Messing About in Boats

After a memorable Bank Holiday Monday, sunny, warm and not raining, the weather almost immediately reverted to its normal, cold, cloudy and wet. I put off any further expeditions under the catch-all excuse of 'recovery' until Wednesday, when I took on the Wey again accompanied by my son.

I used the same tactic of trying to keep him in sight while he steamed on towards Pyrford from the usual start at New Haw. He must have been taking it easy as I could see him until well after I had passed the M25 and railway bridges, which is unusual, as I've usually lost sight of him well before then. As before, I turned with him when I met him on his return journey, but to my surprise it was after the last footbridge before Pyrford, which is much better that I’ve done before. When I looked at the Garmin read-out afterwards I found that my average speed was up on what I’ve done before, so hopefully there is some sort of improvement going on.

Thursday was a big no-no on the water as gales were the predominant factor in the southern end of the country. This abated a bit by Friday and by evening when the third part of the canoe course was due, it had settled to just a steady but significant wind blowing at right angles to the river. Due to unforeseen circumstances I had missed the second week session of the instruction so was again playing catch-up to the others. In fact, as it turned out, it didn't make very much difference as the general standard of Canadian canoeing was pretty abysmal.

The first exercise was to paddle around two buoys in a figure-of-eight. Unfortunately, the buoys were set much too close to the bank and a small jetty of the adjacent sailing club for comfort. The tight space available just wouldn’t accommodate the wide ranging turns of half a dozen complete novices as they tried to negotiate the buoys and avoid each other at the same time. It was a pretty hopeless exercise as we collided, locked paddles and nestled up against each other as the wind drifted us into the bank, the jetty and each other.

It’s all very well being a novice in one of these things, but at least in a kayak I’ve been able to make my mistakes in relative privacy and after a while figure out what I‘m doing wrong, and then work out what to do to get around it. However, there’s one other major factor in a canoe, that's the other idiot at the other end of the boat who is also flailing around with a paddle and screwing up my own well thought out remedies to the problems in hand. I had, at the sharp end, just got the hang of getting the nose around the buoys when I found my sweeping strokes, on both sides were being negated by the sweeping ‘J’ strokes at the rear, and for the umpteenth time we headed towards the bushes on the bank only to be arrested by colliding with the jetty.

Apparently I'm also not supposed to switch hands on the paddle as I move it to the other side of the boat.  I'm supposed to keep it held the same way as the hand at the top of the paddle stays at the top when carried over and the stroke is carried out with my lower arm crossing my body. I haven't yet fathomed how that is supposed to work. Practicing a sideways paddle to draw the canoe erm... sideways, was no better unless the two of you do the strokes at the same time. The wind took a hand and constantly pushed the boat around and towards the bank and/or jetty. But, at last it was over and with almost no gain on the previous week I was glad when it ended. In two weeks it’s time for capsize and rescue in the Canadians... God help us all.