A week or so later, I took my Rangers out paddling for the first time. I don’t know why I’d never done that or why I suddenly had the idea to. There was a local Ranger leader working at a watersports centre and so off we went. We started with kayaking and then moved on to paddleboarding. I think I had a choice of watersports and I suspect that kayaking covers a lot of the basics of water activities and paddleboarding seems fairly easy and is very popular.
We were all dressed up in wetsuits & neoprene shoes and then we got in our double kayaks. My previous adventures, on the open sea, meant getting in the kayaks on the waterline and shuffling until we started to float but Poole Park Lake doesn’t have that. We had to get into boats that were already floating in a foot of water, which felt very unstable. I can’t remember for sure but I would bet I climbed into the water and got in from there rather than trying to get in from the side.
The Rangers, of course, are fearless. Most of them are teenagers, although I had one who’d technically aged out of Rangers and had come back for the fun of it. I don’t technically need another adult with the Ranger adult ratio of infinity but it’s always good to have one. I think I had three current Rangers, one who was home from her first year at university and my aged-out Ranger. The more the merrier, to a certain degree. Anyway, we paddled out. Our instructor rode alongside us in a small plastic motorboat and so we had a go at paddling one way across the shallow lake and then back again and then we started using games to build confidence. The younger Rangers were very eager to try to stand up in their boat and very happy to fall out into the lake. It’s a very shallow lake. I doubt there’s anywhere in the entire lake where a teenager would be water deeper than waist-deep. I think we played a game where we had to chase and tag each other. Yeah, kayaking went ok. I don’t think anyone loved it but most of it became competent at it.
Then we moved onto paddleboards. I’d been sharing a kayak with a Ranger but I had my own SUP. Well, we all did but then the instructor got out the giant bus board, which can hold about ten paddlers. I knew we’d all end up in the water and I’d still rather stay dry so I stayed on my own board and took photos. They didn’t capsize the board. It would probably be easier to capsize a bus than to get that great big thing to flip over. I’m fairly sure some of them ended up in the water but I’m also fairly sure it wasn’t an accident.
So far, all my paddling experiences had had a purpose. We’d gone to Old Harry and then we came back. It meant we had to keep up a certain amount of speed and required a certain amount of stamina. But, even without the Rangers, it was really good fun to just mess around on the water. I can see what Kenneth Grahame saw in it. Rangers is my favourite age group – you don’t need to be quite such a teacher with them as with Brownies or even Guides and you can just have fun alongside them. We definitely had fun. I’d never been on a paddleboard before. I was a bit dubious about the way you were sitting an inch above the water with absolutely nothing between you and it but I liked how light and manoeuvrable it was, how I could fidget, how I could sit sideways with my feet dangling in the cool water. SUP was definitely something I’d be looking into a bit more.
Bumblebee Paddles 