Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Toronto Paddlefest 2010: An Absolute Beginner’s Experience

Moun­tain Equip­ment Co-0p (MEC) holds some­thing called Pad­dle­fest every year down at Sun­ny­side Beach. It’s a kayak­ing, canoe­ing, pad­dle­board­ing, and dragon boat­ing expe­ri­ence open to any­one for a tri­fling $5 for each 90-minute instruc­tional ses­sion. The folks at MEC are pas­sion­ate about their out­door sports, and it shows in events like this one. Even for an absolute begin­ner like me, it was fun and a fan­tas­tic learn­ing expe­ri­ence. I should note that I slept incred­i­bly well after­wards, too!

I have zero kayak­ing expe­ri­ence, so I fig­ured I’d give the event a try. The first part of my adven­ture began with try­ing to reg­is­ter for the ses­sions. I called MEC’s Van­cou­ver 1–800 num­ber to reg­is­ter, and think­ing that they’d be 3 hours behind us in Toronto that I’d call them at my noon­time, their 9am. That was a mis­take. They open at 9:30am East­ern Stan­dard Time. By the time I called 2-and-a-half hours later, many of the ses­sions were already full. Remem­ber how I said the folks at MEC are pas­sion­ate about their out­door sports? So are their mem­bers. The adver­tise­ment I saw in the news­pa­per said you can reg­is­ter for ses­sions on the day-of, but wouldn’t count on actu­ally get­ting into any of the ses­sions like that.

I ended up sign­ing myself up for:

• Yoga for Paddlers
• Games for Bal­ance and Fun
• Dragon Boat­ing
• Stand-Up Pad­dle­board­ing

I had no idea what to expect for any of them. The Yoga for Pad­dlers was new for me, as I have as much expe­ri­ence with yoga as I do with kayak­ing. If you remem­ber, that means “absolutely none.” I had orig­i­nally wanted to be Intro to Kayak­ing, but it was absolutely full and I had to find some­thing else for the first times­lot. Maybe you have some yoga expe­ri­ence, but I didn’t know what to expect. My impres­sion now is that yoga is one long, drawn-out stretch­ing ses­sion. That’s actu­ally not a bad idea for start­ing off the day! In fact, I’m prob­a­bly lucky that I ended up in yoga and get­ting all stretched out and limber.

Why was I lucky? Because the rest of my day was rather pun­ish­ing, but in a fun way.

Games for Bal­ance & Fun… some­how tied into kayak­ing. What would you expect from a ses­sion title like this? Well, it’s all about bal­ance games and dumb (but fun) things to do on the out­side of a kayak on the water. The instruc­tor was an incred­i­bly irrev­er­ent, humor­ous fel­low who also knows a fair deal about kayak­ing. In other words, he was a good instruc­tor and per­fect for this ses­sion. The instructor’s open­ing speech was about how kayak­ers who would nat­u­rally feel no com­punc­tions about walk­ing into the lake and play­ing in the water sud­denly treat the water like hot lava once they’re in the boat. His objec­tive was for us to have fun & get com­fort­able with the water while being in, on, and around the kayaks.

We began in the water by rid­ing on the out­side of the kayak like rid­ing on horse­back. That places our cen­tre of grav­ity a fair bit higher than it would be if we were sit­ting in the boat prop­erly, so it’s a bit unsta­ble. I even­tu­ally got com­fort­able and decently capa­ble like that, but even­tu­ally I fell off and into the water. Get­ting back on in water, how­ever, is a fair bit more inter­est­ing than get­ting on while at the shore. First, flop up onto the back like a seal. Get your cen­tre of grav­ity (just below your belly-button) onto the boat prop­erly, then flip one leg over the boat and sit up. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, it took me an hour of flop­ping into the water over and over again and try­ing to get it right, over and over again, to sort of get it right!

Other games we tried included, mov­ing to the back of the boat while strad­dling it, mov­ing into the seat, back out of the seat, stand­ing up on the boat, and even trans­fer­ing from one kayak to another with a part­ner. When we got back on shore and the instruc­tor reviewed what we had gone through, the games turned out to be not at all ridicu­lous. The point was to get us com­fort­able falling out of the boat, get­ting back on, and in a res­cue sit­u­a­tion, trans­fer­ring from one prob­lem kayak to the res­cue kayak.

For me as a begin­ner, although I kept dunk­ing myself in the lake over and over again, it gave me con­fi­dence to know that if I was kayak­ing nor­mally (I still have yet to try that), I don’t fear the water because I already know how to get back on my boat. Now, get­ting back onto the boat and into the seat is another mat­ter — I never did suc­cess­fully do that with­out flip­ping over and dunk­ing myself — but at least I know I can get back on the boat and out of the water! I’ll have to play around with the kayak some more when I get another opportunity!

The next ses­sion was dragon boat­ing. Wow, that was a work­out! I can’t say that it’s the most fun way to get around on the water, but I can now bet­ter appre­ci­ate the team­work required to really get one of those suck­ers mov­ing at speed — and how hard it is to main­tain that power and coor­di­na­tion. It’s tir­ing! It’s very, very tir­ing! How­ever, it was inter­est­ing to learn that it’s not about arm power — the power comes from your abdom­i­nals rotat­ing and crunch­ing. How­ever, I have to note that the shoul­ders do get tired from lift­ing the pad­dle out of the water quickly and get­ting into posi­tion, reach­ing way out and for­ward. It’s the morn­ing after right now, and my del­toids are indeed notice­ably tired, as are my obliques on the side away from the pad­dle (they were the ones hold­ing me up and out!).

Stand-up pad­dle­board­ing is essen­tially stand­ing up on a board like a surf­board (some are wider than surf­boards, oth­ers are pretty much surf­boards) and using a big long pad­dle like a mutant canoe pad­dle to get mov­ing. I have to say that my expe­ri­ence with the kayaks ear­lier came in very handy. I fell into the lake again and again while try­ing new things on the pad­dle­board, and feel­ing com­fort­able with get­ting dunked and climb­ing back out of the water went a long way towards keep­ing things fun the whole way through! We first got com­fort­able with just stand­ing on the boards and mov­ing, then went to learn­ing how to turn, how to mod­ify our stroke to travel straight with­out switch­ing hands, and finally… a few advanced mod­i­fi­ca­tions that guar­an­teed more dunk­ing into the lake. Each of the mod­i­fi­ca­tions meant we stood away from the board’s bal­ance point or pivot point, but gave the board more maneu­ver­abil­ity. The down­side, of course, is that it also resulted in the board being less sta­ble. I fig­ured I was on the board to learn, so I tried every­thing the instruc­tor told us to try — even though at some point I had swapped with a class­mate and was on a decid­edly unsta­ble board!

I am by no means expert at any­thing after a full day on the lake, but at least now I have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what kayak­ing, dragon boat­ing and pad­dle­board­ing are like. More than that, I feel com­fort­able out there on the water — falling in, tip­ping in, or in some other way mess­ing up is no big deal. That under­stand­ing and that con­fi­dence on the water are, I think, well worth the $20 for the whole day of experiences.

All in all, the day was very fun and I rec­om­mend every­one try it if they get the chance. If you’ve never been in a kayak, canoe, drag­onboat or on a pad­dle­board, you’ll find it a great new expe­ri­ence. If you already know a bit about kayak­ing and canoe­ing, there are some very good intermediate-level and advanced-level ses­sions avail­able as well. To end off, though, I’ll say that the Games for Bal­ance & Fun ses­sion will be good for every­one, regard­less of expe­ri­ence level!