Bumblebee Paddles

Because I’ve been telling my paddling story chronologically here, I haven’t mentioned the boathouse yet but the season is upon us! Eventually, we’ll catch up – you’ll find out how I came across the boathouse and how I joined it and what happened there last year but for now, we’ll jump straight into 2024.

The boathouse belongs to two local Girlguiding divisions and is run by a team of five – we have a “manager” who no longer goes on the water, deals with most of the admin, checks in on the boathouse over the winter and stays on shore while we’re out on the water. We have a qualified instructor who runs all the sessions and we have three assistants who aren’t qualified, including me. My eventual aim (and eventual is sounding like “by next summer”…) is to get qualified but I really need to work on my rescues and my own thing about hating capsizing before I can get there. Local Guide and Ranger units book in evenings during the summer term to come down for a taster and we have a regular core of girls called the boat club who come every other week (depending on the tide) to build their skills throughout the term.

Last weekend, we all went to the boathouse. Other than maintenance visits, it’s been abandoned since last July so the grass out the back needed mowing, we needed to check the airbags in the kayaks (two completely flat), see what kit needed ordering, we put all the buoyancy aids in size order, swept out under the matting, listed some stuff for sale and just generally got it ready for the new season. Then we had the afternoon off and met up again in the evening for the pool session.

Before the term starts, we get the boat club girls at a swimming pool with our pet professional and do an assessment and safety session – how strong are they as swimmers? Do they panic when they go under the water? They learn the basics of handling a kayak and they practice capsizing so that when it happens for real, out on the sea, they know what to do.

We have five girls this year and three made it to the pool session. We already knew one couldn’t come but the second, Augusta… I assume she just forgot. We’re not too worried. She was a member of boat club last year and maybe the year before. Her sister certainly has certainly done it. We know Augusta, we’re not worried about checking her swimming and capsizing. Of the three who did come, one was another returnee and two are new. Cornelia, the one we knew would miss the session, I actually already know. I taught fencing and archery at her unit’s camp a few weeks ago and she absolutely destroyed me at fencing because she does it at school, and to a much higher standard than my taster session. Dorothea, another new girl, is a Guide in the instructor’s unit which means only one new starter who’s a complete mystery.

The plan was to start with a swim and then get them to tow kayaks around the pool chasing plastic balls, so they could get used to hanging off a kayak and understand what they feel like when they’re just floating around. But somehow we ended up jumping straight from the swimming to “this is a kayak, this is how you get in it and this is how you get out of it”. When we launch from the boathouse, it’ll be wading out into shallow water and climbing in. When we launch from the pool, it’s either getting in from the side or scrambling in from deep water – obviously, that’s a skill they’ll need but not the very first moment they meet the kayak at the first session.

Then we got to falling out. The girls practiced tilting the kayaks, controlling them with their lower bodies to see how far over they could lean before the boats actually tip over and then we got them to tip just a bit too far so that they capsize. Get your legs out, if gravity hasn’t done it for you, and swim to the surface. No problem! We knew Betty, our returnee, wasn’t going to have a problem because she’s done it before but the other two turned out to be naturals too. So we moved on to capsize drill – hanging upside down, they reach up and bang three times on the underside of the boat, which is now above the water, before exiting.

I’ve done this before but I hadn’t realised it’s called capsize drill and I hadn’t realised it’s done for a reason. It’s not just “you’re going to panic upside down underwater so take a moment, engage your brain, bang this pattern to force yourself to think sensibly and then emerge”. It’s because out on the water, we might not hear a shriek and splash but we might hear a deep echoing hollow banging. In practice, there will always be at least two adults around, often four, and we’ll see it happen most times but this is really to get our attention. I’ve never been on this side of the pool session!

It’s quite hard to hang on upside down in a kayak with no spraydeck when you’re a bit smaller than the boat is designed for. It took Este, the one I was working with, a couple of attempts before she could hang on long enough with her knees to do anything. We spent a lot of time dragging kayaks to the side and draining them, getting the girls back in and doing it again. Do it on your non-dominant side too, because you don’t know which way the sea will tip you over and you need to know what it feels like to capsize in both directions.

Then we played the game, but with the kayaks flooded. We soon learned that the orange ones will float just below the surface but the blue one will sink violently at the nose and tip its occupant out vertically. Not that we had anyone in them at first. The girls held onto the kayaks and paddled around with them collecting plastic balls. Then we put them inside the flooded kayaks and they paddled around using their hands and collecting balls. That didn’t work very well, mostly because the blue one sank. So we did it a third time with the kayaks empty.

Penultimate exercise was to introduce spraydecks. Our pet professional only had one spraydeck small enough for these girls and one of his sons, who’d mostly come to play in the warm water, was wearing it. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a ten-year-old wearing a spraydeck that’s almost big enough to get two of her into. We went over how to fit them onto the kayaks, how to find and grab the loop and then they capsized again and pulled it.

This was one of the bits where being the teacher vs being the pupil popped up. I’ve been the pupil a couple of times. I’ve been the teacher out on the water, mostly doing “no, you need to paddle on both sides!” but I’ve not been the teacher in close-up one-on-one semi-technical sessions. For at least her first go, I should be up the front of Este’s kayak with my hand on the cockpit so I can feel if the spraydeck comes off and if it doesn’t, to grab it and pull it. Luckily, I didn’t need to. Este’s a natural at that.

So we practiced that lots of times, practiced climbing in with your body weight in neoprene falling off you because it’s far too big, putting the spraydeck back on the kayak again, capsizing on the other side and so on. They were all a lot more comfortable with it than I will ever be!

So we moved on to our last lesson, using the paddles. There is a right way up to hold a kayak paddle but the way I would teach it is by comparing the shape of the blade to the shape of your hand, wider at the top than the bottom. The way our pet professional teaches it is that there’s a ridge on the shaft that your knuckles should line up with. I was never taught to paddle properly – to paddle right-handed, which is what our pet professional taught even though he’s left-handed and so is Este, you grip the paddle in your right hand and then you let it move in your left hand. I was never taught this and yet if I watch videos where I’ve shoved the GoPro down my buoyancy aid to give a POV shot, I can see myself doing it!

It’s terrifying being in a 20m pool with three kayaks zooming around! Dorothea and Este didn’t necessarily have much control over their direction and Betty is restricted by the size of the pool, the presence of three adults, three boys and a load of kayaks in the water so they’re zipping around all over the place, doing handbrake turns either deliberately or not and you never know where the next one is coming from. We’d talked at the boathouse earlier about putting a weight on the back of kayaks because we always have one girl at the unit sessions who can’t get it in a straight line (mostly because she does a violent dig on one side and then panics that the kayak turns sharply). We’d decided a sponge in a mesh bag would probably do the trick but it turns out a fully-grown adult paddlesport assistant hanging onto the stern does the job very well. Este was making some sharp zigzags right up until I demanded a ride, at which point the journey from one end of the pool to the other became a lot straighter.

That was supposed to be the end but the bigger girls begged for a go at rolling, since our pet professional teaches that for a job and is apparently into whitewater. They started with just leaning a long way over and flicking back upright. Then the adults helped them lie sideways in the water and flick back up. Then they hung upside down in the water and flicked back up and by the time we were five minutes from parents picking up, they were trying to put it together into a 360 roll. Neither quite managed but they got pretty close, especially Dorothea, who’s a first-timer this year. On my rolling lesson, we got as far as “I don’t like capsizing or being upside down” so the rest of the session was devoted to just doing that over and over again until I hated it a little less. Rolling has to wait.

So now I know this year’s girls, or three of them – four if you count that I remember Augusta from last year, all five if you count the fencing session with Cornelia. We know that they know the basics, we know that they know what to do when it all goes wrong and over the next couple of months, we’re going to take them out into our very shallow, very sheltered corner of the harbour and start doing everything for real!