke a bit of the green stuff and kayak directly after, you'll experience 'kayak angst' while on the water.

I have a similar thing happen to me. Once during a night paddle of 5 hours. No moon and solid cloud cover. I couldn't tell the difference between water and sky.

It was really weird.

David H. Johnston
www.paddlinginstructor.com

I have never had anything with that description, but I did get Vertigo while working on combat rolls a couple of weeks ago. I was successful on my first two rolls, but on the third I failed the first attempt and started to feel dizzy. I attempted a few more times and it got worse, so I signaled for a T-rescue from my buddy. He said that I kept grabbing his bow, but I was so disoriented that I thought I was hitting my own boat. I ultimately bailed and swam, but it was pretty scary. When I pulled out of my boat, I could not tell which way was up, but luckily my PFD knew which way to go. I swam to an island and could not even stand up. I did not have it on the rest of the run, but I was done with roll practice for the day.

I guess that is what happens when I decide to go ahead and paddle when I had a nasty case of the flu.