When Bad Decisions Look Like Good Ones in Packrafting
By Huw Miles
Packrafts are sneaky bastards. That’s part of their charm, right? Tough, floaty little tanks that’ll bounce off a boulder, ferry you through a bony line, and make you look better than you are. But that’s also the danger: they forgive so much that it can stop you learning from your mistakes.
The Luck-Disguised-As-Skill Problem
Packrafting is a broad church with people discovering it from a range of backgrounds. Some are river folks (kayakers, raft guides etc) who recognise the potential to do some epic expeditions, but in my experience, more come from a terrestrial travel background. Through Hikers, keen trampers, bike packers, adventure racers etc. Folks who are no stranger to expedition life, but perhaps are newer to the water. Each group has their own strengths and weaknesses, but the folks discovering paddle sports for the first time via packrafting, are the folks I see drifting into some traps that will sand bag their progression. In a case by case basis, this isn’t a big deal, but as packrafting grows and the same patterns repeat, we end up baking in the issue to our culture of packrafting. The most effective way of exposing these traps, is to shed some light on them so we can recognise them, talk about the issues, and share it throughout the community.
Through my degree in Sports Development and Coaching Science, we did modules dedicated to the acquisition of skill. Among the key components of which is effective feedback loops. We need Knowledge of Results and Knowledge of Performance. This makes pretty good sense when you think about it. If you’re a footballer (or soccer player) and you’re practicing taking a penalty against a goal keeper, and you keep putting the ball wide of the posts you can see how the Knowledge of results and knowledge of performance are critical to improvement. Knowledge of Results is “Did it go in?” and knowledge of performance is the “why/why not” – in this case the “why not” is because you put it wide of the goal. You’re only going to be able to improve the outcome by knowing if you need to adjust your aim to the left or right, AKA Knowledge of performance. You can see how difficult it is to make improvements with only one of these feedback loops…. but if you were to pick only one, Knowledge of Performance is the most critical. Sharma et al. (2016)
With some river running paddle sports like whitewater kayaking, the river can be punishing to some errors like dropping the wrong edge into the current or leaning the wrong way. This can create a steep learning curve and many many flips/swims when you first start out. The joy of packrafting is that that learning curve is flattened. Far less barriers to entry and a much shorter apprenticeship to river running.
This forgiving nature of the packrafts, “protect” us from the feedback the river is offering us. What a blessing right?! But you can probably see where this can also put a low ceiling on our acquisition of skill or development as a paddler. In the example I gave earlier, a hinderance in your development as a footballer might mean failed dreams of representing your country or pursuing your dreams of becoming a professional athlete. Kinda gutting when you’re a kid maybe, but not a big deal. In paddle sports on the river, this can be dangerous. We don’t always get to learn from our mistakes. In river running “failure” doesn’t mean “not living up to your potential as a sportsperson”, it can mean getting seriously hurt. Or worse. After all, the best way to improve your safety on the river isn’t always necessarily through Swift Water Rescue Classes (although they do have a valuable place in your education as a paddler) but by simply becoming a better paddler.
When we lack the feedback from our rafts, we miss the opportunity to gain knowledge of performance. We occasionally see this in our intermediate courses where folks might have been self taught packrafting for a little while and decide they want some guidance on taking their paddling to the next level. How this presents is folks who have self assessed their paddling based on their knowledge of results alone. In packrafting, knownledge of results can be as simple as starting at the top of the rapid and finishing at the bottom of it without swimming. Because packrafts are so forgiving they don’t alway punish poor paddling or poor decision making… but that doesn’t mean the poor paddling or poor decision making are absent or that packrafters won’t , at some point, get a whopping from the river!
The danger to this as an individual is that bad habits can become cemented in motor memory and become “the way I’ve always done it”. At which point it might become a game of seeing how long your luck holds out. Not the end of the world in easier, less consequential water, but can be a big deal in real whitewater. It can create a situation whereby you need to be lucky every time on the river…. but the river only needs to get lucky once.
Without the boat “correcting” you, your body survives, but your brain doesn’t even register the miss. And that’s where it starts.
Enter the Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a psychological nudge we’d all do well to remember. It’s the finding that the less skilled someone is at something, the more likely they are to overestimate their ability. Not because they’re arrogant, but because the same skills you need to do a thing well are the ones you need to recognize what doing it well even looks like.
In paddling terms: if you’ve never seen a truly clean line, or been shown how to set up rescue, or had your judgment stretched in consequential terrain, you might not even know what you’re missing. But you’ll still feel confident. And confidence—unbacked by experience—spreads fast. We’ve seen some of these super confident beginners, really well intentioned, start to offer their advice or opinions to others in some instances. This can be problematic at times.
“Thinking in Bets”: Why Outcomes Lie
Annie Duke, who left the world of professional poker to teach people how to make better decisions, said it perfectly: we’re wired to judge decisions by how they turn out, not how they were made. In high-consequence environments, that’s a dangerous mindset.
Just because you didn’t swim doesn’t mean your line was safe. Just because your leash didn’t catch doesn’t mean it won’t next time. Just because your group got out fine doesn’t mean the plan was solid.
And yet people build whole belief systems on these outcomes. They post beta. They drop comments. They form opinions—strong ones. And those opinions, if repeated enough, start to shape a community.
There are no Dunning Kruger filters before posting well meaning advise on-line and the positive reinforcement created by self assessment by our results, can lead to strongly held, but poorly informed opinions that can spread like wildfire when these folks dispense guidance with confidence.
Be cautious of whose advice you follow. Are they qualified to dish out advice or a Middle Manager for a big oil company, an architect or a retired golf club manager with a hobby and an overinflated sense of their own knowledge and ability? Do they actually know what they are talking about, or are they just confident at putting their opinions forward?
The Grind That Nobody Sees
All of this isn’t to say that these community minded folks aren’t incredibly valuable to our community and helping spread the good word about packrafting. But we should be mindful of the false equivalency between professional instructors and community minded Dunning Krugers.
Becoming an instructor is graft. It takes years, performance based assessments, natural dispositions and dedication to professional development. A Rescue 3 college of mine put it well saying, “there are a number of different ways to become a Rescue 3 instructor….. but none of them are easy”.
I can’t speak to anybody else journey to becoming an instructor but mine looked like a 4 year BSc Hons degree at University and 8 years of professional guiding to get to the start line of being eligible to apply. During those 8 years of guiding, I gathered more professional qualifications such as a my Remote Emergency Care Expedition First Aids Quals (then latterly my Wilderness First Responder through NOLS) my British Mountain Leader award, obviously Whitewater guiding quals and my Advanced Whitewater Rescue Technician-Pro. In my personal time I undertook numerous first decent in remote parts of the world and was invited to become a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in London. I built up a breadth of experience work wise from canyoning guiding, expedition leading, outdoor education, rafting, sea kayaking, working on the ski fields in the winter months etc.
It’s years of training layered on top of years of paddling, usually done on shit pay, living out of a car or a staff room, juggling second jobs or sacrificing any sense of normal career progression. You lose relationships. You say no to stability. You eat more two-minute noodles than anyone should.
And through it all, you absorb. You take in hundreds of decisions, thousands of moments, until you start to see the patterns before they unfold. You learn what exhaustion looks like in someone else’s eyes. You hear what silence in an eddy means. You call it early—not because you’re conservative, but because you know what late looks like.
If you stay in long enough, you carry loss. Sometimes it’s a near miss. Sometimes it’s a funeral. You don’t get to choose.
And still, you show up. Because this isn’t a game. It’s a vocation. It asks more than it gives—and you give anyway.
Becoming an instructor in something like Rescue 3 isn’t a badge, it’s an honour. It means you’ve proven—through years of deliberate practice—that you can spot swims before they’ve happened, that you can teach without ego, and that your analysis isn’t a gut feeling, it’s a discipline backed by evidence. No career advisor in the world would recommend it or know where to begin describing a pathway into this work. And the rewards certainly aren’t financial, but they do come from the emails describing how a former student saved someone’s life or watching course graduates glow-up to take on their own first decents and becoming paddlers that you now admire.
🔍 So Who’s Teaching Whom?
When someone jumps online to comment on a river they’ve done once, or to hand out beta built on vibes, or to pitch safety advice from the back of an ego trip—it’s worth pausing.
Not every opinion is built on experience. Not every leader is a guide. And not every paddler who looks confident knows how close they’ve come.
If we’re serious about shifting culture, we need to be more discerning. Ask yourself: am I learning from someone who’s been tested? Or am I getting their version of luck, dressed up as insight?
💡 In Summary: Check Under the Bed for Dunning-Krugers
They’re out there. They mean well, most of them. But they don’t know what they don’t know. And in a sport where margins are thin and rivers don’t negotiate, that matters.
So be sharp. Be kind, but be honest. Choose your mentors with care. Choose your voice with humility. And if you’re one of the ones still learning—good. So are the rest of us.
Just make sure you’re learning from the river, not in spite of it.
Leave a Reply