Just for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not actually a kayaking instructor. I volunteer at our Girlguiding boathouse where we have one qualified leader and three assistants. I’m kind of hoping to be an actual qualified instructor by next year maybe but for now, I’m using “instructor” in the sense of… well, my job is to go out with the Guides and Rangers and help them enjoy their evening, whether that’s by “try moving where your hands are on the paddle” to “you need to paddle on both sides to go forwards” or “you’re doing a great job, just relax and enjoy it”, or indeed by taking the girls in tow when they get tired or frustrated.
Last year was a learning curve. I was new to the boathouse so I was new to everything. I think it took until this year to realise that the paddles and buoyancy aids need rinsing as well as the kayaks and it’s only this year that I’ve got as far as taking a look around the group to check whether we’ve got all the necessary safety stuff before setting out, like the towline and something to act as drag for helping girls go in a straight line. Now I’ve figured out how the boathouse works. Now I direct the kids to get boats in and out, I do more of the clearing up while they’re rinsing boats, I know pretty much what we’ve got and where it should go. I’m feeling like I know what I’m doing.
Equally, though, I’m discovering how much I’m the inexperienced one when we’re on the water. I’ve now got my paddleboard safety & rescue training which technically makes me second most qualified but I have no idea what a hanging draw stroke is and the draw strokes I do know are weak and effectively useless. Also, I capsized a couple of weeks ago and failed dismally to get back in my kayak so I know I need to work on that. I mean, we could have taken the time to get me back in but after one re-capsize, I realised both the instructors were tied up out in the deep while the entire group of Guides were paddling in to shore with no one competent watching them. So our instructor towed me back until I could stand up and drag my kayak in and then she left me to go and deal with the kids, which is the correct thing to do. I’d like to add that it was a choppy day. The wind was within remit but it was onshore and fighting a departing tide and the result was lots of little waves. I didn’t help myself by shoving my paddle down inside my kayak and struggling to get it out but I might not have gone over had a wave not hit while I was wrestling with it. I bought myself a long red sling and a couple of karabiners this season, which have come in really useful for tying up at the buoy but I tend to throw them into the bottom of the boat rather than put them away on the way back in, so those are on the bottom of the sea now.
Weather-wise, it’s been dismal. Our poor boat club should have had six sessions by now and have managed three, of which at least one, the first one back in April, was miserable and choppy and far from ideal and I don’t think the second one was much better. We’ve got our last official one this week so we’ll see how that goes but we’ve now got to fit at least two more sessions in over the summer holidays. In those three sessions, we’ve not got the entire boat club group together once – two girls missed the pool session and the first sea session, one of those missed the second and although she made the third, another one couldn’t. Five is a tiny number. We’ve set a minimum for next year and if we can’t reach it, we’re going to cancel because it’s not really worth running for only five girls. I’ve been taking a few photos in the hope of putting together a poster rather than a bare text email for the divisions and I’ve got another plan for making it all a bit louder, although whether that plan comes off is entirely out of my hands.
We’ve cancelled three out of twelve unit sessions too – still got one more to go after this, so no guarantees that one’s going ahead – plus we had one session that we turned last-minute into raft building, because we don’t go out so far and don’t leave the sheltered area and therefore can run it in higher winds than we can run kayaking. But in this case, the wind got up so much that all they did was build the rafts inside and not take them outside. The wind has been appalling. Even on evenings where you think it’s a nice night, even when I’ve been at Brownies, pointing out of the windows, saying “look what a lovely night it is!”, it’s still windy at the coast and if the wind isn’t out of our remit, the gusts are. It feels like all we’ve done all summer is cancel sessions.
On the plus side, first of all, I have a set of keys! I don’t have a key to the land gate, the one at the front of the boathouse where you drive in but I have all the others. If I can get past the gate, I can unlock the front door, turn off the alarm, unlock the back door, unlock the sea gate. I’ll need to borrow someone’s keys and get the gate key cut, maybe even this week, otherwise it’ll be the same next summer, where I can unlock once someone else arrives but have to wait outside until then. Having any keys at all makes me feel like I properly belong this year, so I’m excited about that.
Second, we have a new volunteer! I know nothing about her except she came for one of our unit evenings a couple of weeks ago, said “I wish I could come every night” and we said “You can!”. Whether she’s qualified, whether she can even get into her boat on her own, I genuinely don’t know but an extra pair of hands is an extra pair of hands. I try not to feel guilty when I can’t make it to a session because they got on fine for years without me but the more people, the better. For example, when I capsized, we could have had that extra pair of hands looking after the girls while our instructor tried and failed to get me back in my boat and not left them to fend for themselves. I do say that in the full knowledge that they had three of their own leaders with them, one of whom has kayaked before, so they weren’t entirely abandoned but it’s better for us to be with them than distracted by ourselves. Maybe the new volunteer will make it to the last couple of sessions of the year, maybe we’ll go out with her over the summer or maybe we won’t see her until our planning meeting in January. But we’ve got her!
Third yes, extra safety. We’ve got a towline! We spent all of last summer talking about needing a new towline, since one’s on the bottom of the sea and one’s mysteriously disappeared. We did fine without it – I did a lot of contact towing, especially of nervous kids and that did fine. I had one who was so miserable that I had to resort to towing her all the way from the middle of our “playing field” back to shore and contact did fine on that occasion but it does feel better to have a proper towline. The main instructor and I both now carry slings so we can improvise a towline, or anything else. And I have my PSR training, which isn’t an actual qualification but does put me one step above being totally unqualified and inexperienced and feels like we’ve increased our net safety knowledge for the season.
So the pros of this year are more knowledge, more experience, more understanding, more safety and just generally everything is better. But the cons – the single con, really – has been the weather. Even the evenings when the wind’s been within remit have been breezier or colder than we would like. I don’t think we’ve had many, if any, of those beautiful hot still summer nights like we had last year. I think the closest we’ve had is the night my Rangers went, mercifully. The instructors’ Guides have moved up into a brand new Ranger unit which they’re not technically running but kind of are, and because of the small numbers in both mine and theirs, it made sense to combine them for the evening rather than come out twice for a tiny group. Mine didn’t particularly enjoy last year but they only got half a session and it was shared with the Guides. I think they enjoyed it more this year. They got the full session, everyone was reasonably competent, I took a tennis ball out because chasing each other around is more fun than last year’s game, they were allowed to jump out and swim back and one of them accidentally-on-purpose filled her boat with water and capsized. A good time had by all.
What do we want for next year? Better weather. A bigger boat club. Me to be qualified. We’ll see whether we get any of those.