Bumblebee Paddles

And so, at the end of the last week of the 2024 season at the boathouse, I finally reach my first season, 2023, on the blog!

My first proper visit was in mid-April when a couple of us went to clear up after the long winter, check on the boats and their airbags and generally make sure we were ready for the first sessions. It was the first time I’d really had a look at the boathouse and its kit. It’s a little wooden hut next to a proper marina, with a dry room where we gather the girls and where they get changed. There are a couple of curtained-off changing cubicles but they were unusable in 2023 because that entire side of the room was housing five elderly Chinese kayaks we didn’t have a lot of use for and have since sold. Then there’s the store room. Just inside to the right are racks of cagoules, buoyancy aids and a few random pairs of water shoes. On the left are some planks and barrels for raft-building. Then there are triple-height racks of kayaks on the right and some canoes on the left. One canoe is on wheels because it’s the preferred craft of one of the assistants and there’s another two hanging above it. At the far end, there’s a rack of paddles to the left and assorted maintenance stuff to the right and a line of tennis balls wedged into the wall above the door.

Outside is a concrete are, a small scrubby grass field and a water butt. We have mains cold water in the tiny kitchen by the front door but no hot and no sewerage. While we’re out on the water, our “manager” brings out chairs to set the kayaks on, buckets and sponges and we use the clean rainwater from the butt to wash the salt off the boats and kit.

At the end of the little garden is a gate and then we push through the bushes to our own private (muddy) beach, right next to the public park. Great place for parents to sit and wait if they don’t want to go all the way home.

So that’s the boathouse.

Then we have two session types. The first is unit evenings. 1st Happytown Guides get in touch. “Can we have a session? We meet on Wednesdays”. So in January we sit down with a tide timetable and the list of people who’ve requested a session and we slot them in. We need high tide because it’s really shallow here. We also try not to be at the boathouse more than three times a week. The trouble with this system is that if anyone sees the pictures on Facebook in the summer, they can’t come and join in the fun until next year, if they remember to get in their request the next January. With only one instructor, one manager and three unqualified assistants, we’re already pretty overloaded. It might get easier when/if I get qualified to run sessions but for now, we’re at capacity.

Second is boat club. We have a core of girls who come every other week throughout the term (that’s just how the tides work here) to build their skills. It’s on Brownie night so I can’t make it to all of them, and I plan to be extra busy at Brownies the weeks I am there to make up for it.

Unit nights generally involve just introducing boats and paddling. They’re simple but fairly repetitive. Get the girls on the water, get them off the water, make sure they enjoyed it, play the game of “stand up in your boat and tell us your name and your favourite chocolate”. With boat club, there’s generally an aim to each night. Last year I was there for an entire evening on paddling backwards, we seal launched off the pontoons and we did a mini-expedition. These girls are much more confident and competent because they’ve had a lot more practice – some of them are back for their second year in the club. It’s £80 for the term, which includes a pool safety/assessment session, six 90-minute evenings on the water with tuition from our instructor, an end of term celebration and a badge or two. You’d pay £80 for a single hour with a lot of tutors so it’s pretty good value.

A couple of years ago, they used to work through the syllabus of a watersports or adventure badge and get presented it at the end of term. With the new programme (we persist in calling it that; it was introduced in 2018!) there are no more suitable badges. They do get a special boathouse badge but it would be nice to have some more programme-oriented. Girlguiding introduced their series of adventure badges last year (five types of adventure for each of the four section; 20 badges altogether) so we can give the girls the Guide (or Ranger) Water badge, and units can give them to their girls for the taster evenings. Girlguiding is pushing adventure quite hard at the moment but it feels kind of hollow coming on the heels of selling off our activity centres.

I witnessed more unit evenings last year because there are three nights a week I’m not at Rangers or Brownies. In a way, I enjoy them more. As a general rule, our instructor takes the more confident ones out to play games and practice their handling while the rest of us are either crowd control or dealing with the nervous ones or the ones who just can’t do it. I tend to drift towards the ones who are really struggling. Some of them get carried on the current into the reeds or mud and need to be towed into clearer water. Some go round and round in circles because I can’t figure out how to explain to them that they need to use both sides of the paddle, one after the other. Once we put a bigger girl in our tiny childrens’s whitewater kayak – it’s a good size for the tiny ten-year-olds who were still at Brownies at Easter, but anyone bigger will take on water from behind and then we need to drain it or they’ll sink. We try not to make that mistake – we spend some time sizing up the girls and matching them with our motley kayak collection but that evening, we got that one wrong.

I made a lot of use of the contact tow last year. The one who scooped frantically on one side and never touched the water with the other. The one who panicked because she couldn’t figure it out (we rafted up and I distracted her until she was calm again, then we agreed I’d take her over to the others and the game and she was great after that ). The one whose legs hurt too much to do anything. Honestly, by the middle of the season I was resolving that whatever happens next time, I’m not contact towing. It’s becoming my predictable signature move, just like Harry Potter and his Expelliarmus. But I was glad I’d learned it because it came in really useful.

I also had a girl practically climbing out of her boat and onto mine because she splashed a tiny crab into her cockpit and needed urgently to escape from the monster. Our instructor fished it out and I’m still amazed I kept us both from capsizing. Actually, I think that was one of our boat club girls. We use a variety of closed-cockpit boats but we don’t put spraydecks on the unit evening girls – they’re here for a taster, learning how to capsize and escape isn’t an appealing thing to think about on your first ever trip and we don’t go out in rough weather – again, doesn’t make a great first impression – and so they generally don’t fill up much. Boat club do usually wear spraydecks – they’ve practiced this in the pool session before we go out on the sea, so it doesn’t intimidate them in the way it intimidates ten-year-old Flossie who was still in Brownies three weeks ago. How the crab got in, I don’t know.

The reason I enjoy the unit nights more is the way those girls, especially the first-timers, transform over the hour from “I’m scared and I can’t do it!” to “I’m enjoying this and I’m coming back next year”. Their entire faces and demeanors change and it’s just magical, especially when you’ve been the one to cause it. My panicker, for example – when we paddled back to shore, we were also playing a game of throwing a tennis ball around to get each other out and she was zooming around as if she’d been born in that kayak. The change can be incredible.

That’s what the boathouse is. A place to give local girls the opportunity to try something new and adventurous. Some of them will fall in love and will join boat club next year. Some of them will be excited to come back for the unit evening next year. Some might even make it their thing, join a club, buy their own SUP, become an instructor, take up a life of paddling and all because they went to the boathouse one evening when they were Guides.