It’s very early but we’ve now had our first boathouse meeting of the year! We do this in January – get a tide timetable, go through our calendars and our requests and put all our boat club and unit sessions in so everyone’s ready for the summer term. Unfortunately, it does mean that anyone who stumbles across the boat club during the summer term has to wait until the following January to get put on the list for next year – between the small team and the tides, we just don’t have room for spontaneity.
I’ve finally properly met our new volunteer! Well, I met her last year because I was there when she said she’d like to come every week but we get through so many units with so many leaders that I’d completely lost track of who she actually is. It turns out she’s a unit helper with the region chief commissioner, which means she was one of the people who helped keep the girls together when I capsized last season. Of course, being so completely new, she knows nothing about the boathouse, so the meeting was regularly punctuated with explanations – being in the same boat two years ago, I just kind of waited and figured things out by listening, observing and being confused. Asking straight out is much more efficient!
Speaking of losing track of people, we should have some codenames for the adults too because I don’t like using their real names here and it gets muddly to talk about “the other assistant” and “the other other assistant” and so on. Quick introduction, then:
Bumblebee: that’s me, obviously
Butterfly: our manager, who’s been in charge of the boathouse for 30-odd years now and no longer goes out on the water but looks after the place, the admin and the bookings.
Ladybird: our qualified instructor, a Guide leader and former pupil of the boathouse who grew up to take over the instructing of it
Dragonfly: another of the assistants, who does Guides with Ladybird and has been an assistant at the boathouse since Ladybird was a Guide
Grasshopper: another assistant, Butterfly’s son, prefers a canoe to a kayak
Caterpillar: running out of reasonably cute bug names now. Caterpillar is our new leader who’s just joined us.
We hold the meetings at Butterfly’s house – it might be more appropriate to go to the boathouse but with no heating, it’s a very cold place to spend a January evening and Butterfly has more comfortable sofas than we have down at the boathouse and it’s a lot easier than opening four separate locks to get in. Either she or Ladybird gets hold of a local tide timetable before the meeting – I’m not sure what the right word for this thing is but it’s a calendar with a week per page and against every day is a little diagram of the tide as well as high and low tide times and we get daylight & night coloured in! Because we’re so very much at the mercy of the tide in our corner of the sea, we need to see whether the tide comes in very suddenly or over a few hours and the same for out because it makes a huge difference as to whether we can go out or not. It’s no use having a high tide at 7pm if half an hour earlier, there was no water. But if the tide has been creeping slowly in and the water’s been reasonably high enough for two hours by then, that’s great. So we need the little squiggles as well as the bald facts.
As for planning, the first thing is to figure out what groups want what nights. Boat club is on Thursdays, so we go through the summer term and find all the Thursdays with good water. Generally there’ll be about seven of them, so we’ll pick six as our dates and keep the seventh as a reserve against bad weather. Then Butterfly will go through her notebook where she’s keeping unit requests and say “1st Happytown and 2nd Jolly Guides want Tuesdays” and we’ll find two suitable Tuesdays and so on, until we’ve matched all our requests with a suitable evening. They don’t get a say in it, which is partly why we do it so early in the year, so by the time they’re actually planning for the summer term, they already know when they’re at the boathouse – there’s no opportunity to say “Oh, actually, we’ve already got plans for that evening, can we swap?”. Generally, no. Between the tides, the light and the fact that we’ve all got other Guiding commitments to work around, what we’re putting together at this meeting is every date that we can possibly make available.
Actually, this year we could put in more. We only had six requests from units, one of which is our combined Rangers – I have six, Ladybird & Dragonfly have four so we take them out together rather than using two separate evenings. Unfortunately, four of those requests are on Ranger night and being a solo leader, I don’t have the option to leave them with anyone else. The other two are Fridays, one of which I may be away for. Although the deadline’s gone, we could theoretically add some Tuesday and Wednesday groups – but we probably won’t.
Then there’s boat club. Because we only had five girls in the boat club last year, and they were often outnumbered by the adults, we’ve set a minimum of eight girls this year for boat club to run. It’s Brownie night so I can’t really make more than half of them, so it’s either going to be a quiet season for me at the boathouse this year or a really quiet season. I guess I can live with having some space to breathe this summer – I love the boathouse, it’s probably my favourite Guiding thing I’ve ever done, but it does leave April to July feeling like I don’t have a spare second to even catch my breath.
Other than the boat club & unit nights, we’ve also put in our fundraising Guide activity nights – these are on shore using the boathouse as a base and we alternate Guides with Brownies each year. I’ve not actually been to one of these yet. And of course, we’ve got our pool session and boathouse opening day – not an open day when you get to visit but the day when we throw open the doors, air the place out, mow the yard, check the airbags and the kit and get it ready for the new season.
So, the new season is in sight!
Bumblebee Paddles 