Normally our boathouse season runs throughout the summer term. Other than the boat club’s pre-season pool session which happens roughly during the Easter holidays, subject to availability of instructor and pool, we squish in all the unit evenings and all the boat club evenings between coming back after Easter and breaking up for the summer. But this season had some appalling weather and we ended up cancelling three sessions and using our fall-back date, which meant we ended up two sessions short. We managed to make up one of those by running an extra session late in the summer holidays – once you get into September and into term time again, it’s getting a bit chilly in the evening but more importantly, it’s getting dark too early, so we just couldn’t find the time to make up the second but at least we were only one down.
Normally our last evening would be a family barbecue where we’d present our boat club girls with their badges and certificates but with having missed two paddling evenings, we couldn’t afford to just do the barbecue, not least because there are certain skills we want to cover during the term for their certificates that we needed to make sure got done. So we invited the parents to come earlier than they normally would so we could do the presentation but the rest of the evening would be out on the water as usual.
For some reason, we started talking about the canoes. One of our helpers goes out in a canoe rather than a kayak like the rest of us and we talked about, I think, the possibility of me joining him in the canoe because I’d expressed a bit of an interest in canoeing at our meeting the week before, and he would love to encourage more canoeing. On this occasion I declined, mostly because I wanted to take pictures both of myself for Instagram and of the girls for a poster for the 2025 season and I’d prefer to be able to zoom around in my own kayak for that. I do like canoeing – I’m not very good at it but it’s a lovely way to spend a warm Sunday morning in August. But having discussed “do you want to canoe tonight?” we found ourselves extending the invitation to the girls. As well as our helper’s own blue canoe, we have two red boathouse canoes which I’ve never seen out on the water. It took a moment but eventually all the girls decided that yes, they’d like to try canoeing, and we dragged all the kayaks back into the boathouse and back into their racks – for we’d already got out everyone’s kayaks for the night!
Now, canoeing is a very different discipline to kayaking. Our girls had got used to kayaking and are able to just carry them down to the water, launch, head out and wait to be told exactly what they’re learning today. But now we needed to go through the fine details of “this is how to use the paddle”, “this is how to sit”, “this is how you work as a pair” and all that, which is brand new to them.
We didn’t go far or do much. Normally we’d take the boat club girls a bit further out than the unit girls, find a buoy or a post or something and use it as a base for the lesson but today we stayed quite close to our bit of shore because everything from the moment they sat down was an ongoing lesson. Being accustomed to sitting just below water level and paddling with a double-ended paddle on your own is very different from sitting on a bench in a canoe, paddling with a single-bladed paddle and doing it in tandem with a partner. There’s the question of getting it without either of you capsizing the other, there’s getting started, stopping, turning – in short, everything about this new craft was something new to be learned. In a way, it’s easier to do it solo – I find it very frustrating that I can’t do a j-stroke and have to paddle by flipping the paddle from side to side all the time but at least I don’t have to worry about what a second person is doing.
So we just dithered around the bay, practising a whole load of new skills. Our main instructor was sharing a canoe with Este, our newest boat club member. Because it was the holidays, we didn’t necessarily have the availability we have during term time and we only had three of the five girls, so Augusta and Betty shared one and instructor and Este shared the other. Our canoe assistant canoed around them and us last two kayaked around, giving advice and support where needed but generally just keeping an eye on them, making sure they didn’t drift too close to the sea wall.
The instructor suggested maybe they’d like to stand up in the canoe and it became very clear very quickly that Augusta and Betty didn’t want to. That’s fine with our instructor and it’s fine by me too but all four of us assumed they hadn’t heard it from anyone else and I think they started to feel quite a lot of pressure to do something they didn’t want to, so I spent at least fifteen minutes paddling around, calling “You absolutely do not have to do it if you don’t want to, she just doesn’t realise you’ve already been asked three times by three different people, please do not feel like we’re deliberately pressuring you!”. The water was very shallow – I’d had to be towed out twice and then get out and drag the kayak a quarter of a mile before there was enough water to actually get afloat – so there wasn’t a lot of problem with capsizing. The water would be barely up to their knees most of the time, but it’s a pain to drain and right a canoe because they weigh a ton and they’d end up lying in the mud rather than floating in the water, so they’d be even harder.
Give or take “stand up! stand up!”, they all enjoyed their experiment with canoes. Back on shore, we asked if they preferred canoes or kayaks and actually, it seemed every last one of them preferred the canoes over the kayaks. I gave them the details for a local company that hires out canoes in case they wanted to go and play in their own time and as we washed down the boats and put them away, the leaders began to plan to do some more work in canoes and maybe even on SUPs next season rather than keeping them in kayaks for every session. Not that we have any SUPs at the boathouse but I have one I can bring down and both me and our main instructor have our FSRT/PSR training and are qualified to rescue from SUPs, even if they’re not crafts either of us are particular experts in.
And then we presented the certificates and badges! The certificates are really just for attendance, listing the skills we’ve covered over the term. They get three badges – our manager has a stock of the old Guide Outdoor Pursuits interest badge, they get the new Guide Water adventure badge and we also have our own boathouse badge, which we give the boat club girls and which leaders can buy for their girls when they come for a unit evening. I have two – one for my blanket and one for a certain t-shirt I hope to own one day. We also apparently have a Brownie variant of the boathouse badge – the only one I’ve ever seen is blue for Guides but we do on-shore fundraising fun evenings for Brownies, so there’s a yellow badge for them.
And that really is the 2024 season over! We had a meeting with our treasurer, who I’ve never met or heard of before, which devolved more into a really early 2025 season planning meeting and last week we had a corporate community group, headed by the father of two ex-boat club girls, who came in to the boathouse for three days, armed with a community grant to tidy the grounds, clean and repaint the outside of the boathouse, clear out the gutters, sort out our water system and scrub the mould off the ceiling inside, so it’ll look lovely next season. Of course, everything will be overgrown and we’ll need to do some serious mowing somewhere around March or April but we’ll have a nice clean foundation to start on and we won’t have to worry about the building leaking over the winter.
Since I probably won’t do a lot of paddling between now and the new season, I have no idea what I’m going to blog about for the next six months but I believe in me! I’ll find something, it just won’t be new paddling experiences.
Bumblebee Paddles 