I volunteered to be an instructor for the BASK Clinic again this year. Eric Lee published a tentative schedule for the classes, and almost every weekend landed on one where I was diving as part of a Master SCUBA class I was taking during the same time! The weekend I most wanted to teach at, in the surf at Bolinas, was the same weekend as the Bay Area PaddleFest, where I was manning the BASK booth and giving a talk on “Reading the Water”. Since the schedule was only tentative I immediately warned Eric about the schedule conflict and discovered that it was not all that tentative. It was too late to avoid this conflict and I missed out on teaching in the surf this year.
Even though I was only going to be able to make it to one of the clinic weekends, I was able to make it to the Instructors Clinic. This year it was a weekend of practicing in Horseshoe Cove on the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. We spent the first day practicing teaching paddle strokes on the water without getting ourselves wet. Then we retired to the nearby Youth Hostel at Rodeo Beach to cook a big meal and crash in bunk beds with dozens of other people in a dormitory style room.
The next morning Penny Wells lead us out into the water without our boats to hold hands and dunk ourselves in the 50 degree F water. This was done to get us over the fear of getting wet so we would be uninhibited when the time came to practice teaching rescues. We split up into groups of three, practiced one rescue, re-combined and split up into different groups to practice the next rescue. When it came to be my turn to demonstrate how a paddle-float rescue is done, I ended up with Penny Wells as one of my observers. Penny is one of the founders of BASK an has an incredible store of experience and skill. When I used to paddle a sit-on-top kayak all the time I didn’t think I needed to learn any of these fancy rescues because I could always climb back into a sit-on-top. But one time I watched Penny drag a kayak over her cockpit, drain all the water out of it, flip the boat right side up, and bark orders until the out-of-boat kayaker was back in her boat and safely paddling again. This is called a T-rescue and I was in awe of Penny, how easily and quickly she performed it. Now at the clinic, Penny watched me demonstrate how to do a different rescue, the paddle float rescue. She said that I did a perfect job of describing and demonstrating it and could find nothing wrong with my technique! I felt I was getting the highest possible praise from The Master!
It’s too bad I’m not very fond of the paddle float rescue and don’t ever plan on doing it myself. One of the problems with this rescue is that it requires a piece of equipment called a paddle float. This is an inflatable float you keep on your deck at all times. When you tip over and exit your boat, you find it, stick it over your paddle, inflate it, use it as an outrigger on the end of the paddle to stabilize you while you climb into your kayak, then pump all the water out of your boat. I think this is too gimmicky and slow to be practical. My solution was to learn to roll before I started paddling the ocean in a sit-inside kayak. In the worst extreme, if I ended up out of my boat I would get back in my boat using several techniques that don’t require an extra piece of equipment. I’ve practiced several of these re-entries in calm water and probably should practice them in rough water.