Bumblebee Paddles

When I started this blog, I started an Instagram account alongside it and so I curated a whole list of paddlesport or paddlesport-adjacent accounts to follow. There’s a whole blog post in how difficult it is to find kayakers to follow who aren’t into whitewater, as I’m not, but that’s not my point. SUP accounts are plentiful – it’s much more accessible and much more picturesque, which makes it a much more social media-friendly sport than kayaking. And naturally, I follow Paddle UK, the national governing body which deals with safety recommendations, training and qualifications, the law, funding, clubs and so on. Oh, and sport. It’s a bit better balanced on the website but the Instagram account must be at least 95% championships and competitions and you start to feel like you’re not the kind of paddler Paddle UK cares about if you’re not aiming to be the best of the best and get a few medals.

Most of us are not doing this. Most of us have no intention of being the best at our club, let alone at the Olympics. Most of us are not training to win European championships or ocean races. We’re paddling for the fun of it, for leisure, for exercise, for a break from our day to day lives. I absolutely could paddle more (could I? When I already don’t have time to catch my breath between April and August?) but why? Would paddling more make me happier? Would paddling faster make me a better person? Would I enjoy kayaking more if I had a row of trophies on the mantlepiece?

I am being a little facetious. I can always improve my skills a bit more – most of us could. But we only really need to improve them to our own situation. I paddle in two ways: I hire a sit-on-top kayak and paddle from Knoll Beach to Old Harry and back. I’m a National Trust member so I’m not even against the car park clock – I can take my time. I don’t go out when the weather’s bad because I don’t enjoy it and so it’s always smooth and the wind is always reasonably low and the trip is quite within my skill levels. I like landing on the rocks and enjoying the idea of all the tourists on top of the cliff looking down at me and wondering how they can get to stand on Old Harry too and then I paddle back and I might go to the Bankes Arms for a drink and a cheese baguette (although not since chunks of local cheese turned into a pre-mixed mush of grated cheese, onion and some white gloop that I presume is mayo!).

The other way I paddle is at the boathouse. I’m quite within my skills level there too. We take out ten to eighteen-year-olds for their first proper taste of kayaking (let’s pretend many of our Guide units don’t bring the same girls back year after year for their second, third and fourth “first tastes”!). Again, because they’re such beginners, we don’t take them out in bad weather. Three of us have no instructor or coach qualifications but we have enough experience to teach first-timers the basics. We can do crowd control, we can tow girls back to shore when they’re struggling – we don’t need to be the bestest ever kayakers, we just need to be better than the Guides, and more importantly, we need to be confident and calm. We don’t need to be fast or flashy, we don’t need to be able to do tricks. We need to know how to put buoyancy aids on them, show them how to adjust their kayaks and how to paddle forwards. We have to be able to paddle up to them and hang onto them if they capsize while our instructor helps them get back in – or tow them back to where it’s shallow enough to do it themselves, or over to the pontoons where they can climb back in.

But it would be useful to be able to take a leading role. Dragonfly and Grasshopper, who’ve been at the boathouse for years, don’t have those qualifications, nor do they want to get them. It’s not my job to be the one who steps in and rescues them… but it kind of feels like it is. So I’m working my way really slowly through my qualifications because if someone else can lead the sessions, we can offer more sessions and Ladybird can take a few little shuffling steps back and running the boathouse can be shared between two people instead of one of them having it all on her shoulders.

That sort of thing is what I’d like to see more of from Paddle UK. Oh, of course they want to show off all the UK paddling champions and all the things they’ve won. If I was one of them, of course I’d want my governing body to be making a big noise and fuss about me. But they’ve got the space to talk about and celebrate things other than competition. What happened to the #ShePaddles initiative? There were no new ambassadors selected this summer. There’s virtually nothing coming from Paddle UK’s social media about them and there are only eight news articles about them on the website. Anything pre-rebrand seems to have been lost so there’s very little information about who they are and what they do. Why don’t they push the Go Paddling account more? Where are the concepts of beginners and leisure and qualifications? Why is it all competition?

So I think that’s something I want to do. Something I want to be. A little quiet lone voice that isn’t competing to be the fastest or the strongest but just someone doing this for fun and showing other people how to do this for fun. Someone who has a collection of photos rather than a collection of medals and a collection of kids who say things like “Yeah, we’re really excited to come back and do this again next summer!”.