I can’t often get to actual boat club because it’s the same night as Brownies but if we plan it in advance and put it in the programme, the other leaders know when I won’t be there and I like to be there on the first night of the term’s boat club. I get to know the girls and they get to know me, right at the beginning when we’re all learning everything. No one knows all their names, they still need an extra pair of hands because it’s the first time they’ve been on the sea and it’s just generally a good getting-to-know-you session.
At the pool session a few weeks back, we had eight girls, with one who couldn’t make it (hereafter referred to as Desdemona, because I’m naming them after the Shakespeare characters from the moons of Uranus) and two who were a bit of a mystery but who turned up (Juliet & Portia). We had one returnee from last year (Ariel) and then ten strangers, which is a lot of names to learn when I’m only going to see them a few times. Having made some notes on their appearance, I’m reasonably sure I’ll be able to identify five or six of them next time I go, as long as I study those notes for a day or two beforehand. Portia is the shortest. Cressida has curly hair. Miranda is the tallest. And obviously, these aren’t their real names, so I’ve got two lots of names to remember!
Eleven girls actually pushed our stock of kayaks a bit. We generally keep the four Jives for adults but that only leaves us 14 boats between 11 girls, and instructor Ladybird decided to go back to her old dark pink Transition instead of using a Jive this season, which takes us down to 13, leaving only two boats out of play! We lined them up in height order and gave them all paddles – actually got to use our nice shiny left-handed paddle this year! Then Portia had the red Dynamo and Ariel the yellow again, which is the one she had last year. I thought after a whole year, she might have outgrown it but she’s still our second smallest and she’s not squished into it or sinking it just yet. The four biggest girls had our stocks of Redlines and RPMs because they’re quite adaptable. Then we went back to the shorter end of the line and handed out the Wavesport Forplay and Piranha Inazone. That left three, and after some debate, we gave them the ancient Prijons and Dancers, which are very different boats, much longer and thinner. Grasshopper is in talks with a Scout group trying to dispose of some RPMs and if we’re really lucky, we might get to buy them cheap, in which case we might get rid of some of the oldest boats – we don’t have room in the boathouse to keep adding new ones and the long thin boats are useful for long thin girls but the RPMs are very adaptable. We can put everyone in them from brand-new Guides-who-were-still-Brownies-last-term all the way up to most of the adults.
The only trouble with the first night is that you get relatively little time on the water. Everyone’s got to learn the art of buoyancy aids and jackets, paddles, boats, safety, the basics, how to get in, how to paddle, not to scream etc so nearly an hour had gone before the girls were pushing their kayaks out onto the water and wading in after them. This is the delicate bit, getting in without capsizing. In my first year, this was the point where I capsized on my very first evening. Grasshopper and Dragonfly tend to take to the water, which means there’s someone there to gather up the girls but Ladybird and I tend to wade around in the shallows either to hold onto the boats if needed or to drain them if they fall out. With the boat club girls, we’d rather not hold onto them too much because these are the girls who are going to become experts, who are going to need to learn to do things by themselves if we’re going to get them through an entire term. I held the paddle for one of them who couldn’t figure out where to get an extra hand from but they all managed it all by themselves and without capsizing at all, which puts a bit of pressure on me to not be the one who messes it up.
Most of them got the hang of it pretty quickly. Umbriel was nervous and Bianca took a long time to get the hang of it. All Umbriel really needed was a few words of advice and a bit of time to get used to the kayak. I hung around close enough to watch and make encouraging noises and very quickly I noticed that although her progress across the water was a bit halting, she was able to correct herself when the boat turned too much instead of panicking and spinning in circles as girls often do during their first ten minutes and was visibly getting more comfortable. Bianca was back with Dragonfly and although they made progress, by the time we were going back in, I noticed that she was holding the paddle very much at one end, putting a lot of power in one side and none in the other and even when she shifted her hands to make it more even, she was still putting a lot more power in one side than the other. She’ll get the hang of it over the next few sessions – by the time I’m back there in a month and a half, she’ll be on her fourth session and should be a pro.
Ariel, of course, is a joy to watch – the fruits of returning for a second year. And it’s not just that she’s got a year’s worth of skills that the others haven’t, it’s that she’s got a year’s worth of confidence which is especially good to watch when she was the youngest by quite a long way last year and one of only two that were brand new. Well, three, but I never met Cornelia, she only came once or maybe twice the entire term for various reasons.
We rafted them up – learning this is a useful thing because it’s a good way to keep them together when we’ve got our hands full with something else, it’s a good way to gather them so we don’t have to yell across the entire ocean to get them all to hear something and it’s a confidence game we play – get them to hold on really tight, then stand up in their boats one at a time and tell them something about themselves. It’s often their favourite chocolate or their favourite ice cream or their favourite subject at school. This time Ladybird had the bright idea to get them to name a sea creature starting with the same first letter as their name. We had four starting with the same letter, one starting with the same letter as two of the instructors, which meant either imagination had to employed or girls had to just repeat something that had already been said, and one girl who just couldn’t come up with anything at all. Neither could the adults for her, come to that.
That was about it. We’d had a go at paddling, we’d had a go at paddling on the sea – Umbriel had asked at one point how deep it was (about two feet) and I stuck my paddle in the water when we were rafted up to discover even there, the deepest we’d be getting probably for most of the term, it was only about waist-deep on the adults, which is still just shallow enough to stand up even for Portia and Ariel, our two smallest. That sort of thing is reassuring when you’re new to this sort of thing, to know that you haven’t got fathoms of black abyss underneath you and that if you fall out – which you’re not going to do, not tonight! – they can just stand up. When the weather’s a bit warmer, we’ll do capsize drill with them on the water. It’s an important thing for them to know and better to be reasonably comfortable with it before you have to do it for real by accident but it’s also an intimidating thing which doesn’t make for a fun first session when you’re still new and nervous and the water is still freezing cold.
So we paddled back. Several of the girls who’d done quite well going out to the raft now found themselves spinning a bit, which is partly because they’re new, partly because they’re not putting on the speed that helps keep them straight and partly the tide. And let’s be honest, it’s partly the boat. I occasionally try out the orange Arc, which I really want to like but it spins horribly, whereas the Jives just bob along like big blue floating sofas, so I’m absolutely ready to blame the equipment sometimes. But when you’re this new and still learning control, you’re going to spin a bit. That’s normal.
Two more things to learn: how to get out of the kayaks without tipping them over and how to carry them up to the boathouse, wash them and put everything away. We had four sets of chairs out, so eight girls washing kayaks, one collecting buoyancy aids, zipping them up and putting them away, one more washing the paddles and I’m sure the eleventh was doing something useful. They learned where everything goes, how and why to wash and then how to finish up the evening, ie what wet things they can and cannot wear back inside to get dressed. Butterfly, our manager, disappears into the kitchen to make hot chocolate and cups of soup once they look like they’re starting to finish up the cleaning and then the rest of us wait outside, putting away the buckets and chairs and mats, if anyone’s remembered to bring the mats out onto the concrete, which we often don’t.
This year we had a lot of parents hanging around. It’s not really worth going home and they wanted to watch. There are benches along the seafront that make excellent viewing platforms and they were very keen to chat while the girls carried the boats back up. From their point of view, they have no idea how deep or otherwise the water is, so everything looks scary and impressive, they’ve seen the girls all stay upright, all improve their paddling even over the short time we’re out and they’re very impressed both at the opportunity the girls are getting and at how great it is that we have this boathouse at all. I bet if we offered a parents’ boat club, we’d have a few takers from among them. And £80 for the term is a bargain, especially from the second session when we’ll be spending more time on water than on shore and they get a handful of badges at the end of term. You won’t get many opportunities to spend six to ten hours coaching on the water plus introductory pool session with minimum 3:1 child:adult ratio plus badges and hot chocolate every session for that price.
Alas, I myself can only make it to two more sessions, and the second is only if an earlier one gets cancelled because of bad weather or they decide to do a family barbecue on the last night. I’ve only got three unit sessions pencilled in this year too. Well, that means more time at the pool or more time at the beach on my SUP – or more time at home catching up on other things.
Bumblebee Paddles 