We launched from the nice sandy beach at Ord and spent quite a while in shallow water doing balance exercises. Shallow enough so that we could easily stand up and get back into our kayaks when we fell in. Which was often. The next few pictures show some of our exercises. The final exercise, which I tried several times and never got it (yet) was to stand up in your kayak. Gordon makes it look so easy!
We then moved on to exercises where we put our kayaks on edge and did progressively, um, richer kinds of turns. (Words like challenging and complex make it sound hard. It was truly fun, but non-trivial.)
Then lunch on an island with beautiful beaches and lots of tide pools. The beaches have a quartz sand, but much of the beach is actually made up of coral-like remains of algae that have ingested some kind of mineral and turned it into a hard case. This is probably the most accessible of the many beautiful spots I've visited in Scotland. If I were to return with and paddle on my own I'd certainly come here.
After lunch, we paddled into deeper water and repeated the balance exercises we did in very shallow water. It was humbling to discover how much more difficult they were to do in deep water. As Gordon pointed out, a lot of learning a new challenging skill is not about the body, but about the mind.
It took me a while, but I did succeed in some of these exercises that turned out to be challenging for me. I was thrilled.
Again we all ended up in the water trying these balance exercises, but how do you get back into your kayak when you're in deep water? We all of course realized that the next lesson was going to be various techniques to do just that. Both self rescue and rescues where another person helps you back in. I've of course done this many times before, but Gordon gave us some coaching that made it much easier for me than before, using much less energy. Very worth it.
Wrapped up with a bit of roll practice just to round out the day.
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