In previous years, BASK taught a “Novice Clinic” and I have volunteered as an instructor for the last two of those years. There has been talk of changing the format and this year some changes were made. Now it is no longer a clinic for novices, it is a clinic for anyone in BASK. In fact, membership in the club is now mandatory for anyone who wants to attend the clinic. Eric Lee, who has run the clinic for several years now says that the new motto is “enrichment not recruitment”. Instead of trying to introduce new members to kayaking we will spend the energy to improve the skills of existing members. Since it is no longer just for novices the name has been changed to “The BASK Clinic”.
The first weekend in the pool was the only weekend that I could attend this time! I was taking a Master SCUBA class most weekends, organizing a booth for BASK at the Bay Area PaddleFest, and giving a talk. I would have preferred to teach on the surf weekend, but could only fit the pool session into my schedule. This is the first in-the-water session (there are classroom sessions as well) where we make the students (we cannot call them novices any more) show us that they can swim, and teach them a few rudimentary skills in the clear warm water of a swimming pool.
The students are taught how to pop open their spray-skirt and exit from the boat when it is turned over. This may sound intuitive, but some spray-skirts are very tight and people have been known to drown trapped upside down in their boats by their spray-skirt. (Thankfully never at a BASK event). After the students get back in their boats we practice the Eskimo rescue. This is where you hang upside down in your boat holding your breath and pounding on your boat to attract attention. Another kayaker zooms up and lets you grab their bow and pull yourself right-side up. As the instructor standing chest deep in the water I tried using my hands as a surrogate bow to pull on and my students seemed to find it difficult to get back up. When we switched to doing it with real boats they had an easier time of it.
Everyone was in little river kayaks, and I had loaned mine to one of the students. So when the formal part of the program was over I didn’t have a boat to play in. Because these students are not novices, some of them were pretty advanced paddlers and a few could even roll a kayak. When the talk turned to teaching the roll, I jumped ashore and tried out all the spare boats lying around the pool. I had loaned my boat to one of the students because he was a tall guy and he couldn’t find any other boat to fit in. I bought my Pirouette because it is an old river kayak design that is so unfashionably large that it has lots of leg room in the bow. As a second best I found a Dancer that I could just barely squeeze myself into. Then I was able to join the melee in the pool and demonstrate some Greenland paddle rolls and other tricks.