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I’ve had what an optimist would call mixed success with rolling instruction. Ok for clarification of the data pool I will say that I’ve tried to help twenty or so people with a first roll. Which is not many. But out of those twenty, only two actually rolled while I was helping them.

Now I am up to three.

The Kalamazoo Canoe Kayak Club has been sponsoring pool sessions once a week since November. Gabriel, Isabella and I have been going almost every time. Gabriel is getting close on his hip-snaps. But he resists the notion that the kayak should come up first. I think I got the concept across to him when I gave him a kick board and told him to try hip flicking off of it. If he hip flicked hard enough and brought his body up last I would let him come up, and if he tried to sit up first, I would let go of the kick board and he would sink back into the water. Pretty cruel isn’t it?

After I tried this technique on Gabriel, I applied it to a slightly more savvy 13 year old girl named Olivia. I worked with Olivia holding onto my hands while I stood in the water next to her. She would hip flick off of my hands bringing the boat up first and then her body over the back deck. After she did this half a dozen times, I gave her the kick board. I held the kick board at first while she tried to roll. I noticed she didn’t seem to need it very much, so I let go. Next I worked her up to being able to capsize on one side and come up on the other with the kickboard. She got that after a few tries. So I decided to graduate her to the paddle. The big difficulty was getting the paddle to stay at the surface. After I guided her paddle a few times, she got it on her own and was rolling easily. I felt like a champ, despite the fact that I wasn’t the clever one. Her mother was in the stands above the swimming pool watching her roll. The girl’s mother in the stand watching her roll reminded me of All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. There is a part of the story where in Mexcio John Grady Cole spends months taming this wild horse he found, and rides it around the pen on the ranch where he works. He wants his mother and his girl to see him ride this horse he just tamed. Mainly because it was the one thing where he was eloquent and beautiful, rather than an uncouth cowboy from Texas with no prospects. When I roll I always look up to see if Laura might be watching. She hasn’t been impressed yet, but I am still trying.

Kids are just easier to teach, especially girls. Boys even at nine, are beginning to think they know everything. At least mine does. I was trying to explain to Gabriel that everyone while surfing/white water paddling should be responsible for themselves. He tried to argue that I could just eskimo rescue him everytime he went over instead of learning to roll. I told him it wouldn’t work. He doesn’t get it now, but I hope he will. Learning to roll is pretty much like the rest of life. It’s about being responsible for yourself when you fail. Being self reliant enough to come up on your own. Of course, if you fail and you really need help, your mates should be there to scoop you out of the drink and put you back in your kayak; but you shouldn’t come to depend on it.

I may use this kick board method with some adults to see how it works. But I think it is a pretty cool toy. The foam board has a lot of flotation, more than the paddle really. It doesn’t complicate things as much as the paddle in terms of: where to put it, how to sweep, etc. And after the student gets the kickboard roll they can graduate to the paddle.

I’ve been reading the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin series, of the Master and Commander Far Side of the World movie fame. I can truthfully say I like the movie. Though the story in the film has an incindental if not tangential relationship to the texts it purports to be translated from. But the actual novel, Far Side of the World, 10th in the series, has one great line I’ve been mulling over for the last week or so, “Jack liked others and expected to be liked in return.” This speaks to a virtue in character I hope I possess. Whether or not that virtue is returned in kind is another matter. This line while trivial, speaks to me in particular.

Jack Aubrey in the novels is an indomitably cheerful man. Despite hordes of personal setbacks, troves of financial difficulties and the general stress of being in command of a Frigate during time of war; he generally is kind and good natured and very difficult to discourage.

Granted Jack can be dimwitted on land, but in his own habitat he is very capable, and often very successful. I wonder if in my own small way, I am the same as Jack, a blundering buffoon on land, ready to shoot himself socially, fiscally, and politically in the foot at any given opportunity. But with wind in his rigging, and blue sea underneath him, there is no one who can stop him.

I hope to find plenty of blue water soon and to hear the hum of the wind in the rigging.

I’ve had the same pair of chotas for a few years now and they are beginning to look very sorry indeed. They smell terrible too. I could use some wetsuit shampoo on them. But I am lazy. I think the smell is part of the charm. The low cut chotas are pretty useless. They are not overly warm, nor overly protective when trying to haul a loaded boat up a stony beach.

The difficulty is in finding a shoe that will fit inside the Silhouette with size 10 1/2 feet. Then add in the oversize goretex booties that must fit in the wet shoe most of the year and you have a very tempestuous fit.

There aren’t really that many options for footwear. NRS seems to have the market cornered.

Often there is a question I want to ask. It lays half formed in my mouth like vapour for days. And the answer, I forget sometimes, is waiting for me without even having voiced the question.

Laura is the question and the answer.

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

Pablo Neruda