Since it’s Halloween today, I wish I had something spooooky for this blog but I don’t. I’ve hung up my wetsuit by October and I can’t even think of anything relevant from Guiding, other than that we did apple bobbing and cooking smores over candles at Rangers last week – not exactly spooky but reasonably fitting considering we meet in an anti-Halloween church hall. So I’m going to at least stick with the Guiding theme and see if I can come up with a few suggestions as to how to get kids into kayaking, from my experience at the boathouse.
Take them out in good weather
The key to getting them to want to do it again is that they have to enjoy it the first time. Maybe that should be my first point but it’s such a big overarching one that it makes more sense to break it down into how to make them enjoy it and for us, the weather is important. We kayak on the sea and although we’re pretty sheltered, we have to go out a little distance past the really sheltered bit to get enough water underneath us if we want to do anything more than “this is a boat and this is some water”. We cancel if the wind gets above a certain strength, mostly because our instructor can’t teach in anything higher but also because wind and choppy seas don’t make a fun introduction for kids. If you spend the entire session clinging to your boat and petrified that you’re going to capsize any second, you’re not going to go home and declare “that was fun, let’s do it again!”.
Keep the session fun
Beginner sessions, beyond how to get the boat moving past the shallowest shallows, should be mostly about fun. Our unit sessions are just games – we raft up and everyone has a go at standing up long enough to say their name, their age and their favourite chocolate/ice cream/school subject. Of course, it’s no fun if you pressure them and some kids just aren’t ready to stand up so if they say no and they’re absolutely sure, we don’t push it anymore. For some of them, just being in the boat is enough of a challenge. We tend to take a couple of tennis balls out, especially if we’ve got an older group, and they play a game of throwing the ball at each others’ boats, avoiding it, retrieving it etc, which is a great way of getting them used to manoeuvring the boats and gaining confidence without even noticing. And for the really experienced group, the Rangers who’ve been coming every summer since they started Guides, we’ll sometimes take them on a short expedition.
My own Rangers didn’t enjoy their first session in 2023 and wanted to go back to the commercial provider they’d previously used as Guide. Now, their 2023 session was very early in the season when it wasn’t very warm and our sister Guides came along too, which meant we had to split the session and bring Guides out on the water at the same time. They enjoyed it a lot more in 2024 when it was just Rangers, when they had the entire session and when the leaders weren’t preoccupied with a girl in a sinking boat and could just concentrate on playing games and letting them run wild – within reason, obviously!
Keep them warm
Nothing will kill enjoyment more than being cold. Unless it’s really hot, we put a cagoule on all the girls at the boathouse because there’s always more of a breeze on the water than in the boathouse’s back garden and we have a couple of oversized extra layers in the emergency Daren drums (is that the general name for them or is that a caving name?) in the canoe. And of course, if anyone capsizes, we’re very ready to rush them back to dry land if they start to get cold. Back at the boathouse, our manager often has hot chocolate or soup ready – we tend to reserve that for the boat club girls but if it’s cold, it can be made available for units.
We get the girls to wash the boats down with fresh water when we get back and that’s when it can get cold. Buoyancy aids hold a lot of warmth so while we tend to go round and collect discarded ones to rinse and put away, we’re not big on “take that off right now” for the girls who are still wearing them. The adults tend to pitch in and once they’re done washing, there’s no faffing around outside – last boat in, get your wet stuff off and run in immediately!
Don’t intimidate them unnecessarily
For various reasons, all our kayaks are closed cockpit river or sea kayaks rather than the more beginner-friendly – or at least, less immediately intimidating – sit-on-tops. We don’t put the unit sessions in spraydecks. If we do, we have to cover “this is how to remove them and escape if you capsize” and that’s really scary for a first-timer. Without them, they just fall out like they would a sit-on-top and we pop them back in again. Spraydecks are great for keeping water out in rough conditions or for enabling you to roll back up without the faff of escaping and getting back in but our Guides aren’t going to be rolling on their first taster session (not sure we’ve even got a leader among us who can do it) and we don’t go out in conditioners where they’re going to get much water inside the kayak – except when we pair a girl with a boat far too small for her, which we try not to do. We’ve put a few Guides in the Dynamos that really shouldn’t be in them (best for the ones who’ve come up from Brownies in the last term or two, generally) and some Rangers don’t do very well in the RPMs – they sit low in the water and any movement causes water to slosh in. But probably 95 times out of 100, there’s no worry about water getting into the uncovered cockpit so there’s no point in adding the extra stress of a spraydeck.
The boat club girls do wear spraydecks but they’ve had a pool session before the season starts to get them used to capsizing and escaping and so it’s something they’re already accustomed to and means we don’t have to squeeze it into a session that’s already a bit on the short side.
The other thing that’s intimidating at the boathouse is that there are Sea Scouts just a couple of hundred metres away and they are little words-I-won’t-use-on-this-blog. They tend to go out in a flotilla of either canoes or dinghies and their greatest delight is to try to ram our kayaks. They always have someone older in the boat but a lot of the time it’s someone who I suspect is the Scouting equivalent of a Young Leader, a teenager who knows enough to teach the beginners. I trust that Young Leaders have reasonably good judgement and won’t ram our kids but I don’t entirely trust them. So we either try to keep our distance from the Scouts or, on occasion, the adults have to put themselves between the Scouts and the Guides. I don’t want to get rammed and capsized but better me than ten-year-old Flossie who was already nervous.
Bribe them with badges
There are two badges that we/the leaders primarily give out. The boathouse has its own badges. The boat club girls get given them as part of the package and unit leaders can buy them for their own girls. I’ve only ever seen the blue Guide ones but I believe there’s a pack of yellow Brownie ones somewhere which we sell for our Brownie on-shore evenings, which is a fundraising thing where they use the boathouse and its circus toys but don’t actually go on the water – I’ve been to a couple of these but until I invited myself along at the end of 2022, I’d never boated from the boathouse.
The other one is the Girlguiding Water adventure badge. I’ve talked about this quite a lot – Girlguiding have a set of adventure badges with no criteria, just a kind of commemorative “I had an adventure” thing. There are five – Water, Height, Snow, Sports and Land – and then a different design for Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers, which means 20 different badges in total. We give the boat club girls the Guide Water adventure one and leaders have the option to buy them for their girls if they come to a kayaking session. I have both Guide Water and Ranger Water on my blanket. I have to admit, though, the girls don’t tend to love the badges in the way the adults do.
Bring them back next time
The girls who enjoy it the most are always the girls who’ve done it before. We tend to get the same units over and over again and that means most girls do a session every summer. It might be a bit scary the first time but if you haven’t totally put them off, they’ll come back the second time remembering that it wasn’t too terrifying and they’ll come back the third time remembering that this was something they were reasonably good at and by the time they get to Rangers, they’ll think of themselves as old hands and pretty expert at this.
Of course, this is from the boathouse point of view – if you’ve got your own children, you can take them paddling a lot more than once a year! But repeating something, gradually building their skills in an unpressured way, letting them start to feel like they’re the ones who know what to do, that’s always going to be good for them.
Get them used to the boathouse
Not that we do that much with the boathouse as a building but it is available for local units to hire just as a building. You might use it as a base for activities outside by the sea. You might use it because your hall is the polling station for elections you didn’t plan for at the start of term. You might use it just for a change. You might come to our on-shore fundraising/fun evenings – we run a series of them each year, during a week with low evening tide when we can’t paddle, Guides one year, Brownies the next. You might even borrow the boathouse for your own private fun evening. We had a unit down this year who missed out last year and asked if they could come on their own. We have a load of circus and teambuilding toys stashed away under the benches, we have a mini oven, we can provide games and party food.
It means local units can get used to the existence of the boat club, local leaders can start to notice the “boat” in its title, girls who are too nervous to go on the water can come and get used to the place and to the leaders, put a bit of money into it so we can buy new towlines and jackets (our two main investments in 2024) and then when the idea of going for a kayaking session comes up, it’s already something familiar. That Guide unit that came for a fun evening, they’re not on our regular boating roster, so we told them about what we do, showed them the boats and maybe we’ll see them next summer. One of their girls has been in the boat club two years in a row, so word is getting to them but they’ve never boated – and I know, because that’s the unit I was a member of myself.
So that’s us. Parents will have different things to consider when they want to introduce their children to paddling, proper clubs will have different things again, activity centres will have different ones again because our circumstances and opportunities are very different. But for our regular annual cycle, that’s how we get the girls to enjoy kayaking and want to do it again.
Bumblebee Paddles 