If you’re a regular reader, you may know I’m on a slow meandering journey to becoming a kayak instructor. If you follow me on Instagram, you may know I’m already there, although you may not realise I’ve kind of skipped a couple of important steps.
Last year, I went to a local Ranger unit to teach fencing. For various reasons, none of the girls turned up and the leaders mentioned that they hoped they would next week, as the unit was going to the divisions boathouse for an evening of kayaking. I invited myself along, chatted to the instructor and to skip to the end, I’m now a leader.
We have one qualified leader. We have, now, three unqualified leaders who are experienced enough to act as crowd control, extra pairs of hands and people who know enough to help with the absolute basics. We’ve talked about using our pet paddlesport pro to get us all through the first basic qualification, Paddlesport Safety & Rescue but that doesn’t seem to be happening so I’m going to sort that one out myself next month. I’m one of the unqualified helpers, by the way, if that wasn’t obvious. Then I’m going to try to fit in the Paddlesport Instructor Award before we reopen next season and I’ll suddenly become second-in-command. That’s not out of any hunger for power or anything but just because getting qualified seems the obvious next step and will take at least a little of the pressure off our one and only instructor.
You see, we have girls who come back to boat club for as many years as they’re able. Having me as a qualified Instructor will allow our main leader to run an advanced class and me to run the beginner class for the new girls. Right now, me leading the group (and probably the bigger group) feels terrifying but by the time we get to that point, I will be equipped for it and anyway, our main instructor will probably have a lesson plan.
But that’s next season. Let’s talk this season.
The boathouse is shared between two seaside divisions. It does a regular boat club for a group of up to about 14 girls who want to build their skills and confidence over the summer term. It does one-off taster evenings for individual units. And it does a shore-based activity and barbecue evening – well, it does about four of those evenings so that units that meet on different week nights can fit it into their programme. Boat club is on a fixed evening but is tide-, light- and weather-dependent. As a general thing, the tide is only high enough every other week, for some reason. Because of the light evenings and the warmer weather, it can only run in the summer term, which means all things boathouse have to be crammed in between mid-late April and mid July. Unit evenings are all over the place. We sat down in January with a tide timetable and a list of units who’d requested a kayaking evening and tried to fit them in. There was a lot of “Sarah’s girls meet on a Tuesday. Have we got a Tuesday with enough water? Helen’s lot meet on a Friday. Can we do a Friday towards the end of term?” and so on. We had four dates from Monday to Thursday and at least three of them got cancelled. The fourth was on Ranger night and I couldn’t go. I didn’t hear of it being cancelled but I didn’t hear of it happening either.
Speaking of cancelling, we had to cancel two sessions because of bad weather and we only went ahead with my own group because the Guides came along, which means we had to split the session in half. Shorter session, not going out so far – ok, we can cope with this weather under those circumstances. Next year I’ll make sure the parents know that’s a possibility and that everyone checks their messages before they set out.
That’s the admin. Boat club is Brownie night and I can’t just miss every other Brownies for a third of the year but I thought I’d go to the very first. That was one of the ones cancelled because of bad weather. The second was one I’d put down to be at Brownies and so my first boathouse experience was the third boat club meeting. We have an assortment of kayaks in various shapes and sizes, many elderly and many donated. The boat club girls all had their own by now and I was steered towards a floating armchair called an Islander Jive. These things are closed cockpit kayaks 10’7″ long and 67cm wide, if you’ll forgive me mixing my units. I’ve been accustomed to the 17′ long/58cm wide Perception Essence. I can practically touch the nose of my Jive and if I spread my knees far enough to press them against the side, my legs bow far too much to put my feet on the footrests. At this stage I’ve got accustomed to it. I’m not doing anything technical at all, it’s fine to lounge in this floating sedan chair but it took a long time to stop disliking it.
I had high hopes for the Falchion 385s – we had five of them donated by the Sea Scouts and no use for them. Anyone who’s slim enough to sit comfortably in them isn’t heavy enough to make them go properly. At one point I planned to buy one of them but after a few adventures in it, I realised that while I like the way it moves, the cockpit is too small and I’d need to hack out the huge piece of buoyancy foam occupying the space where my legs need to go. Anyway, it would have to live in the boathouse so that wouldn’t free up any space.
Anyway. Boat club!
At time of writing, I’ve been to three boat club meetings and four unit evenings. The boat club girls were already over the basics by the time I turned up. That first (third!) evening they learned to paddle backwards. At my second one, we did seal launches – how to launch from a ledge into water. In our case, the ledge was a pontoon but it could be a river bank or the seashore. I’ve seen some horrifying videos of American whitewater trips that slide off rock protrusions forty-odd feet in the air. At the third one, our instructor introduced draw strokes, to move the kayak sideways. At least, that’s what we were supposed to be concentrating on. In reality, I spent a chunk of the evening dealing with a girl who had a tiny crab in her boat and tried to scramble out of the back in a panic, and then with a girl who accidentally capsized. That’s not such a big deal for these particular girls but it took a few minutes to empty the boat and get her back in and we had to come back early because she was cold – it was windier out on the water than we’d realised even while we were pulling the boats out into the shallows. We’re rarely out even for an hour, although the boat club girls get longer because they don’t need the long briefing that the beginners do, but it’s still not long enough that we routinely carry things like extra warm layers. Maybe we should.
But the four unit evenings have been more enlightening in some ways. The other leaders enjoy how the girls develop over the season but because I missed the first few meetings and a couple in the middle, I still can’t really identify seven of the eight girls (I can manage the eighth – her sister was in boat club last year and was one of the Rangers in the group I hijacked that last night of term). But over the course of an hour or so, I can definitely see improvement in both skill and confidence.
There’s always a mix of girls who’ve been kayaking once before, girls who take it in their stride and girls who are terrified. I tend to adopt the terrified girls and so far, they always make it back to shore with a lot more skill and confidence than when they started, although whether they gain in enthusiasm is another question.
Who have I had? Well, I had the tiny one who couldn’t quite comprehend that you need to paddle with the other side before the boat starts turning towards the side you’ve just paddled on – I reckon she’d had made quite a good little whitewater-er by the time she was heading in. There was the one who had a complete panic out on the water, but who recovered enough once she’d had a few minutes rafted up to join in throwing the tennis ball at her little friends all the way back to shore. Who did I have at the fourth one? Oh, the girl who found her boat so uncomfortable that she couldn’t feel her legs and had to go in five minutes early.
I have not yet made it through a unit evening without deploying the contact tow – it’s become my signature move in the way that Harry Potter made “expelliarmus!” his signature. I’m quite pleased with that for two reasons. The first is that we don’t currently have a towline. Given the distance we go out and the depth of the water, we don’t really need one although they’re on the list to replace this year. It’s good to be able to tow even without a towline. The second is that the contact tow is something I was only introduced to back on the Sea Kayak Award course in April, when I was on the receiving end of it a couple of times. Right now we have one more unit evening and that’s the Rangers I went with last year, who shouldn’t need any towing. They’re big brave girls and experienced.
It’s kind of weird being one of the instructors when it was only five minutes ago that I was the pupil. But honestly, the level of most of them is low enough that if you’ve ever been in a kayak and can look after yourself in three and a half feet of water for forty-five minutes, you’re probably good enough to do what I’m currently doing. For unit evenings, it’s very much about “this is how to get in the boat” and “this is how to make it move” and “this is how to make it move in the direction you want” and that’s about it. I try to stay close to the unconfident ones, ready to raft up for stability if they require it, ready to take them in tow if necessary but the most technical I get is “don’t lean too far over or you’ll unbalance the boat and fall out”.
Yeah, it’s been educational. The instructor commented a couple of sessions in that she could see me improving and figuring things out. Other than mastering the contact tow, I don’t think I’ve learned anything new but I’ve had to get used to whole new styles of kayak and I’ve had to adjust to being on the other side of the desk and I guess that means I’m looking at things a bit differently. I did the Sea Kayak Award because I thought it would be good to up my own skills but there’s been very little need for it – we didn’t cover as much new stuff on that course as I expected and the main big deal was learning to cope with inclement weather. We don’t take our 10-18s out in that kind of weather – it’s too hard for them to paddle against so they get tired, it’s probably cold and that means it’s not fun for them, and four adults, three unqualified, can’t rescue an entire unit if the higher waves tip them over.
So, next step on the Journey to Paddlesport Instructor will hopefully be the PRS in August. Stay tuned.