Bumblebee Paddles

This one feels weird because I’ve tagged as #girlguidingpaddles even though there was no paddling. But it was a boathouse event and the boathouse is definitely #girlguidingpaddles. We do these on-shore evenings every year as part of our fundraising and awareness, Guides one year, Brownies the next. In my first year at the boathouse, we did them four nights in one week but last year and this year, we’ve only done two dates and they’ve been different weeks. I’ve never actually been to one before – can’t remember why not the last two years, although I think we cancelled quite a few in 2023. This is our second one of 2025 and the previous one was on a Monday, which is Ranger night, and while I can leave my Brownies with the other leaders once in a while, there isn’t anyone to leave my Rangers with.

But here I am, at long last, at our shore evening!

There are lots of things we can do at the boathouse. Given enough girls and enough time to exercise our imagination, we could produce an entire activity evening with multiple novel stations. But we also have a few stand-bys and that’s what we used. First, there’s what we call a quiz, and what everyone else might call a wide game or orienteering. Basically, the boathouse is on the side of a large park. The girls are split into groups and given a clipboard with a double sided quiz on it. They have to run around the park and hunt for the answers. This takes about half an hour. The girls stay in small groups because they’re so much easier to see and their leaders either wander around the park or watch from a good vantage point. The Guide uniform is due to change next year (although officially it’ll take two years to phase out the current one) and it does have its faults but that particular shade of blue with the bright red hoodie pocket and bright red polo shirt sleeves is very easy to spot from a distance. The number of times we’ve stood in the boathouse garden and looked across at the car park to see if a group is on its way over, and that uniform makes them so easy to identify from that far away.

That half an hour gave us the time to fire up the firepit. If groups want, we can do some actual cooking but for tonight, toasting some marshmallows was all we needed it for. We needed enough fire to have enough embers for the entire group to keep toasting for as long as they wanted. Butterfly had some firewood – both a bag of kindling and a bag of small logs – and we had some firelighters. The problem was the matches. This matchbox must be older than I am and the striker panel was almost completely worn away. If we could just put a match to the firelighters, we’d be good but getting the match lit in the first place was hard and there was just enough breeze to make it difficult to get to the firelighters. We resorted to doing it in the doorway of the boathouse, just to get out of the breeze. There we had to balance getting the fire lit enough to be able to carry it out into the wind and not getting it lit too much to set off the smoke alarm, especially since it’s right up in the ceiling where none of us can reach it.

So that took forever! Dragonfly added a lot of firelighters. I’d have just done one or two blocks, enough to light the handful of twigs which would in turn light the kindling but Dragonfly made extra sure it wasn’t going out by putting most of the pack of firelighters on it. Well, it worked! The twigs caught, the kindling caught, the logs caught. I’ve still not mastered the art of burning entire logs unless they’re in a sealed woodburner, so after a while, they just stopped burning and we had to throw some more kindling on to light it up again. Then the girls came back. By now we had enough fire and enough embers to make lots of marshmallows. Of course, Guides like to set fire to the marshmallows. I do understand the appeal of fire but when you’re the person who gets to light it, you’ve had your fill of flames and don’t feel the need to burn your food on it. I myself toasted an absolutely perfect marshmallow, one of the best I’ve ever done. Absolute gooey perfection.

The trouble with gooey perfection is that it’s messy. Entire globs of mixed molten marshmallow and chocolate kept falling out of the biscuit as I tried to eat it and by the time I was done, I absolutely needed to go and wash both my hands and my face. I have never been so sticky in my life. I can only manage one marshmallow per campfire but Guides have a good appetite for burnt sugar so they got through two or even three each before they’d had enough.

Then we sent them outside with some of the circus toys. We have some of those step pedal wheels, the ones you need really good balance for, which Guides always enjoy. We also have some “skis”, which are long strips with strings that you need to work as a team with to walk forwards. Their own leaders supervised twenty-odd minutes of play with them while we got the food ready inside. Yes, more food.

Butterfly outdid herself with the sausages. To be fair, we were told there were going to be fourteen girls and four leaders, so she catered for 18 and in the end, there were only 9 girls and 2 leaders, but we do prefer to over-cater rather than under and besides, we’re limited by the size of the packs of sausages. We don’t have much of a kitchen in the boathouse but we have a little tabletop oven, which looks like a microwave with a shelf and a clear glass door. I remember cooking hot dogs on the hot plates on top of it when I was a Young Leader. Anyway, there were more sausages than two or three Guide units could eat. We had rolls and ketchup, we’d produced a lot of plastic cups and jugs of squash, laid out neat rows of crisps by flavour, there were chocolate biscuits for afterwards and there was tomato and cucumber as a nod towards being healthy. To be fair, Guides usually love that sort of finger food. But eleven Guides couldn’t finish off that many sausages or quite finish the vegetables either. Besides, after all their running around and eating marshmallows and playing circus toys, we were running out of time. We were coaxing them to take the chocolate with them to eat on the way home even as their leaders were trying to bundle them out of the door.

In my first year at the boathouse, we planned four of these nights in a single week. The idea is to have a lot of girls because it’s something of a fundraiser. Groups come to the boathouse, they have some fun, we feed them, we make a bit of money so we can afford the insurance and any new kit and to pay external instructors if we need them. In an ideal world, every Guide unit (or Brownie unit in even-numbered years) in the nearest four Divisions would come and we’d have four or five units per session. But in reality, we cancelled three out of four in 2023 for lack of interest and I’m pretty sure the two evenings we’ve run this year have both been for single units. We also have my own old Guides coming in a couple of weeks (two days ago by the time this is published!) for their own on-shore evening which isn’t technically part of the programme but just them wanting to make use of the boathouse. They want to bring some of their girls actually boating next year, so I’ll email them in November to get them added to the list for the meeting in January. Yeah, we work a long way ahead! They came for their own evening last year so it’s not the first non-boating evening I’ve ever done at the boathouse but it was the first time I’ve done one of the “official” ones and it’s always good to show off what you can do at the boathouse apart from boating. It would be nice to get them boating as well, though!