I planned to write a post in July about how I’m a kayaking instructor, guys! and that post is still coming, I (more or less) promise – but it won’t be this summer.
You might have heard my kayaking story a few times. I’ve done a few half-day sit-on-tops tours on the open sea, I graduated to my Discover and Explore Awards last summer and then I did an intro to sea kayaking in preparation for a night nav, which turned out to be truly beautiful. I then spent a good few months trying to figure out what path I wanted to go down, because I wanted to take it further and I concluded that I wanted to end up with the Instructor Award, with an eye to maybe working up to a less “basic introduction to coaching” qualification later on.
But to do that, I need first to do my Foundation Safety and Rescue Training, which means that I need to be able to rescue myself and my group. It’s the standard for calm-ish water – there’s also the White Water Safety and Rescue Training, Stadium SRT, Advanced White Water SRT and Advanced Surf SRT, at the very least. I’m sure there are others I didn’t spot in a quick Google. Key parts of that FSRT are escaping a capsized kayak, rolling yourself back upright and various manoeuvres to rescue other people, like Hand of God, bow rescue and so on.
Here’s the really difficult bit. There are hardly any Instructor courses running beyond May or June and I need to have done FSRT at least two weeks before the Instructor but I don’t want to be doing it in winter, given how much time I’ll be spending in the water. The only pair of dates I’ve found that work together are FSRT on April 7th and Instructor 17-18th June. That gives me a month to be ready for FSRT, which I’m going to have to do in a river. Have I mentioned the really difficult bits? I really don’t like cold water and the idea of having to deliberately capsize petrifies me. This is not a set of circumstances that adds up to me getting that FSRT early this spring.
But while I was on the hunt for matching course pairs, I came across a place that does swimming pool technical skills sessions throughout winter – three days before the last one of the season. In Reading. That’s more than two hours away, which is a long way to go for an hour in a pool, but it also seemed to be exactly what I needed. So I booked and I went.
And it was amazing! It was very informal, a random group of instructors, adult learners and club kids, just doing whatever we wanted to. I was paired with instructor Finbar and in this lovely warm swimming pool, with me scared but knowing what I’d come here for, I capsized. Then Finbar put a spraydeck on me and I capsized again. This is the bit I’ve tried to resist for the last year, the bit that really scares me. But actually, it wasn’t so bad. I knew I was in the water but I didn’t really feel like I was upside down. I felt around, found my pull loop and tumbled out of the boat and into the water. Getting back to the surface was the hardest bit; I always but always seemed to swim several feet along the bottom of the kayak instead of several inches sideways to freedom. We did it a few times. I do tend to get my nose full of water, which immediately drains down into my lungs when I turn upright but it wasn’t so bad. In a warm swimming pool where I can touch the bottom.
We did try a neoprene spraydeck. The cordura ones don’t have any stretch and they pop off quite easily – in fact, so easily that they can pop just from gravity when you turn upside down in the water. The neoprene ones don’t do that. Luckily, Finbar is a good and sensible instructor and before we tried either spraydeck in the water, I had to put my hands on my head, close my eyes and then find the pull loop blind. When we did that with the neoprene one, it just didn’t pop. I pulled and yanked, I used my elbows as a lever, I pulled forwards and up and back but it was very clear that if I capsized in that thing, I’d drown before I got free, so off it came and the other one went back on.
Finbar was quite happy that I was much more comfortable with the whole capsize and escape thing and so we moved on to practising how not to capsize in the first place. I was already aware of low brace and high brace but I’d not really tried it out for real, so we practised. Finbar tipped me sideways and I low braced and then we experimented with a nice powerful forward stroke as a bracing stroke and then we did high brace. And maybe I squeaked a bit but I also giggled a lot and learned to really lean and gain some control over my edging and also capsized accidentally a few times. I went to pop the spraydeck but I’d forgotten Finbar had promised to Hand of God me if that happened, meaning that he’d flip me back upright. That was an educational experience in itself – you’re feeling for the pull loop and suddenly the world swings and you find yourself back in the fresh air – but it also saved us having to drain the water out of the boat and get back in it and gave us lots of extra practice time, and me lots of practice in capsizing unexpectedly, which – after all – is what it’s going to be like when it happens for real. Honestly, by the end I was giggling like a loon even as I came back upright. We finished with one last wet escape in which Finbar wanted me to take the time under the water to not just panic and escape but to take a moment of calm while I was there, and in this case to reach up and bang on the bottom of the boat, which is now above water, in a pattern. I had to capsize, keep my mind together enough to remember and tap the pattern and then escape.
So after just an hour in the water I was feeling a whole lot more comfortable on, under and in the water – as long as the water is warm and shallow enough to stand up in. I really enjoyed the session and I learned a lot, about kayaking and about myself.
One thing that I realised – really realised – is that I’m not going to be ready for my FSRT in a month’s time. I still want to do it but there are a few things I need to practice and get comfortable with this summer. I need to capsize and escape in cold water. I have a plan for that – redo the intro to sea kayaking that I did last September. Then maybe do the full day course. Spend some time on the water. Getting hold of a sea kayak and spraydeck is going to be difficult – they’re inherently more dangerous than sit-on-tops which are the ones hire companies hand out much more comfortably. But at least I can hire a sit-on-top regularly. It won’t be the same – you can’t lean very far at all in them because you just fall out but I’d at least like to get used to paddling so that a whole day isn’t too exhausting when I’m ready, and I want to get used to the feeling of the boat rocking and not panicking that I’m going to capsize. I may even join a local club. Paddle clubs are not very welcoming to newcomers: you get a website that’s visibly not been updated for a year or even longer, maybe even designed in the 80s, and/or a Facebook page that’s either private or hasn’t had any updates beyond “we’re thinking about a trip in February”, “we have to cancel the trip?” and “guys, has that trip been cancelled?”, none of which is any help to me to decide whether this club can provide what I want.
Second, I need to get used to cold water and that means open water swimming. There’s a bit of river just down the road that everyone uses in the summer for all sort of boating activities. There’s also plenty of sea. I live near enough to the sea to know its dangers, by the way. I know where the local Blue Tits are and I know where there are lifeguarded bits of sea marked out specifically for swimming. I know where the touristy bits are, where entire families are splashing around with rubber rings (that’s the dangerous bit) and paddleboards and swimming. So that’s what I’m going to do this summer. I’m going to paddle and I’m going to swim. Next winter, I’m going to go to more pool sessions, although maybe not all the way up in Reading, and by spring 2023, I’m going to be ready to take on the FSRT and by next summer, I’ll be a kayaking instructor. I hate to say “I’ll do it next year instead” but I’m not ready and I know it and I’m making plans to become ready.
So that’s the plans I should have been making for 2022, ready to announce to you all that way back and ready for me to work on but life doesn’t naturally fall into logical 1st Jan – 31st Dec logic and sometimes it takes until an activity in March for you to realise what you’re going to be working on. I’ll blog it, it can become the Road to Kayak Instructoring, or something like that and then you can follow along and maybe people who are considering the same thing might find my journey useful to their journey – although I expect there’s not a soul out there considering paddlesport instructing while simultaneously being too scared of the water to be able to capsize.