Hi, I’m Bumblebee: a reintroduction for 2025

Since the season is about to start again, I thought I’d do a reintroduction!

Hello, I’m Julie but my Brownies call me Bumblebee. I’m a Brownie and Ranger leader (and sometimes Guide leader but not currently) coming up on my 18th anniversary but for the purposes of this blog, we’ll focus on a different Girlguiding role of mine: I’m a paddlesport assistant at our local boathouse. I joined just over two years ago, so this is my third season there and I’m no longer the baby of the boathouse because we have a new volunteer this year!

We run a boat club for local Guides and Rangers during the summer term, with our core group who get to develop their skills over the term and we also run taster nights for local units to give kayaking a go. If the weather’s too windy for kayaking, we can do raft building because we can stay in the more sheltered water, or we can do it if you just prefer rafts over kayaks. There are six of us – our manager, one qualified instructor and now four unqualified assistants. I’m one of the unqualified assistants, although I’m on a long and slow journey to becoming a second qualified instructor. We’re all more than capable of looking after ourselves under the conditions we take girls out in – generally warm windless evenings. We’re on the sea but we’re in a very sheltered shallow part of it. I don’t think there’s anywhere, even if we take experienced girls out for an expedition, where we’re further than 300m from the shore and never more than about 100m from water shallow enough to stand up in, even for a ten-year-old.

You can follow my paddling story right here on this blog but in short, I had a go at kayaking in a swimming pool aged about eleven as a Guide, didn’t paddle again until 2016, was really bad at it and in 2019 had a random inspiration to buy an inflatable kayak from Lidl. Because I’ve got a modicum of common sense, I decided to go out with a pro to learn about kayaking and about the bit of water I intended to use it on and that turned into doing my Paddle UK Explore Award in July 2021, my Paddlesport Safety & Rescue training in October 2023 and my Sea Kayak Award training (although we didn’t finish the assessment and I’ve been chasing it ever since!!) in April 2023. I’m not qualified to take anyone out paddling but I’m qualified to be able to look after myself and, theoretically, to be able to rescue people from kayaks, canoes and stand-up paddleboards.

I’m also an archery instructor and fencing coach, both of which I did through Girlguiding. It means I’m just qualified enough to safely run a taster session for beginners, so I get invited to county and region events to run both and county sometimes send me out to units or camps to run them there too. And of course, I do them in my own unit and districts. Fencing is a really handy thing to have when you’ve had a busy week and suddenly don’t have anything to do at Guides. “I’ll just pop the swords in the car and we’ll do some fencing tonight!”. The swords are plastic and bendy, by the way. I don’t do the actual metal stuff. I may be qualified to use them (I honestly don’t know if I am or not) but even if I had some available, I know that I don’t know the safety stuff around them. If anyone finds the helmet claustrophobic or if I’m teaching in hot weather, I also have a load of foam “swords” (lengths of pipe insulation) which I can teach the same skills with.

I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that like many Guiding leaders, I’m an absolute badge fiend, who’s nearly filled up two blankets. To be fair, I’ve been collecting since I started as a five-year-old Rainbow and I’m a little more picky now about what badges I acquire than I have been in previous years. We have our very own badge at the boathouse, Girlguiding has a set of adventure badges (different set for every section for Height, Land, Sport, Snow & Water) and I will never not be in love with the Adventure Leader badge so I’m really excited that last week Girlguiding announced a set of adventure badges for adults to go with the Rainbow, Brownie, Guide & Ranger sets – I’ll be ordering a full set of those the second they’re released in May and we’ll work our way through them asap, although I think I’ve more than earned the Water one already.

When I’m not Girlguiding, my day job is in research. That makes it sound a little more grandiose than it actually is because it reads as medical or academic research. I work from home for a small company that deals in retail and market research and I am the research department. Actually, these days it might be more accurate to say that I lead the research department because I have someone I manage, which makes me feel like a proper grown-up.

Outside of work and Girlguiding, I write a lot. I have two blogs attached to this account – the one you’re reading right now, Bumblebee Paddles, and a travel blog, The Logbook of Captain Hunt. I think of it as digital postcards from my travels, written there and then like a diary rather than the kind that’s designed to be found and read by and answer questions from strangers, the kind that’s flooded with stunning pictures of women in impractically long dresses. I travel a lot. Back in 2008 when I started my first proper job, I realised I wasn’t doing much with my life outside work and I decided to use my annual leave to do a gap year in small pieces over a long time. I hit those 365 days some years ago, long after I’d forgotten that was what I was doing. The furthest north I’ve been is Svalbard, an archipelago belonging to Norway and inhabited only by the last few miners and anyone connected to the tourism industry, and the people who run life for the people in the tourism industry. The furthest south I’ve been is Cyprus, west is Iceland and east is Ekaterinburg in Russia, just on the other side of the Urals. It’s where the last of the Romanovs were slaughtered in 1917 and it was the fourth stop on my three-week adventure around Russia nearly six years ago now. I’m currently writing my third travelogue, which is going to be about hot water and steam and bathing culture and which currently doesn’t have a title better than “The Bath Book”.

Back home, I like to swim, craft, read in the bath and scroll social media for hours. I think this blog might give an impression of me as living an action-packed life where I’m never off the water and perhaps in the summer that’s nearly true – my summers do tend to be three or four months of not having the time to even breathe. When I’m not kayaking at the boathouse, I like to hire a canoe on the river or a kayak down on a different bit of sea or take my SUP out. But then mid-September hits and I retreat inside until April.