The Undead

The Sunday paddles are, at least as a regular event, over. This is actually the second time I’ve binned the Sunday paddles. The first time was back in 2024 when interest and attendance was repeatedly poor. I don’t why I thought I could turn a trickle into a deluge after the passage of two years with more people than ever out of the game unless perhaps I have a God delusion and think that I can somehow turn water into wine, bread into fish, and non-interest into enthusiasm.

Mentally, this is a tough call to make because I am essentially giving up and if there is one thing that really signals weakness to me it is giving up. Seth Godin, in his book, The Dip, argues that winners know when to quit and when to keep going. Dips are temporary set backs which require a no quit attitude while cul-de-sacs are dead ends where no amount of perseverance will create a path forward. Dips are a bit like over-reaching during a training cycle. You get fatigued, a bit stiff and sore, but, if you manage your training correctly, you are stronger and fitter than ever at the end of the training cycle. I am so used to pushing the fatigue (both mental andphysical), soreness, even boredom at the repetitiveness involved in training that I take that attitude to everything. It works for training but it will never turn a cul de sac into a highway.

When you come back to first principles, the purpose of the Sunday paddles was myriad and yet none of those many goals were being met. In group situations, there is always a social element, and, as I live like a hermit because of my difficulty in finding people who enjoy doing what I do, that was an important goal. But I also wanted to be out with people who like being challenged and valued improving their skills. At the outset, the Sunday paddles were meant to include some skills practice, but very few people are interested in improving their skills even when doing so will open the door to a much wider range of possible experiences. Sea kayaking, particularly under calm conditions is actually a low skill sport where you can complete many, many trips with very little skill.

Last Sunday, I actually had three people show up. One regular (who I will continue to paddle with outside the Sunday paddles) and two paddlers from the ACT who wanted to go from ungraded to Grade Two. I ran them through some of the basic skills that constitute the Grade Two skill set although I could tell by they way they held their paddles, sat in the boat, just generally moved that they were a long, long way off. Initially, I thought I might be able to tick them off on a rescue if not the actual paddle skills but even that was not possible. If you can’t competently complete a simple rescue in calm conditions there is no way you’ll manage in a real situation.

Way back in 2020 after the fires came through and the lockdowns followed, I ran Sunday paddles for almost an entire year and they were quite successful. I even had double digit participants and we did a lot of really interesting paddles in a great variety of conditions. It’s hard to admit that those days are over, but they are and no amount of wishful thinking will bring them back. In a way, it’s a metaphor for everything in life. I used to be able to squat my body weight, but I can’t now and no amount of training will get me back to that point. I can hang on to what I have and I can maximise what I can do, but I cannot, like Jesus, turn the dead into the living.