Oban to Stornoway

June 13, 2008 on 8:37 pm | In Sea Kayaking, Uncategorized |

I have returned from what was a long weekend. From where I left off:

I am afraid it looks like I am off on a rant.

Oban is an odd place if you come from the Outer Hebrides, it is stuffed full of tourists. It seemed the world and his wife ride there on their motorbikes, which for me as a petrol-head makes for a great spectator sport.

I had dinner in the EE-Usk  restaurant on the front, the place was great and the service was OK however no one asked me if the meal was good, they just took my card ran it through the machine and wanted me out to get the next set of customers in and I am sorry to say the fish wasn’t cooked, sad because the part which was, tasted fantastic.

The Sunday saw us roll up at Kilbowie for the 4* conversion course. A quick history as I understand it:

The BCU, British Canoe Union, have restructured their awards for personal paddling skills and the way the coaching scheme is done, I am not saying it wasn’t needed but the way it has been done has left a lot of paddlers wondering if they should bother.

There are two sides to the scheme the personal skills side are the star tests which are a measure of how competent you are in your personal paddling and the other is the coaching scheme to develop your abilities to teach paddling.

We spent the morning talking with Gordon Brown of Skayak Adventures  who has been writing most of the elements. I saw his notes and they made perfect sense, I then read the BCU guidelines and they is seems had been written by a dyslexic monkey.

I sit in an odd position as I am a professional guide but most of my coaching is done through Stornoway Canoe Club. This means I need the coaching qualifications for the club rather than the business. The guiding qualifications for the business, now I have them, never go out of date but the coaching ones I have to get renewed - annually.

So here is the rub, I don’t have to pay anything to do my professional work but I have to pay to be validated for the ones I use as a volunteer…

We were under the impression we were going to attend the course and then we would be able to carry on assessing 4* in the same way we have for the last ten years, but no. We have to watch a training course being run, we have to watch an assessment being done and we have to do an orientation day to teach navigation and then we have to have someone watch us run an assessment - minimum seven days. Oh and we can’t double up, so each one has to be for each person seperately. I am likely to only to use this for the club so how is the club going to finance four of us through this?

So, if we chose not to do it? No new 4* paddlers in the club, it is a pre-requisite for becoming a coach or guide in these waters so no new qualified coaches or guides unless they are prepared to travel to the mainland and pay for a minimum of four day coaching and a two day assessment just to get to the door.

I believe the BCU have got this seriously wrong and they risk alienating clubs. The clubs are the breeding ground for new paddlers who go on to become the coaches of the future. Sea kayaking is growing sport and shouldn’t we be making it accessable not more expensive and difficult?

It wasn’t all bad on a personal level, the afternoon was spent paddling in the tide race at the Falls of Lora under the Connell Bridge, I was trying to work out the last time I paddled there and it was over 15 year ago in a rotabat, (which older paddlers will remember). I got trashed then and so nothing changes except the trashings leave you aching more the next day.

The Falls of Lora are a tide race created under the bridge where the contents of Loch Etive and its tributary lochs empty through a narrow gap. There is a shelf and when the water rushes over it creates huge (and scarey) hydrolic feature. This includes on the right tides, a big standing wave followed by a massive wave train, some very exciting boils and whirlpools. It makes for a great spectator sport from the dry warmth of the bank. There is web site Falls of Lora where all the details of when it is working at its best can be found and some pictures, I was too busy trying to stay in the boat to get the camera out!

Gordon gave us some excellent pointers on using the water there for coaching.

So was it worth the club spending over £600 for the three of us to go there? The jury is still out, it was great to paddle and good to get up to speed with Gordon was very useful (as always) but in terms of coach development …

Tim Pickering
http://www.canoehebrides.com
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