Sorry if I’ve been a bit quiet lately. From the blog it could seem as if there was a lull, a quiet moment. Of course the quiet here has much more to do with the craziness of the offline world. I’m looking forward to next week when again I get back to instructing. Tuesday and Thursday I’ll be at Rutabaga in Madison for a couple cold water sessions. May is a tough time to coach. The combination of cool water and air temperatures usually make it too uncomfortable to spend too much time with students out of their boats and in the water, so you tend to cut a few things a bit short.

When I think back to when I first started coaching this lack of “swim” time would not have seemed like much of a problem. The rigidity of those early outlines limited “splash” time. You did your wet exit, solo, and T rescue and that was it. You could work right through those moments and spend the rest of the time warm and dry.

These days of course I don’t live in ridged method. Method yes, but ridged no. The method of course is wrapped in teaching through experience, not lectures. Getting experience in a kayak tends to mean a bit more time in the water than you might normally plan on. By trying to keep your students warm and try, you inevitably cut back on experience time and revert back to lecture which to my mind does the student a disservice. Humans learn by doing. What they learn from lectures is often that their coach tends to talk too much.

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