Yeah, I know. We’re nearly halfway through June and I’m only just starting the 2026 boat club season. Well, the date we had in our diary was for the middle of April and the weather wasn’t cooperative. Neither was it for the next week – normally we only have enough water in our bay every two weeks but occasionally we get a freak tide – and the session two weeks later, our third on paper, finally became our first. And I couldn’t make it because we only had two leaders at Brownies that week and one of them had to leave early, meaning I had to be there!
But our second session, my first, was at half term two weeks ago and I just haven’t bothered writing it up yet. We have nine girls this year and the codename theme is Greek mythology. I wrote the list in order of goddesses I remembered and supplemented it with other female figures, then I just put the names against them in register order, which I think is the order Butterfly got their applications, so there’s no meaning in the Greek names other than anonymity. We have two returnees this year, Hera and Persephone, and seven newbies and because it was half term, we only had five, so I have yet to meet Athena, Aphrodite and Demeter – one of the returnees is the fourth one missing.
We also have an external commercial instructor with us this year, who shall be called Hornet, not because his identity particularly needs protecting but because all the adults have insect codenames derived from my leader name, so he’s having one too and I reckon a hornet is the biggest insect of this kind. He has higher qualifications and much more experience than our previous instructor Ladybird, who’s now left us (and Girlguiding as a whole) so it’s going to be an interesting and educational season.
This was the second session for the girls so we took them on a mini expedition – just our usual route across to the neighbouring marina, through the far end and then back along the sea wall. It’s a bit far for absolute beginners so we don’t use it for unit sessions, except occasionally Rangers who’ve been coming every year since they were ickle Guideys. It was probably a bit early for most of the boat club but we had as many adults as Guides. I went back for Caterpillar who got caught in traffic while the others took the girls out across the water, then I took point, partly to lead the way and partly to make sure no one got ahead. The main hazard is crossing the marina entrance, where we might get run over by a squadron of Sea Scouts in dinghies or a massive motor yacht that doesn’t care about kids in plastic kayaks. So we hold our position, get everyone together, then push across at a reasonable speed without stopping.
Then I led the way through the marina. There’s a series of poles that we usually slalom around but that side was thick with green gunge. When we reached the end, having dodged a couple of incoming yachts that then turned and went elsewhere, I paused again. We do that anyway, because you don’t know what’s coming in from the open sea but it was also bouncy and I’d rather Hornet made the judgement call on whether we go round or whether we go back the way we came. Round it was!
I probably wouldn’t have chosen to, not with some of these girls on their second-ever session. Even Caterpillar felt it was uncomfortably, if not a little scarily, bouncy. Our three biggest girls coped fine and vanished with Dragonfly and Caterpillar but Selene and Hestia struggled a bit. I kept with Selene, who plugged on despite being pusher closer to the wall than she would gave liked, and Hornet, after claiming a stranded SUP paddle as a windfall, decided the best thing to do was take Hestia into his canoe – a whim when it came to picking a craft from our collection of rehomed boats not really meant for an adult man. She’d been spinning a lot and was getting tired and sometimes it’s better to not let them get discouraged. Grasshopper took her kayak, the little yellow Dynamo, onto the front of his canoe and we headed for our favourite bridge to play “can you paddle under that?”, a game scuppered by the marina launching a yacht right there as we approached.
The weather was also closing in on us. It had poured down with rain while we got changed in the boathouse but was dry again by the time we were ready to go out and as we crossed the marina, the sky was spectacularly black. I don’t know if you had the big storm the Wednesday night after the heatwave bank holiday weekend but this was the Thursday, so possibly the tail end of that after the extreme heat. However, it didn’t come to much in the end. Rather than try anything, especially with tired Guides after a mini-expedition, we played games in the bay. So instead we just played games in the bay. At this point, it dawns on me that Hera, an old hand at kayaking by now, had spent the session in Hornet’s canoe too, learning a new craft, and during the games, he discreetly slipped out and into Grasshopper’s canoe without Hera & Hestia noticing, much to their outrage when they finally realised. Anyway, games are good because they build up control and confidence without the girls realising what’s really going on.
I hadn’t been nervous, exactly, about having Hornet in charge, but I knew it would be different. He runs our annual pre-season pool session, having both the relationship with the pool and the means to transport kayaks, but I’d never really spent time with him and when I have seen him, he’s 100% concentrating on the girls and I’ve never really spoken to him. Shouldn’t be uncertain, really. I’ve been through enough paddlesport instructors myself in my various scraps of training and they’re all great – they understand how to get the best out of someone without pushing them beyond their personal limits and Hornet is clearly used to teaching kids.
Dragonfly was actually more or less in charge, doing the warm-up and the reminder of how kayaking works and mostly deciding what we’re doing while out on the water and it kind of felt like Hornet was just there to fill our requirement to have someone qualified present rather than running the session as I’d expected. After all, it’s our boat club and while I still regard myself as a newbie and Caterpillar even more, Grasshopper and Dragonfly have been involved for decades and know how to run things, even if they’re not legally allowed to do it by themselves.
Of course, none of us – except Grasshopper, who canoes – could have taken a tired Guide aboard and we’d probably have ended up towing her when (if) we realised she was getting too tired and discouraged but then we might not have opted to go outside the wall. So was this how it was going to work? My next session would feature my Rangers and their sister Guides and no Dragonfly, who has her own Guides that evening. Would I have to basically run it while a professional watches and judges? Well, be back next week for that story. Now I’ve started, I’m going to make an effort to keep going, at least as long as the boathouse season lasts.
Bumblebee Paddles 