After nearly two months of inactivity on the kayaking front I'm just beginning to get this show back on the road again. Without the imperative that the DW provided its been quite difficult to get the motivation to get out and paddle. Lately almost any excuse has been sufficient to postpone yet another session with the result that at best, time on the water has been sparse.
Luckily the club has offered a course for the BCU two-star award to take place at the end of May and I've offered myself up for it. Actually this course is getting a bit more serious about paddling as the requirements for entry are a little more onerous than the one-star. It's going to require a bit more work on my part to get up to speed just to meet the entry requirements.
Which are: to demonstrate an efficient paddling technique and to have completed at least two, two hour journeys, and to be able to paddle a Canadian type canoe. Now the last time I was in a canoe was as a callow yoof when it was possible to go down to a boathouse on the river and hire out a Canadian for five bob an hour. They didn't supply things like BA's and there were no questions asked like 'Can you swim?', we just got in the thing and paddled downriver. Elf and safety anyone?
To get over this last requirement the club is providing starter lessons in canoeing and I'm on for four weekend sessions building up to the two-star course requirement. The first session, which took place last Friday evening, provided an introduction to single and double canoes, alternating between the two. One of the first exercises in the double was to swap places, front to rear, with your partner. This was accomplished with a rather close encounter in the not-very-wide middle of the boat, but without getting wet. Getting the thing to go in a straight line without a rudder proved near impossible and we paddled around in large circles for a while.
Next we changed partners and I inherited one who appeared to think that everything is solved with muscle power. From the back he provided a forward surge of prodigious proportions every time his paddle entered the water, although it didn’t seem to matter in which direction we were pointed, we just headed off at any angle with a series of surges and a lot of rocking and rolling. The mysteries of the ‘J’ stroke were next explained and I experimented with that for a while in a single canoe and crushed my fingers several times between paddle and the thwart several times. This looks like being a long hard summer.
The other requirement, to carry out two, two hour paddles was met in part by the second of the Improvers sessions, held on the previous week, when our leader, who happens to also be the instructor for the two-star course, decided to carry out a two-hour paddle. It was certainly an experience. Six of us set off at five on the Sunday evening and headed downstream, and it gave me a little satisfaction to note that most of the other tyros seemed even less sure of themselves in the boats than I did. Passing through Molesey lock one of our number took a bath while trying to get back into the boat. But we progressed rather slowly down river to Raven’s Ait and elected to return from there even though our target had been Teddington Lock, a mile or so further on. Coming back against the flow was a push and I was glad to see the church tower near the clubhouse hove into sight again.
Weight: I weigh in at 13stone 9lbs which puts me in the overweight category of the BMI index.
I'd need to drop my weight to 12 3 to get to the 'normal' range. That's a loss of almost 1 .5 stone (20lbs) An almost impossible task. I have already dropped almost a stone in the last four months, which has been hard enough to achieve. Yet I have to do it as the extra weight is still making exiting the boat a bit of a comedy of errors. The two-star takes place on the last weekend of May. At least I’ve now got a target weight of around 13 stone and two hour endurance to aim for.
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