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Originally Posted by washoe
a lake is always choppy, lucky, almost always. 5 kts make it choppy, which is nothing. Im born on a lake, lived near water all my life basically. I know. how many kts do you think it had? read the bs story in the article I just linked, it tells the story the other lawyer was concucting for over a month. she was withholding information to the family for a month. she left them in the dark and spending 100k for search and rescue missions. seriously? and then she spills it through her lawyer. she was holding the kayak, thats her story! and when she turned around she was gone. lol what a bunch of bs.
I suggest you wear a life vest to anyone who doesnt know what theyre doing. But even without it, its hard to drown in a lake for a normal person who can swim. thats why the kayak place didnt even hand out any vests.
It's perfectly plausible to drown in a lake if you are a below average swimmer or the lake is large. Freshwater lakes are not very buoyant. As Luckbox noted, it can be difficult to get back in a kayak if you don't know the proper technique.
I obviously don't know what happened, but if I had to bet, I would bet on a simple case of negligence and bad decisions. The tour operator likely was negligent in allowing inexperienced to kayakers to go out without life vests or training in how to get in and out of a kayak in open water. If Ng got out of her kayak to swim without a plan, that was a bad decision. A kayak is going to drift away from you relatively quickly, especially on a windy day. And if the other woman left Ng's kayak and paddled back shore to get help after a relatively short period of not knowing where Ng was, that almost certainly was a questionable decision as well.
My guess is that the other woman returned to shore, was told by someone that she made a mistake by returning to shore, and then panicked because of a concern that she may have negligently contributed to someone's death while in a foreign country.