Getting A Leg Up

This year I have finally decided to get "Sea Skills" or Grade 3 in NSW Sea Kayak Club (NSW SKC) language so I have been reading through pages and pages and pages of tedious documents to make sure I know what I am supposed to know to get some kind of qualification for things I have been doing for many years now without that qualification. If you wonder what the point is, you're not alone.

When I first joined the NSW SKC, I thought some sort of formal qualification of paddlers was a great idea - within reason. I had come from a small mountain town in Canada and had spent 20+ years as a volunteer leader in various outdoor clubs. Leading trips filled with diverse participants taught me so much I would never have learned had I just done the same trips with a group of friends of known skill, fitness and fortitude. As a volunteer leader, you pretty quickly learn that individuals, almost universally, over-estimate their ability and under-estimate the difficulty.

The most egregious example I remember was a woman who came on a week long mountaineering camp who said she "led 5.10a comfortably" but was pushing herself above that grade and reported Himalayan snow climbing experience. When we got out into the mountains, it turned out she had never climbed trad routes, was scared on class 3 and had no idea to cross a flat snow covered glacier. Later, we went rock climbing together at a local crag and she could lead 5.7 sport climbs but nothing else.

In the club I led trips for, most accidents were what would be classified as "slips on snow" in Accidents in North American Mountaineering. For years, I ran an annual snow climbing workshop in spring and it was amazing how many people who had been hiking around in the mountains on snow covered peaks for decades had no idea how to properly kick a step, use an ice axe in both self-belay and self-arrest mode, ascend and descend steep snow slopes, assess risk, plan a reasonable route, and don't even get me started on actually self-arresting. I would like to say that through the years, I got virtually everyone through the program at least once, but there were many, many people who I met on trips or heard about who had "slips on snow" who refused to come to the free workshop. I think it was ego.

As a volunteer leader, no qualifications required, the only way you could estimate the ability of the individual was through detailed and pointed questioning, and people who want to come on trips have a way of answering questions that does not really answer the question, or by observation on the trip, by which point it might be too late.

But back to the NSW SKC and Grade 3/Sea Skills. Paddle Australia has a clear list of skills, knowledge and equipment that an individual certified to grade 3 must have to pass the assessment process. That would seem to give leaders and other paddlers on any trip some kind of confidence that individuals certified have a fairly equivalent skill set. Sounds like a really good idea. What could possibly go wrong?

After running a year of Sunday paddles, I discovered that practice is somewhat different to theory. Many people who came on the Sunday paddles were technically qualified to Grade 3/Sea Skills, but were, in practice not at Grade 3 level. These folk plugged along fine as long as conditions were easy but when it came to landing in small surf, rolling a kayak, even getting back into a kayak without landing, suddenly glaring differences between the theoretical and the actual came to light.

Like most of life's complex problems I don't think there is a simple answer to this conundrum. Relying on individuals to keep up their strength, aerobic capacity, and skills clearly does not work, but requiring people to recertify every year to ensure that they still meet certain criteria is both onerous and expensive for individuals and assessors alike.

It would be a great shame for communities and the mentoring process if all the experienced fit paddlers suddenly decided only to paddle with experienced and fit individuals all the time. There are lots of people, and I was - still am - most definitely one of them who can improve their skill and ability if they can get a leg up from the more experienced. No matter what level we are at, we can always reach up or down and help someone else out.