Out with the Old

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water...

At the start of last year things on the kayaking front were not going well. Despite having paddled around 900 miles in the previous twelve months I was so disillusioned with the whole club and DW affair I could have readily given up on kayaking and paddling in any of its forms  The injury that I'd picked up in the left shoulder during the extended paddling gradually set itself to rights as I restricted the mileage and I got over my hissy fit with the club, although I still ended up with a rather jaundiced view of them as an insular and cliquey bunch. I rejoined in March for another year as I suppose I rather thought that things might be different. Unfortunately not. Those who did the DW apparently weren't up for a repeat and no one else from the club entered the race for the coming year. The club carried on with the same trips and events as in previous years and I more or less dropped out. Clearly my involvement with the DW, such as it was, was over.

I was on the verge of calling it a day and walking away from kayaking to take up stamp collecting or model aeroplanes or anything that didn't involve long stretches of water. I went on a number of short paddles up the same old stretch of the Wey but without the carrot of the DW ahead of me I was just going through the motions. At that point Mrs D suggested that I have another go at the two star award. I had previously attempted the 2 star and assessment test and had been failed ignominiously by the club insofar as handling a canoe had proved to be foreign territory to me. Having completely screwed up the assessment for various reasons I wasn't keen to repeat the experience and receive yet another rejection. I reasoned that failure again was almost certainly going to happen if I took the course with the club in the same way as before. Some of us may be a little slower on the uptake and need a bit more than a days instruction to get to grips with the requirements for 2 stardom. The club's only option being to repeat the format that I'd already failed at.

Looking around I found that the majority of 2 star courses were apparently offered in the same commercial type of format. For a fee you receive a couple of days 'training', then after a few weeks away to practice by yourself what you've been shown, you then return for assessment (for another fee). Eventually, I found another club that was willing to offer their members coaching and assessment up to 2 star standard without too much emphasis on the amount of time it was going to take and so I threw in my lot with them. Ten weeks later I knew how to paddle a canoe and could at least get it to go in the direction I wanted it to go. I also cleared up a number of weak points while paddling in a kayak, including backing up without having to use support strokes. Further than that I'd also experienced through the new club sea trips and other types of boat including white water boats, a racing single canoe and time trials. Possibly more importantly though, the ethos of the club is completely different. It centres on competition in all of the disciplines and there is positive encouragement to try out and take part.

This year I let the old club's membership lapse preferring to stay with the new one. Of course, no sooner had I resigned from the club than to be perverse, the old club set up a DW training group a week afterwards.