Making up for a paddle-deprived childhood

By David Lyon, Globe Correspondent, 04/27/03

		Paddling with L.L. Bean. (Globe photo / David Lyon)  More on New England  Water fun in New England  Kite surfing in New England  White water surprises
		Printable version L.L. Bean Outdoor Discovery School Main Street, Freeport, Maine 888-552-3261 www.llbean.com The one-day kayak excursion, offered June through August, costs $100 and requires advance registration. Short (2-hour) kayaking sessions are offered on a walk-up basis at least twice a day on the weekend of June 7-8, daily June 14-Sept. 7, and on weekends through Sept. 28. The walk-up introductory sessions are offered on a first-come, first-served basis and cost $12, including all equipment and transportation from the Freeport store on Main Street. The only Discovery School canoeing expedition in Maine this year is a five-day trip, Sept. 8-13, on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway ($795 per person).

FREEPORT, Maine — Oh, the shame. Somehow, while growing up in Maine, I failed to develop certain skills that every Mainer is supposed to have. In theory, we're born knowing how to eat lobster, give slyly misleading directions, and perform various colorful and woodsy tasks. We're also supposed to be a whiz with paddles.

I grew up on the coast. But my days at sea weren't in a catboat or a sloop, and certainly not in a sea kayak. I spent most them aboard an oak-keeled, plywood-hulled "cabin cruiser" that my father, grandfather, and I built one winter from mail-order plans. We fitted the boat for lobster fishing and named her for my mother, which is pretty much how half the local lobstering fleet came into being in those days. During my teens, I spent the summers puttering out to haul traps at 4 a.m. and coming back to port in time to sell the catch before dinner. On Sundays, when it was illegal to lobster, I trolled for striped bass and horse mackerel, jigged for cod, or beached on an uninhabited island to dig softshell clams.

I could row a tender, navigate by dead reckoning, and repair a broken prop shaft in time to get back to the mooring before a storm hit. But I never learned to paddle. I was clueless in a canoe, incompetent in a kayak. In fact, my friends and I figured that sea kayaking (which we had never seen) was probably an Eskimo thing, or at least a California thing. Hauling traps, I missed that childhood rite of passage that involves a tipsy canoe, a wooden paddle, and an unceremonious dunking.

As I got to an age when exercise became fun instead of work, the lacuna in my childhood began to assume embarrassing proportions. I developed lame excuses to dodge paddling excursions until a friend, who happens to be an ace kayaker, pulled me aside. "The first step to beating a problem is admitting that you have one," he said in his best 12-step tone. I muttered something to the effect that I didn't know what he was talking about, but it was clear I couldn't keep hiding.

So I put myself in the hands of my higher power, L.L. Bean, by contacting Bean's Outdoor Discovery School to arrange a weekend intervention in basic paddle skills.

At that point, Bean offered basic workshops in both canoeing and kayaking, so I signed up for a half-day of canoe basics and a daylong kayak excursion workshop at the Freeport facility. (Bean has since dropped basic canoe skills from the school roster, perhaps because most people would rather paddle a stable kayak than a rocky canoe.)

Despite being half my age, my canoeing instructor clearly had plenty of experience with latecomers to the sport and spent the first two hours of the four-hour "Quick Start Canoe" on land, where he could keep an eye on us and not have to practice his lifesaving skills. We spent what seemed like boring hours practicing how to hold and move the paddle, when to roll and not to roll our wrists, how to get in and out of the canoe. Once we were on the water, my partner — an older woman who had never paddled, but had been an observer and passenger in her courting days — agreed that canoeing really did feel like second nature.

That is, until Maine weather intervened. Ten minutes out, our beefy young instructor was showing us how to place our arms to get more power and control into a canoe stroke. Soon we were spinning in circles to practice quick changes of direction, until a gigantic flashbulb went off.

Our instructor froze at the lightning flash. Not that he hadn't expected it: Thunderheads had been piling up on the southwest horizon. But when the distant crack of the first strike finally reached us, he pointed to the clouds, then to the dock, and yelled "Go!" Six canoes instantly spun into a single-file race for the dock, and we were all high and dry, canoes and paddles stored, before the first splats of rain fell five minutes later. I figured I had canoeing licked.

One paddle sport down, one to go. I was ready for my daylong kayak excursion where Bean promised "some basic instruction." I wasn't ready for more Maine weather. The thunderstorm that had abbreviated my lake canoeing had ushered in a mass of humid southerly air behind it. Casco Bay was socked in solid with fog. I called Bean: Was the class still on? "Fog or shine," a disembodied voice responded.

The humiliations began to accumulate. I couldn't figure out why my wetsuit fit like a left shoe on the right foot, until a septuagenarian classmate from Florida pointed out that "it goes on like a girl's prom dress — zips in the back."

Once again, we spent our first hour going over basics, such as getting in and out of the kayak without taking a swim. Bracing with the paddle, I climbed in and out, in and out with all the grace of a landlocked duck. The fog persisted and several students nervously asked our college-boy instructor if the trip would be canceled.

"Nah," he said, laconically. "But you'll need these." He handed out compasses and laminated charts. I felt my confidence soaring. Blind navigation with a chart was something I understood. We all climbed into our plastic craft and before long we were paddling down the coast of the Harraseeket River harbor, "sounding off" our numbers every few minutes to keep the flotilla together. Every so often the eerie fog would part to reveal a pair of eider ducks and their ducklings bobbing on the glassy ocean surface, or a harbor seal's whiskered snout sticking out of the water like the butt of a submerged log.

Following the charts, we circumnavigated three islands, picked our way through tricky currents and channels, and made sure we stayed clear of moving lobster boats, no more daunted by the fog than we were. By midafternoon, the fog finally began to disperse, and I saw the rocky coast as I'd never seen it before: low in the water and silent.

When we finally returned to our launch, I confidently beached my kayak, began to climb out, and promptly fell backward in the water. "Baptism!" the instructor called out, in case anyone else in the class had missed it. I was finally a Mainer after all.

David Lyon is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.