Boat club restarts this week and so this blog comes back to life! To be honest, I was going to abandon it – let the domain expire, stop writing it altogether. I can’t keep it up over the winter despite my best attempts because I don’t paddle in the winter and this entire blog (and Instagram) came into being to show British Canoeing I had some kind of online presence and would make a suitable ShePaddles ambassador – but they haven’t opened applications in years, not since they became Paddle UK, so that dream has been torn up and binned and there’s no point in writing the blog anymore. And yet as soon as I unlocked the boathouse for the annual reopening, my fingers started twitching on an invisible keyboard and so here I am.
Yes, the boathouse is opened. The airbags are reinflated, the ancient rowing boat is finally sold and we dragged everything outside to give the boat room a good sweep. The guttering is being fixed and Dragonfly is trying to coax someone to give us new lino for the dry room to replace the stained carpet that doesn’t really belong in a building designed to get damp.
A few big changes this year: Ladybird, our instructor, has left Girlguiding which means at least this season we’re reliant on external instructors for every session. We had someone come in for a few sessions, mostly the unit ones, last year but this year it’s going to be every single time, so that’s going to be… an educational experience. It’s always interesting to see how different instructors handle the same scenario, which is unit sessions – assuming that everyone’s a first-timer out for a taster session. Boat club sessions will be different again – are we going to have the same person leading the entire season on their own curriculum or are we going to have someone new every week who has no idea what the group has already done? Educational.
There may also be a local leader with qualifications Ladybird’s found who can take her place but none of us have met her yet and we don’t even know if this is someone who’s agreed to come and help or just someone who’s popped up in the county Facebook group and said “Yeah, I’m qualified”. I’m towards the bottom of the boathouse hierarchy; it might be that Butterfly & Dragonfly know all about her, including having her in the timetable for the term. As for our own existing team, Caterpillar, who joined us last year, now has her own set of keys! I remember getting my keys, how it felt like going from a helper to one of the team and how I spent that first weekend buying tags so I could label them in a way that makes sense – blue for the sea gate padlock key, green for the back door, red for the front door and yellow for the gates. There are a lot of keys!
And now we’re back at boat club, weather permitting! I know nothing about this year’s boat club – I missed the pool session in March because I was at the opera (oh yes, kayaking in the summer, Wagner in the winter, I am an onion etc) so I haven’t met them and I haven’t even heard how many we’ve got, let alone how many of them are returnees. I haven’t even made a list of codenames yet – last year it was moons of Uranus because there are lots of them and they’re all girls’ names and the year before it was girls’ names from Taylor Swift songs. Uranus and Neptune still have names but I think I’d like each year to look different. Greek goddesses? Oh yes, that’ll work nicely. Plenty of girls’ names there! The last email I had from Butterfly said we’d hit the minimum 8 but who knows, it may have grown since then. Well, if I run out of goddesses, there are plenty of other female figures from Greek myth & legend but it should be fine – we’re limited by number of boats so there’s a certain number it can’t go over.
So there we are. The boathouse is ready, we’re ready and we just need the weather to be ready!
Bumblebee Paddles 