Bumblebee Paddles

A couple of weeks ago – over a month ago now! – I did the post on the pool/assessment session for the new boat club girls and now finally I’m doing the first boat club session of 2024. Yes, there’s a big gap. There wasn’t such a big gap in real life but 1) I like a little temporal distance between reality and blogs just for a little anonymity and 2) my GoPro refused to cooperate and I didn’t get any photos from that first session. Yes, that really is the big reason for such a big gap, I haven’t been back to the boathouse in a little while and therefore had no pictures.

We were in the same situation girl-wise as at the pool session – two girls who were, for various reasons, unable to make it, leaving us with only three girls. That meant we had effectively five adults, four on the water, to three girls. It meant we could be pretty one-on-one with the girls and we did kind of need it.

So, first thing is getting ready to get out on the water. When we’d checked the kit before the pool session, two of the airbags in our Prijons were flat as pancakes. I’d reinflated them and now we discovered they’d lost a lot of pressure. Not completely flat but another two or three weeks and they would be. They’ll need replacing. That’s fine, we’ve ordered some new ones and we have some spares and we won’t actually need the Prijons until we do a club session.

We all got changed – I travel a little further than the others so two of the three girls were already there and in their wetsuits so I don’t know if they came ready to go out. Makes it quicker if they do. Last year we had five unwanted kayaks cluttering up the main dry room but now they’re sold, so we have a lot more space – and we have access to our changing cubicles! They’re just some shower rails and curtains hung from our sloping ceiling but it’s more than we had last year. Then we had to get the girls into buoyancy aids and cagoules, match them with a paddle and a spraydeck – oh, and then take the BAs off again to put the spraydecks on underneath. Then we took a good look at our three girls and decided which kayak they were each going to use this season. Este was easy, she’s having the little yellow Dagger Dynamo, which sits a little higher in the water than its red twin. The other two had two of the blue ones. One was definitely one of the RPMs. Maybe the other was too. No, I think one of them had the Redline. Two of the smallish blue ones, anyway.

Once they had their kit, we adjusted the footrests for them. That’s easy in the Dynamo – hooks behind the pedals, slide them up and down – but one of the blue ones has a bar rather than pedals and you have to undo the wingnut, take it off entirely, move it to the correct position and then screw it back into place, without catching your fingers under the bar, the bolt or the wingnut. Then we went through the important things. How to hold the paddle – we did this at the pool but it’s always good to go over it again – how to paddle, reassurance that we’re not going to make them capsize tonight because it was a cold, breezy night, far from ideal for a first boat club session, really, but it had been hot and sunny at lunchtime and the deterioration was quick and unexpected, and then a warning not to make too much nice. The boathouse is at quite an open public location and while the public are generally well-meaning, they’re also very quick to understand shrieks as a requirement to phone the coastguard on our behalf, which means awkward questions at work the next day for our instructor. I can understand why they might phone the coastguard if they hear kids screaming out in kayaks but apparently they’ve been known to misinterpret laughter too, so we have to be reasonably quiet.

Then there was stuff like how to get into a kayak in shallow muddy water and how to carry a kayak. For the girls, it’s two girls to a boat, bend with your knees, not your back, and carry the boat down to the waterline before coming back for the next one. Our instructor is capable of swinging a kayak onto her shoulder, even the big Jives. I’m not but I can help carry two at a time between two people, one in each hand, with one person at the front and one at the back. Our other assistant goes out in a canoe so the girls helped him mount it on its little wheels and he wheeled it down to the water. Last year it took six or so Guides to carry it and maybe we’ll do that still when there’s a bigger group, because the wheels are awkward. The rest of us went out in Jives, although our second assistant – I really need to start giving the adults codenames as well as the girls! – used her orange Arc last year.

And at last, we were on the water. We weren’t going to be out long because the weather wasn’t great but we were out long enough to give the girls a taste of what it’s like to do everything on the sea rather than the pool. Of course, Betty already knows because she was here last year. We struggled a bit at first – the girls had to get spraydecks on, which is fine in a pool but suddenly they have to do it with a paddle in their hands too and there’s a current and a breeze buffeting them around – and then the water is so shallow that you scrape the bottom with your paddle. The tide wasn’t as high as we expected and there are a lot of sandbanks, visible from the shore, which we had to avoid.

So we did a little forward paddling, the girls had a go at going in a straight line, with the weather battling them, and then we rafted up, talked a bit and then paddled back. That was it. Sometimes when they’re rafted up, the instructor will get them to stand up in the boats long enough to answer simple questions and maybe do the tiniest jump before sitting down again but it was rough enough that they’d have gone in – into some quite cold water! – if we’d played that. Paddling backwards had been another aim for the session but between the weather and the time, we had to leave that one.

Arc Assistant – name them after the boats! – wasn’t a big fan of the Jive. I wasn’t last year, either. They’re big and wide, which felt weird when I was accustomed to a long thin kayak, but more importantly, they’re more comfortable leaning over at about 30° than their paddlers are comfortable with. We know academically that they’re very stable and they’ll sit there very happily and it takes quite a lot of effort to actually tip them over, but the lizard part of your brain can’t agree with that. They feel very tippy and very wobbly for a very long time and then you realise you’ve got used to it and it feels like a floating sofa. Arc Assistant hasn’t got to that stage yet. And after nine or ten months out of it, I’d forgotten how to feel comfortable in it too.

The bit no one expects is that once all the boats have been carried back up to the boathouse, they have to be laid out on chairs and washed. It’s more to get the salt off the metal bits and the worst of the oily mud off than to get them gleaming and pristine, and to dry out the insides so no one’s sitting in three inches of dirty seawater next time. It takes a little while and some of our new girls are too small to help much with turning them over and putting them back in the racks. Because it was so cold, our “manager” on shore made hot chocolate and soup while we did that and when we came back in to get dressed, we had hot drinks waiting for us, which were very much appreciated.

I don’t know exactly what the syllabus for the next few weeks is going to be but hopefully a little capsize practice on the actual sea next time, especially for Cornelia, who missed the pool session and wasn’t a member last year and therefore will never have done it. Get the backwards paddling in and some turning. Most of the girls had instinctively figured out how to turn in order to avoid the various maritime hazards and the current but there’s still a bit for them to be formally taught about that. And the session after, I’ll be back. It won’t get its own blog post, I don’t think – I’ll probably do a summary of the boat club season and of the unit sessions at the end of term rather than commentate on every session I go to.

Oh, and there’s one more important thing! I finally have my own set of boathouse keys! That means I can arrive before the others and be able to let myself in the gate to park and into the building to wait and get changed instead of driving around the area, because there’s nowhere on the road to park and the nearest car park is a paid one – well, not after 3pm during the week, so it’s fine for the units to park there, but it’s a bit of a trek for me. I don’t have a key to the sea gate yet because they didn’t have a spare, so I can’t get the boats to the water, but at least I have the keys to the building. Now I feel like a proper boathouse assistant!