Go Kayak Now!

BCU Coach Level 1 Training and Assessment
When: May 27-30 2014
Where: Portage MI, Long Lake Ramona Park
Who: Body Boat Blade International
What: The UKCC BCU Coach Level 1 training course will be held at Ramona park near Kalamazoo between May 27-30, after the West Michigan Coastal Kayakers’ Symposium. This coach education course is one of the best coach training programs around. It is especially helpful in our area as the focus of the program is introducing people to paddle sports. The Level 1 training course introduces coaching principles and concepts and focuses on student centered learning.

The general outline is below:

The BCU Certificate in Coaching Paddlesport develops your ability to plan, deliver and review, safe, ethical, and effective paddlesport sessions. On the course you will develop ‘how to coach’ skills alongside technical understanding ‘what to coach’ specifically relating to the skills beginners require.
The course will cover how to:
• prepare coaching activities, taking into account participants’ needs and motives
• establish a safe working environment
• deliver prepared activities
• establish working relationships with participants and others
• prepare participants’ for the coaching activities
• support participants’ behaviour
• conclude the activities
• evaluate the effectiveness of coaching activities
• evaluate the effectiveness of personal coaching practice
• manage effective and appropriate bank and water based rescues
A range of coaching tips and tricks, games and activities will be built into the course along with time spent developing your technical/tactical understanding.
Leon Somme of Body Boat Blade will be running this coach education course. WMCKA is sponsoring part of this event, and it must be said that this a fantastic opportunity for local paddlers to get a great course, without having to fly to Orca’s Island Washington!

There are two course pre-reqs that you MUST complete,
PRE-REQ 1 the 2* paddler skills assessment

PRE-REQ 2 The Foundations of Safety and Rescue Training:

If you would like to signup please go to The Power of Water

Complacency is not an enemy that stages a dawn raid on your home, sirens blaring, knocking down your door, blazing in with maximum violence. Complacency is something that approaches silently and slowly over time, waiting for you to turn your back, and then pushes you down the stairs. We all have a comfort zone. In order to keep things interesting for myself this year, I did my damnedest to not paddle flat water all year. It wasn’t an overt resolution I made to myself. But, I wanted to keep things interesting. Some might think that in the midwest we have very little opportunity to keep our skills up in waves and current. So I decided to make a year of it and see how often I could paddle both. It turns out if you are creative, the answer is quite a bit.

In order to achieve this, I wanted to paddle more days on the Kalamazoo River in either a canoe, or in a white water kayak. I did this by using a beautiful section of the Kalamazoo that has three class II sections of white water under the correct conditions. I did a lot of boat spotting, with a shuttle run, sometimes even with Indy the beagle (when Dan would loan me his canoe) to run these three sections.

The first one is the plainwell spillway dam here:

View Larger Map

I spent a lot of time here when there were no waves on Lake Michigan this summer with a number of people including Dan, Rebecca, and Pat. And a fair number of quick 1-hr sessions just paddling upstream from the put in. This spot works in a variety of water levels, and is a great way to keep skills sharp. I worked a lot on edge to edge transitions, ferrying, eddy turns, and obviously surfing white water waves.

Just a short trip downstream is this spot at Fannie Pell Park:

View Larger Map

This spot has all sorts of challenges. The first is actually getting on the wave as it is quite shallow. The second is the challenge of rolling up quickly if you wash off as there are some nasty rocks right after the wave. This spot definitely works better at high water. But it sharpens the skills on reading the water, and getting your boat positioning just right, as well as bracing and rolling in conditions.

The last spot is a mellow fun spot downriver here:

View Larger Map

This spot definitely teaches you how to position your boat to stay on the wave and how to find the front part of a white water wave. As with the spot at fannie pell park, it works better in high water.

I really felt that these spots made for a much more interesting paddling year than if I had decided to just go to Lake Michigan and paddle distance on flat water, though I did do that as well a few times.

We did have a great year for Lake Michigan surf as well as you can tell from these images below:

It was a full year of paddling for sure. I was quite lucky to be able to do a number of training, and assessments. A BCU Coach Level 1 program, An ACA Surf Kayak Assessment. While I wouldn’t say I was complacent, my goal for next year is to push myself even further and to try and do some tidal paddling, as well as some further assessments and training.