By now, you already know about the boathouse but my story has reached just under two years ago and I’m about to discover it. I went to do a fencing session with some local Rangers (who didn’t turn up, for various reasons) and chatting with their leaders, I discovered that they were going kayaking at the boathouse the next week.
I knew the boathouse existed. The boathouse belongs to a couple of local Girlguiding divisions and it does sessions out on the water for local Girlguiding members. I don’t know how long it’s been there but it’s been a few decades now and it’s changed hands a few times. I think it used to belong to County and then it belonged to a couple of divisions that it isn’t even in and I think it’s been in these divisions since the early 90s. Might be wrong about that. It’s certainly been there long enough that our main instructor was a member of the boat club when she was herself a Guide.
I’d been there as a Young Leader – I think we did one of their fundraising shore evenings – but the only thing I remember is cooking hot dogs, and I’d been there with my Brownies at some point since 2016 and that was definitely one of the shore evenings. I remember doing the circus skill activities that the boathouse tends to break out for those occasions. I’d never actually been out boating from the boathouse. But by now I was getting into my paddlesports, I was looking into qualifications for running sessions with Inspire and wondering dimly about how much use I could put those qualifications to. So when I heard they were going to the boathouse and actually boating from it, I invited myself along.
So here we are in July 2022 and I’m at the boathouse. I get dressed up in my wetsuit & buoyancy aid, I get into a kayak and off I go onto the water with the Rangers, the boathouse instructor and one of their assistants. We went off on a little expedition, across a small but relatively busy channel, the way into the marina, through the marina and out into the harbour and round the side of the marina back to the boathouse. I paddled up front with the instructor a lot of the way and I asked questions as we went. What qualifications do you actually need to lead a kayaking session? How do you get them? And somehow, I found myself joining the boathouse team with plans being made for all of us – instructor, assistants and me – to do our FSRT at some point next season.
The boathouse currently has one qualified instructor and at the time, two unqualified assistants – people who’ve been with the boathouse for years but for various reasons have never done their qualifications. Crowd control, if you will. One person alone cannot – and shouldn’t – manage an entire paddling group so they have a few people who know enough to keep an eye on the group, teach the basics, look after the nervous ones and do all the things that a second or third adult needs to do when you’ve got a dozen pre-teens having their first kayak taster. People who have enough skills to do all that and not need to be hand-held themselves. I could absolutely do that, and I also wanted to work my way through whatever qualifications are needed.
When we went back to the boathouse, I learned how to wash down the kayaks and put them away and the boathouse people took my details. I was invited to the boat club’s end of term party, with a barbecue and a fun paddle around the harbour but I couldn’t make it – was that the week I spectacularly sprained my ankle? I suspect it was. I’d been catsitting and when I took the cat home, I slipped off the decking returning to my car. There was a loud crack and a pain in my ankle and once I was sure I was going to remain conscious, I sat there, wedged in between decking and car, considering what horrors I was going to see when I lifted myself back onto the decking and examined my ankle. Something pretty bad, judging by that noise, probably something I really didn’t want to look at. So I pulled myself back up onto the decking and when I did, I found I’d landed on a plastic flowerpot which was split from top to bottom. In hindsight, I was so relieved to find the source of the crack and no bone sticking out of my ankle that I never considered that neither of those things meant it wasn’t broken. Anyway, driving all the way to the boathouse, paddling and having a barbecue weren’t appealing things when you have an ankle the size of a watermelon. So I didn’t go to the boathouse’s party after all.
But I did join the boathouse the next season, as you can guess from the fact that I’ve already been writing about this year’s season.
Bumblebee Paddles 