Because we all have lives outside of the boathouse and some of those lives are really busy (I’ve only been to one out of five boat club nights so far), we had an outside instructor in for our unit evening last week. We have what I call “a pet instructor” who runs our pool sessions, provides our kit (and doesn’t necessarily rush us with the invoice) and who we call on when we need training or an external instructor for when Ladybird can’t make it. We actually had him booked in for four evenings this term and then because of the weather, we’ve had to cancel three of those but last week, he finally made it over. Or rather, he sent one of his staff over.
I was interested to see what a session was like as run by a true professional. Not that Ladybird isn’t but our pet instructor is one of these people who’s probably qualified to take a group of beginners across the Pacific. He does this as a job, not as a volunteer position for three months out of the year. The way he does things is almost certainly dramatically different from how we do it and he’s a grown man, not a Guide leader, so I was interested in how that affected the dynamic.
But instead we got Charlotte, who is a young woman of 19 or 20 who wasn’t entirely sure what was expected of her. Butterfly introduced her two assistants, me and Dragonfly and then showed her around the boathouse and the shore. She’d brought her own boat – we offered her the choice of whatever we had in the boathouse but she preferred her own, which is a playboat. We’re not very picky about what kind of kayaks we use. I usually say we’re something of a rescue centre for unwanted kayaks, so we can’t be picky about what we get. Two of them are so old I can’t really identify them properly, two more are showing their age, one of them used to belong to Ladybird’s dad and one of them was Grasshopper’s back before he favoured the canoe. If we had a friendly local billionaire handy to present us with a boathouse-ful of new kayaks, I don’t know exactly what we’d go for but playboats are not among our current collection. Dragonfly and I observed that we’ve never really seen one in real life, although I’ve got an idea that our pet instructor brought one to the pool session last year and then bounced around in it.
We said this out loud to Charlotte. Dragonfly said that she’d never seen anything like it outside the Olympics, at which point Charlotte said in the casual way that only a national competitor can, “Well, I am a member of Team GB”. We have researched thoroughly. Not an Olympian but she competed in the European Championships last summer and came 13th in her class. When she’s not competing at a national level, Charlotte works in a SEN school and spends her weekends and summer holidays guiding and teaching kayaking. From the European championships to a taster session at the Guide boathouse!
Sea kayaking isn’t entirely her speciality – it’s not what she competes in and it’s not what her boat is built for – but the company she works for, alongside its training courses, onshore adventurous activities and SUP, does sea kayaking. Doesn’t have a lot of choice, being where it is. Its clients range from school groups to corporate days out plus just about everything in between, so she obviously knows what she’s doing both with our environment and with our girls but it feels so weird having a Team GB member who competes in bouncing around and dancing on on the water teaching four members of a local Guide unit how to start paddling. And, let’s be honest, so exciting. We’re just local Guide leaders and Charlotte’s a member of Team GB – she’s so far beyond us that it’s astounding.
We have a fairly set routine for this kind of unit taster evening. Get the girls dressed and into buoyancy aids. Match them with a kayak and paddle and get the footrests adjusted. A briefing which includes safety basics, how to hold and use the paddle, how to get into the kayaks and a warning against screaming in case anyone on shore misinterprets it and calls the RNLI out. The girls get out on the water while Ladybird and I wade around in the shallows to help if needed while Dragonfly and Grasshopper go on ahead. Ladybird takes out the ones who can paddle immediately. Dragonfly and I tend to hang back with the inevitable girls who struggle – the ones who find it terrifying to be floating and the ones who keep going round in circles. With a bit of personal help, these girls usually get the hang of it and they come out to join the main group. Then we raft up really tightly and they take it in turns to stand up in their kayak, tell us their name and something random (favourite ice cream or chocolate bar is an old favourite) and then depending on how much time we have, we either paddle straight back or we play a few games on their way back.
Charlotte’s approach was very different. She had some warm-up games I hadn’t seen before and once the girls were out on the water, she went straight for the games. The first one was some kind of rock-paper-scissors variant where they upgrade through a few animals until someone becomes the apex predator and wins. That means paddling over to each other to play and finding out who is which animal. To be honest, Dragonfly and I were a bit dubious at this point. We had a very small group – 12 on shore last week became 9 over the week and then only 4 actually turned up – and although they weren’t bad girls by any means, they weren’t massive on listening and paying attention and doing what they’re told. When you’ve been told four times that if you lean sideways like that, you’re going to capsize and you just keep on leaning over, you do get to the point where the leaders start muttering things like “if she actually does capsize, maybe then she’ll get the message”. The trouble is, especially in hot weather, the girls want to capsize. Splashing around in the sea is so much more fun than learning a new skill that requires an hour of concentration and effort and it has been very hot lately.
But gradually, we realised there was a method to what looked like Charlotte’s madness. As the games progressed, the girls were acquiring more control. I’m not entirely sure they were listening and paying attention any more but they were having fun. Oh, I know in theory that they’re learning through play every time we do this but I feel like the ratio of learning through play to learning through being explicitly taught was very different this time. After a while, the inevitable happened – the one in the little yellow kayak capsized. Did I mention I’d told her not to lean out at least four times by that point? I think she leaned a little less after that. The one in the pink top never stopped treating her kayak like a sofa – at one point, she was leaning backwards out of it with one knee up and if fate had been paying attention, she should have capsized and learned her lesson. But she didn’t.
One of Charlotte’s games was to get them to stand up in their kayaks, but not rafted up. That may not have been entirely her fault – Dragonfly caught them holding onto each other’s boats and told them to let go because grabbing and shoving at each other is a bad thing but it was actually the very ragged start of a raft. Anyway, they got some space and stood up and Charlotte warned them how to fall if they were going to fall, because the water is shallow. Dragonfly and I made sure they were far enough apart to not crack their heads on each other’s kayaks and they inevitably fell in.
You’ve guessed it – they loved it. We got three of them back in although the fourth eventually had to drag her kayak back to shallower water to scramble back in. We played a few more games, Pink continued to lean out of her kayak and at last, we decided to indulge their desire to be in the water (and give up on the kayaks). Dragonfly produced a game they apparently played the day before with the boat club girls – turn the kayaks upside down and try to get on them. Try to climb on, then try to stand on them, then see how many girls you can get on one kayak. And then, at last, drag them back to shore.
I’ve been looking forward to this post for months – an external instructor was always going to be something to write about because it’s always going to be interesting and educational to see how someone else does it. What do they do better? What do we do better? What new things can we adopt? What can we learn?
In this case, we definitely saw the value of being a little more firm with the girls. But we also saw girls having fun and improving their skills and confidence without even realising it was happening. We do want the boat club girls to be aware that they’re learning this or that but with the unit evenings, it’s enough for them to all come off the water better paddlers than they were when they went on, having enjoyed it. I don’t think we’ll be adopting “stand up in your own boat with no support” and we’ll definitely make sure we cover all the “how to get into the boat and how to use the paddle” before we even touch the water but I think games over “head shoulders knees and jump” worked quite well, was more fun and gave them more quality paddling time. The girls obviously liked Charlotte and she got on well with them, so that’s a win, but they need to learn to listen more and do what they’re told more and spend more time paddling and less time messing around with each other, shrieking and grabbing and pushing.
To be honest, this group has had their session cancelled the last two years in a row because of the weather and actually, it was windier than we expected and right at the top of our remit. Well, ours, anyway. I have no idea what qualifications Charlotte actually has, we just trust that our pet instructor sent someone suitable. She mostly kept them in the sheltered part of the bay, often a bit too close to the sea wall, out of the worst of the wind but there were definitely little waves breaking to bounce over and I felt uncomfortable being side-on to them.
That’s partly my own fault. I didn’t bother adjusting my Jive’s footrests before I got in. I haven’t got “my own” boat. Ladybird and Dragonfly have a regular Jive with something tied onto it to mark it but I just grab whichever isn’t theirs. I don’t use the footrests a whole lot because my knees just don’t bend at the right angle to comfortably sit on them but most people who use the Jives are about the same size and the footrests are generally in more or less the right place. I can kick them around a bit on the water if they’re not quite right. So I don’t bother adjusting them before going out. This time, some kind of munchkin had been in this boat. The footrests were up around my knees. I couldn’t reach down with my hands to adjust them but they were too high up to adjust as normal with my feet. The seat felt three sizes too small and I’m sure I haven’t grown three sizes since the last time I went out with the boathouse (although between Brownies, weather, shore evenings and rafting, it’s actually been nearly two months since I kayaked at the boathouse). Therefore, I just don’t like that particular Jive and should mark the leftover one as mine next time I’m there. It means I felt uncomfortable in it in general but particularly uncomfortable that I didn’t have the option to use the footrests, which is something I didn’t realise I wanted until it wasn’t there. That’s a lesson for me. Don’t just assume the kayak is ok even if it has been every single time for more than two years.
So an educational evening in many ways. A different instructor with a different background and a different approach. Sorting out the kayak. Meeting a national competitor. And that was after a day when I’d finally done my first solo expedition to Old Harry of the year and run into Natasha Sones, who is an Adventure Queens grant winner, Ordnance Survey champion and SUP influencer, of the kind who makes it feel like you can do it too instead of like you’re looking at someone who is so far beyond any ability you could ever imagine having. I wish I’d been certain enough as I paddled past her to yell “Are you Natasha??” instead of waiting until the pictures appeared on Instagram later in the afternoon. I could have had a selfie with a favourite paddle influencer in the afternoon and met a member of Team GB in the evening, all on the same day!
Next week: the onshore evening with the same group, although a lot more of them. That was supposed to be this week’s blog but this one was a more relevant paddling story so it got bumped up the schedule.
Bumblebee Paddles 