Bumblebee Paddles

The boathouse is going to be kind of quiet for me this year – as evidenced by the fact that we’re two-thirds of the way through May and I’ve only been twice so far – but last week we did our first unit session of the year. Five of my six Rangers are doing their GCSEs this year and rather than run evenings one-on-one for three-quarters of the term, I took an evening off to come to the boathouse. That’s partly because I want to go to the boathouse more than I’m currently managing and partly because our instructor, who I call Ladybird over here, can’t make Mondays and there was an external instructor coming in. Manager Butterfly was away and therefore the only people who were supposed to be there are Grasshopper who’s a boathouse stalwart and a regular helper with his wife’s Brownies but by his nature, can’t be a full and proper member of Girlguiding, and Caterpillar, who’s new this season and is a unit helper. So I thought I’d go along to represent Girlguiding and also to see what a session looks like as run by someone different.

And then Ladybird turned up.

The unit was one of our regulars. I’ve met their leader twice – once at a training session and once when they came to the boathouse last year – and it always surprises me that she knows who I am. At the training, she suddenly stopped the session and said “I know it’s the afternoon but we haven’t introduced ourselves and I think we should get to know each other” so we went round the room telling everyone our name, where we Guide and what section we do. When it got to me, I did that – “Hi, I’m Julie, I do Brownies in [] and Rangers in []” and instead of passing onto the next person, she went “But that’s not all you do, is it?”. Uhh… actually, it’s not. I do archery and fencing and the boathouse but how on earth do you know that? I don’t know who you are; despite the fact that you’re running this session I don’t even know your name! And last week, before she’d even said hello, she said to me “there’s someone on the Facebook group asking about fencing and I thought I wouldn’t reply on your behalf but tell you about it in person. It was only just before I left the house”.

This particular unit also contains two of our boathouse girls, Ariel who’s in her second year with us, and Desdemona. They arrived at 6.30 whereas Grasshopper, Caterpillar and I were there for 6, so I rushed and swore at the traffic and the closed roads for nothing. Time to chill before anyone even arrives! So we started getting the leader boats out and then, since we’re guaranteed to use them, we got out the little blue boats, our three RPMs and the Redline. They’re really versatile, they’re always the first ones we select and they will always fit Guides and Rangers.

Then the girls arrived, eleven of them. I know Ariel uses the little yellow boat and the left-handed paddle so I got them out while she was getting her buoyancy aid on. Desdemona pointed out her regular boat (the blue and green Wavesport) and found her regular paddle and that just left the other nine to deal with. This is Ladybird’s domain more than ours. We had another small Guide, so we gave her the red Dynamo, we had a girl who looked about the right size and weight for the Piranha, we gave the tallest the two Prijons and the blue Dancer and then the four blue boats went to the ones who were left, the medium-sized ones. Other than the boat club girls, everyone else had the square-ended red paddles which work quite well for Guide-sized girls, we adjusted footrests, went over the rules and then off we went.

Everyone got out on the water without capsizing! That always feels like extra pressure on me – I can’t forget that I capsized in a couple of inches of water on my first session at the boathouse. So did Caterpillar two weeks ago at her first session. Rite of passage, apparently. We teach the girls to take the boats out into water just deep enough to float in but I personally get in right in the shallows and use a mix of wiggling and punting in the soft mud to get afloat, which I find reduces the risk of capsize hugely.

Ten of the girls took off immediately but one of them, who I’m going to nickname Ilse for the simple reason that I’m watching Mission Impossible 7 as I write this, struggled to control her boat. She didn’t seem to be particularly distressed but she was just going in random circles all over the place. The other leaders took off with the other girls and I stuck around to try to teach Ilse the fine art of going in the direction she wants. Step one, just paddle, get the feel for the boat, learn not to be terrified. Make encouraging noises, make sure she knows deep in her bones that she’s not doing anything wrong and she’s not in trouble.

Step two, notice that she’s not really putting the paddle in the water properly and therefore can’t have any control over what she’s doing. So I explained and demonstrated that and she got the hang of it pretty quickly – on one side. Now the circles were a little less random and mostly going in the same direction. I clipped my sling onto the back of her boat – having something creating drag sometimes helps them to go in a straight line and that appeared to work at first. And then circles again. I watched thoughtfully. What is she doing wrong? Well, she almost seemed to be having troubling reaching the water with her paddle. So I tried something unorthodox that I’ve never seen any of the other instructors do – I swapped my lovely long shaped paddle for her short square-ended non-shaped one. I had no idea whether it would work or whether I’d just done something really stupid.

Actually, that was a good call. She immediately said it felt better but she still wasn’t quite managing a straight line because she wasn’t managing to get the right-hand blade into the water. OK, let’s work with that instead of fighting it. I told her to do two strokes on the right for every one on the left and although that didn’t quite work, the extra practice on the right seemed to get “put it all the way into the water” in her head, which meant her circles started going in the other direction. OK, now she’s paddling properly, if a little unevenly, on both sides. We’re good to go! So we started working our way out towards the other girls who were rafted up at a buoy and playing the “stand up, tell me your name and your favourite ice cream” game. After that, she pretty much just became just one of the crowd. They were all a little bit all over the place and she was no worse or better than anyone else, albeit with a little bit of a tendency to lean to the right and make me panic that she’s about to capsize.

Normally, they’ve taken so long to get to the raft that we have to head right back but this time, we seemed to have tons of time. We gave them a bit of paddling practice in using a bright orange buoy and Ladybird as two markers to circle around and then we went back to shore nice and slowly, throwing tennis balls at each other. This is one of those things that feels like a game but is actually getting them to improve their steering, speed and confidence all in one. We had a minor issue in that the Sea Scouts sailed their dinghies right up between our marker buoy and the shore, so we had to hold the girls back from the “road” until the “traffic” had passed. Somewhere around this point, we had a capsize. The girls, naturally, assumed she did it on purpose and honestly, given how hot it was (we were all in shorts and t-shirts rather than wetsuits) and she was wearing a full-length wetsuit and gloves, I would imagine she was glad to cool off. I didn’t really see what was going on. Ladybird was out the front, Grasshopper and Caterpillar dealt with the capsize and I dealt with the traffic and the ones lagging behind. No sense in three people taking on one girl and leaving the fourth to deal with the other ten.

So we played ball all the way back to shore. The trouble was, the tide was going out almost before our eyes. I managed to stay afloat a lot further in than most of the girls but eventually, my kayak ran aground in the soft mud. I admit, that was the moment I nearly capsized. I got one leg out but when I went to stand on it and bring the other leg with me, the silt in the water confused my brain. Not being able to see how deep the water was, I suddenly couldn’t get my other leg out without falling over. I half-fell back into the boat, assisted by Caterpillar, got myself back in properly and then had another go. That worked, as long as I closed my eyes at the critical moment. Then we waded back to shore through two inches of thick, black, oily mud to the shore. I did have the sense to retrieve my sling from Ilse’s boat before it turned into eight feet of muddy string but the boats got muddy, my legs got muddy, my hands got muddy and by the time we were cleaning them, we discovered the extent of the mud on the boats.

Oh, it smelled bad! Normally we have enough water that we can crash onto the land and bypass most of the mud but even by the time we’d landed, you could see how much further out the tide was than when we’d stepped out of the boats less than a minute ago. Incredible. Terrifying. Because they’d got out of the kayaks while still on the water, a lot of them had tipped them over far enough to fill them up with water, so while they carried the dry ones back to the boathouse, Ladybird and I drained the others. Most of them have bungs, so you just undo that and tip them up until they stop gushing dirty water and then remember to do up the bungs again! The girls cleaned mud off boats, we washed down the paddles and dipped the buoyancy aids and it seemed to take forever! Eleven kayaks for the girls, three for the adults and Grasshopper’s canoe, all with extra mud. Extra stinky mud. I’d happened to glance into the water butts before the girls arrived to discover they were empty but for a layer of fuzz constantly descending from the trees around us so Ladybird and Grasshopper had hooked up the hose to fill them while we got the girls ready, otherwise we’d have struggled to do any washing. We normally rely on rainwater for our washing but it’s been so dry lately that we didn’t have any.

And then we were done! The girls scuttled in to get changed, we tidied the garden and put the chairs away and got changed in the boat room or in the garden (I have new towel shorts for this year which I just put on straight over my swimming costume, which is reasonably dry). But this morning I hung all my wet stuff on the washing line and sprayed it with the hose (far easier than transporting everything home dripping wet) and that smell does not improve by being left in a drybag for twelve hours!