Day two dawned very hot and with another group choosing kayaks for 15 inexperienced paddlers with a higher average age than our group. I hung fiercely onto my Dagger Stratos 14.5 but the others were given to the recreational paddlers but the others all went for P&Hs today – the high volume Scorpio for the one with the powerful legs, the tippy Delphin for the pro and a Leo and Virgo for the others, all more sporty boats than the fairly steady and relatively bathtub-like Stratos (although not as bathtub-like as the floating sofa of an Islander Jive I usually paddle at the boathouse).
We started by having the beginning of the day routine split up between us. I did the warm-up, Virgo had the leader kit briefing, Delphin had the safety briefing and Scorpio got us on the water and ran a few games to test our abilities. We played follow-the-leader around the moored boats and then Scorpio set up a short obstacle course for us to race around. I think Virgo did it in 1:26, I beat him in 1:01 and then Delphin made us all look like snails.
Time to go back to the routine, which is that Paul plans the day and we take it in turns to lead. Delphin led us on a short expedition round and through the Mulberries, taking into consideration the best positioning for going in and coming back out. Then we paddled up to the top of the Mulberries and headed straight across for the harbour wall, which was the bit I led. It’s a bit out of remit in that it’s a bit more than 200m from shore and the wind was borderline too strong but for the purposes of training, it doesn’t necessarily hurt to train us a bit higher than we actually need to be able to do. Having made it across, we followed the wall around and then Paul decided that rather than handrail around the bay as planned, we might as well strike straight for the beach opposite. I’m sure we had incidents along the way but I don’t remember any. I kept an eye out for incoming traffic and announced anything I saw in the distance. Paul and Delphin did a bit of surfing and a bit of rudder teaching and when we reached the beach, someone else took over. We followed the beach through the swimming area, where a school group were having some adventurous watersports, notably a couple of “megaboards”, the 10-person enormous paddleboards. We paddled politely through, requested and were granted passage and went up to Ferry Bridge, the road bridge that now separates Portland Harbour from the Fleet Lagoon.
Portland is connected to the mainland by an 18-mile shingle beach called Chesil Beach. Trapped between Chesil and the mainland is the Fleet Lagoon, which has a weird deep channel zigzagging its way up it. The entrance, via the bridge, is the only place where the water gets anything resembling flow – the Paddlesport Leader qualification is supposed to take place in water with no or next to no flow but does include the rescue of a trapped boat, and we all knew that sooner or later, Paul was going to get “trapped” against one of the bridge supports in order for us to practice this, but for now we just went straight through.
Scorpio was leading the way up the Fleet, minding the lobster pots and the breeze and when we reached the pillbox near the caravan site, we were going to go straight across to a certain little black-painted beach hut where we’d land, which is when Paul decided he was going to give us another incident by turning dizzy. Scorpio got Delphin in one side to support, gave him water and a cold wet hat, I supported the other side and then Scorpio towed the unwieldy bundle to land. That meant Virgo wasn’t doing anything in particular, and we discussed whether it would have been a better use of him to send him ahead to be the welcoming party to help bring Paul ashore, and whether it would have been useful to send me as well, since I wasn’t actually doing a whole lot of supporting. This is what training’s for, to try things, to discuss things and to share ideas. Unless someone dies, you can’t really do training wrong.
We had lunch on top of Chesil Beach, in the unrelenting sunshine, with views across to Portland in one direction and right up the coast towards Devon in the other. Then we paddled back to Portland Harbour, with incidents along the way.
Incident one, Scorpio obligingly capsized as Delphin’s attention was on making sure Virgo, Paul and I went under the bridge safely with the wind against the tide. I’d had a suspicion Paul was going to get himself trapped against the bridge but he said the flow was a bit high to be messing around doing that right now. However, since Delphin handled the capsize so deftly and the rest of us were out of the way, he decided he would do it after all. Honestly, it wasn’t enough flow to actually get trapped, so Paul was doing more work to stay against the stanchion than to free himself from it, which made it a very easy job for Delphin. He reminded us of the vector pull that he’d demonstrated on dry land, though.
Then I led back along the beach, through the swimming area. We had a bit of trouble from a couple of kite surfers, or kite foilers. The first one, a bit joltily, got out of our way. The second one, who’d been on land, decided to launch right in front of us and then completely threw me by going this way and that way, then way out of our way, then coming back in. How do we keep out of the way of this thing? Get between him and the land seemed the obvious answer, except he kept coming in to land! Fortunately, eventually he got far enough out of the way.
My actual incident, though, was that Virgo was requested to capsize and as I moved in to rescue him, Paul zoomed the kayak out of the way. Scorpio went off to tow it back while I rescued Virgo onto my boat. At first I just had him hang on, but quickly realised that it’s very unstable having someone hold onto the tail and you can’t see them. So I got him to swim around to the front and hang on like a koala, which Paul was pleased with – I think it was the simple but descriptive phrase he liked. Having someone with their arms and legs wrapped around the nose of your boat is a very handy way to carry someone. They’re safe, you can see they’re safe, you can move them around to wherever you need them and everyone knows what “hang on like a koala” means without having to have it explained.
Getting him back into his own boat was a bit of a palaver – I’m not hugely experienced with that and I’d missed most of the practice on Wednesday because I’d been preoccupied with self-rescue. But the important bit was rescuing the swimmer and getting the situation under control before worrying about getting everyone back where they should be, so that was fine.
We returned via the marina and in the sheltered waters of the bay within, having waited ages by the harbour wall for three boats coming from our left and one from our right, we practiced a few skills. Can we paddle in a straight line with our eyes closed? (No). Can we get a ball between two posts by throwing it from one person to the other and not carrying the ball? (Kind of). We practiced edging and then we paddled down the narrow edge between the last row of moorings and the stone wall, counting how many strokes it took from the first post to the last. For me and Paul it was 30. For Scorpio it was 40, Virgo 36 and I think it was only 24 for Delphin. What with the relative sizes of their kayaks, Paul calculated that meant Delphin was almost twice as efficient a paddler as Scorpio. This isn’t really surprising. Delphin teaches watersports, including kayaking, at PGL. Scorpio only got in a kayak three weeks ago, thinking it would be something new and fun to fill his days with and is already at the stage where he’s doing this training.
Then we returned to base for a little theory. We talked mostly about philosophy – why do we do this, what’s our aim and motivation? What do we do if our clients are badly behaved, if they won’t do as they’re instructed etc? Most of us talked quite cheerfully about this while Scorpio sat in silence and eventually said “I’m in the army and this is totally alien to me. There’s a hierarchy”. The boathouse girls are pretty well-behaved – no one has ever refused to wear a buoyancy aid, although we’ve had a few arguments over shorts and shoes. No one has been outright mutinous and no one has ever, in my presence, needed to be told off, let alone threatened with being returned to shore and banned from the boathouse. But it’s always a possibility and if Scorpio ever intends to lead a group that isn’t military, he’s eventually going to encounter someone who doesn’t immediately obey everything.
After that, it was back to the water for anything we wanted to do that we hadn’t done so far. For Paul, that was Hand of God – rescuing an unconscious paddler trapped upside down. For me, it was self-rescue using a paddle float. Knowing that I hadn’t been in the water and despite the heat of the day, it would feel really cold, and that I don’t love being dunked in really cold water, and having the paddle float already strapped to my paddle, I decided to just wade out and then swim out holding onto the paddle, so I watched the Hand of God demo from the water and while the others tried, I got on with the business of using the paddle float to get back in my boat on my own. In theory, it stabilises the kayak, meaning that you can’t tip it over as you try to climb on.
Except I still couldn’t climb on.
Eventually Paul came over to help. We took my sling and tied various configurations and eventually, with Paul’s help, I managed to climb really awkwardly back into my own kayak. Definitely not 100% on my own but maybe 70% on my own. I get really frustrated really easily about how bad I am at this but when I talked it over with the boathouse folks on Friday, I realised that I really have had very little practice. It doesn’t come up at the boathouse, when I’ve done it on sea kayak taster trips it’s always hugely supported (because it’s about having a go at the capsize for fun rather than practising getting back in your own kayak) and it’s not something I do when I’m having a nice sunny Sunday down at Studland. So there’s a huge element of lack of practice. Butterfly, our boathouse manager, suggested I email our pet instructor, who runs pool sessions most Saturdays. If anyone can teach me to get back in my own boat, he can.
However, with that dubious high, the day wasn’t quite over. Paul wanted me to try Hand of God. Yes, I’d failed at it a dozen times in a row at Paddlesport Safety & Rescue training but he reckoned I could do it, and if I couldn’t, he can hold his breath for a long time and being trapped upside down underwater is his happy place. And to my surprise, I could. Getting him all the way upright was a bit of a struggle but I managed it first time and I levered him out of the water first time. Then I left my kayak on the slipway and tried it from the water, first by leaping over and pulling Paul’s kayak over with me as I leaned back, and then by the more traditional push and pull. Having failed that so many times in a row last time, I should have been over the moon to have succeeded three times in a row (and failed zero times!) but between two long days and my utter failure to rescue myself, I don’t think it ever really sank in that I’d actually done that!
We all had takeaways from the training. Delphin’s was that he was ready for assessment. Mine was to work on rescue, which I’d known before we even started. Scorpio and Virgo, both new to kayaking and already far better than they have any right to be, also had to work on rescue and the fine art of their personal skills. As for me, I came back to work on Monday morning to tell everyone all about it at our usual Monday meeting, to find a colleague telling me about her paddleboarding experience over the weekend and asking advice about a small kayaking journey I’ve done on many occasions, so we’ve already planned that I’ll be her guide and we’ll go and do that next week, which should be pretty perfect conditions for practising everything I learned on this course with an actual real inexperienced kayaker on a bit of sea I’m familiar and comfortable with.
Next week: because I know what I’m blogging about for the next six weeks (hugely exciting after months of “do I have anything to say next week???”), we’re going to the boathouse to do some raft-building!
Bumblebee Paddles 