Hillwise Freelance Mountain Leader

This year I have felt really empowered in a way I haven’t for quite a while. The reason? Because I have at last gained a formal qualification to lead others paddling. Not a top end elite qualification but a qualification none the less, and something I have wanted for about 40 years, and much longer than leading (as opposed to coaching) qualifications have existed here. To explain my feelings around this has taken some reflection, and having done so I felt it might be worth sharing with others. Of course everyone’s journey will be different, but there will be common strands.

I first started paddling on a youth service weekend course in about 1974. This should be the perfect way to start paddling, but this was the 70’s, health and safety and the concept of a duty of care were alien concepts back then. I learned a lot of good technique that has lasted me a lifetime, but the second day of the course saw me bobbing in Plymouth Sound in February in a force 5-6, dressed only in shorts, a rugby shirt and my dads borrowed cricket jumper, whist the rescue boat tried to recover my kayak, that, having no buoyancy and a small hole at one end, had tried to exit vertically downwards. They did get me back in eventually, but the rest of the experience was pretty miserable.

I had a few opportunities to paddle in my teens, on one off trips and weekends, but I had no programme of development and I was held back by not being able to afford a wetsuit, let alone a kayak, buoyancy aid and so on. Parallel to these opportunities though I had done some boating with a 10 ft GRP dinghy that I shared with my siblings at Sennen Cove.

When I was 21years old I was posted to the Isles of Scilly. I had an income and had purchased a 15ft wooden fishing boat with a Seagull outboard. What has this to do with paddling? Well it forced me to confront the issues around wind, tide and wind over tide. It forced me to peruse Admiralty charts and to learn local leading marks and buoyage.

I did no more paddling until I was 25 when I found myself running 3^rd Totnes Sea Scouts, where some “In House” authorisations allowed me to supervise kayaking, rowing and sailing on the river Dart, along with the use of powered craft. This period allowed me to develop a working knowledge of the Tidal Dart from Totnes down to somewhere around Dittisham. I taught many scouts the basics of paddling, and cross deck recovery, despite very sparse credentials to do so, and by chance I managed to inspire some to become very qualified paddling instructors in their own right….but as far as my own paddling goes there was little development.

In about 1995 I was divorced, living next door to Phil Sheardown as he ploughed through his paddling qualifications in a very aggressive way, notching up one ticket after another. We chatted about it and his aspirations and he knew what I did with the Scouts. This turned out pivotal later.

In 1999 I obtained my first open canoe, cheap from friends, this being a Coleman Ram-x ,something of a dog, but it got myself, my wife who I had met through Mountain Rescue, and my daughter afloat together for the first time. I started to seek some personal skills qualifications and gained my Open Canoe 1 and 2 star awards as they were then. In spring of 2000 my wife discovered she was carrying triplets and her first words were “Oh, we will have to get a bigger canoe” . We did… eventually 2 bigger canoes. This time we invested, bought new and for a purpose. My paddling really took off as we realised that one way to easily move three toddlers around whilst getting exercise and fresh air was in a 17ft6 canoe. I was out and about on the Dart a lot more and I was seeing Phil with his new Voyageur canoe business Canoe Adventures out there too.

Meanwhile I was still in Mountain Rescue. We regularly trained in navigation, 1^st aid and more recently swift water rescue. Whilst all this was focused on hill-going I realise now how much these things contributed to my paddling knowledge too.

In 2008 I retired, and looked around for the next challenge. I opted for a life as a Mountain Leader (for which I was well qualified) but very quickly was approached by Phil and invited to become a freelance steersman for his Voyageur canoes. This was the start of 12 wonderful years, being paid to have other people paddle me up and down the river, I loved that work. The Voyageurs were so big that the EU classified them as ferries, so instead of canoeing qualifications we were assessed by the Dartmouth Harbourmaster for a Boatmans Licence renewed annually and with a medical every 5 years. This job taught me a lot about loading the craft, about customer care, about checking Buoyancy aid fit and about being flexible with your plans. Safety was paramount and we focused on it. I had to gain a Marine band radio licence and use one.

At the same time I also trained and became a leader for World Challenge. I took at least 16 groups abroad to developing countries and experienced poling Makoros on the Okavanga Delta and paddling rubber rafts down rivers in Croatia, Costa Rica, Nepal and Borneo. I saw elite paddlers working on the Zambezi below Victoria falls and I was further trained in safety on water margins and swift water rescue and safety to ensure I could supervise safe river crossing in the Himalayas. None of this was directed at making me a better paddler, but it did.

By 2010 my triplet sons were enjoying paddling trips and starting to be competent, but they were getting to the stage when they listen to anybody but a parent. So we joined Totnes Canoe Club as a family. Soon they were better paddlers than me, rolling kayaks like they were born in them and really loving it. I was really there for them, but took the chance to upgrade my open canoe skills a bit and re-qualify for my 2 star. Not really a forward step, just good consolidation. I did also manage my first kayak roll which was a big step forward, even if I have seldom replicated it! It inspired me to get a sea kayak.

In 2022 I started working for the Bioasis environmental camps programme, during which canoe trips were run by Nils Mueller from Paddle Devon. We got talking and he told me about new Paddlesport Leader Awards, that were not about coaching but about making journeys. This was music to my ears.

Nils offered to run a course and I readily told him to sign me up. I was feeling very much the imposter though. I felt I had very little technical ability, and I knew that the course would be in the winter months and things were going to be chilly. It was time to take things seriously, no half measures. I bought a drysuit. This might seem irrelevant, but in fact it allowed me to focus on everything else I was doing in the water instead of how cold I was. The cold has always limited me in wet environments whether paddling, swimming or caving, and it was time to slay this particular dragon. It made a difference.

So in early 2024 I turned up to Stoke Gabriel for the first of three training days. The weather inevitably was foul. Nils went through as much theory as he could justify, as we sheltered at the back of the closed café, no doubt hoping the wind would ease. It didn’t. We eventually hit the water, or more appropriately it hit us. In a miscellany of open canoes, stand up paddleboards and kayaks we attempted to get out of Stoke Gabriel and into the main river channel, but the waves were so big that only the kayak had any chance of coping and we were soon beaching to empty the open boat re-load it and attempt plan B….and C….and then retreat to the cars and an early finish, mopping up with some more theory at  a café in Totnes. What a debacle? Well for me no not really, I had realised as we worked through the theory that I was already at home with most of it and seemed to get it all much easier than those around me. The waterborne element had allowed me to push the open canoe beyond anything I’d attempted in one before and learn from the experience and it was a wake up call that I would need to up my game to pass.

I went home and plundered You-tube for videos of self-rescue techniques by acknowledged experts (not any old Joe madman) found techniques that I thought could work for me and went about rigging my boat accordingly.

The next training day with Nils was in a sheltered bay on a day that was less than pleasant anywhere else. This time I had to grapple with a stand-up paddleboard, something I had not used before and about which I had made assumptions I was to be disabused of. It did not behave like an open canoe when I tried this or that stroke, and although I could stand up on it OK I made little progress unless I was kneeling. We did a lot of rescues and I attempted my first self rescue in the open canoe. As I bailed out the boat the first response of one of the other paddlers was “You made that look so easy” and my imposter syndrome crept away. The homework had been worth it.

Our last training day was on the Dart at Totnes and one of my sons came to make up numbers. The weather gods had done it again and battling up the river seeking out every bit of shelter from the wind focused skills I use more often in mountaineering. The day ran better than the first one and we got quite a lot of work done despite the challenging environment that was well “out of remit”. I wasn’t sure I was ready but one of the other participants wanted to get his assessment done before a deadline in May, so I agreed to do it then. With only weeks to prepare I had to focus. I had to build a comprehensive boat repair kit. I had to go out and test adjustments I had made to my equipment. I had to re-outfit my own boat and I wanted to push my solo paddling in stronger wind conditions so that I could be certain to handle anything the assessment threw at me. I also had to recruit some people to act as my guinea pigs. This turned out to be easy as there are some in most paddling clubs who delight in doing this, despite all the getting wet. Perhaps it’s a way of getting qualified tuition on the cheap or perhaps they just delight in facilitating other paddlers to develop. Whatever it is I am grateful for it. In the meantime the other candidate pulled out so it was my show.

I planned a route from Stoke Gabriel down the Dart toward Dittisham enabling a pub lunch. We all set off and as we went Nils threw me one curved ball after another. Whilst everyone else was eating lunch I was “repairing” a canoe with a patch. In the afternoon more people in the water to a point where he had everyone in but me and I was expected to triage it. It was a great day and I was pleased to hear from one of my semi professional guinea pigs that Nils was “really putting you through the mill” and that they hadn’t seen other assessors push people this far. I was pleased because I don’t believe in fluking a pass. If I don’t pass well I’d rather fail. These qualifications authorise you to do things where lives can be at risk, so they have to be solid.

I didn’t get everything perfect and I learned a lot on assessment day, so it was a relief to hear Nils pronounce a solid pass. But perhaps it is even more satisfying to know that 6 months on, that patch is still on his canoe which has been working hard all summer!

So this has been a long diatribe and what are we to take from it? Well firstly when we embark on something like this, we bring our whole life experience to the table. My formal paddling was quite mundane, but I brought a lot of crossover skills from other disciplines that meant that although I felt like the imposter I actually had a depth of knowledge to call on that more than made up for my inadequacies. My attitude was important: I was going all out for it. I was prepared to invest time and some money in making sure I had the best chance of success, and perhaps most important I saw every failure as a chance to learn rather than moaning about how crap something was.

 I think I wrote this because in a time of instant gratification there is a tendency to plunge into courses with the slightest of groundings in an activity and hope, not so much that you are good enough pass, but that the examiner doesn’t think you’re bad enough to fail. That you’ve paid for the course so you expect to pass it. That attendance is enough. But of course if a things worth doing its worth doing well. However a pass is only another step on the pathway and skills must be maintained, and I am already working on the next leg of my paddling journey.

With thanks to Phil Hedge for some of the pics.