Re: [Paddlewise] Club Safety

> From ohman001_at_maroon.tc.umn.edu Thu Mar  5 06:41 PST 1998
> Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 08:37:40 -0600 (CST)
> From: Sarah M Ohmann <ohman001_at_maroon.tc.umn.edu>

> 
> Jackie-
> 
> Thanks for your response, and great ascii art as usual.  One situation
> that we may be faced with as our club grows is beginners who would like to
> lead trips that are beyond their abilities as individual paddlers, let
> alone as leaders.  Does your club have a way to deal with this?  This
> possibility was raised by a member of another sea kayaking club in the
> area who did have this problem come up last year...  

Hi Sarah,

What did the other club do?  How was it a problem?

The club of which I was a member did not have leaders.  This might
seem picky, but for a reason, we referred to trip hosts as coordinators.
I was elected official club trip coordinator after only about four 
months of membership.  I'm not saying that how my club went about 
its business should be the accepted practice.  It just happened to be 
what we did and it worked for us.  I wanted to paddle... *bad*. Not 
enough club trips were scheduled.  So to get to paddle with experienced 
paddlers where I could learn more, I offered to host trips.  This is 
how I became club trip coordinator, someone who made campground 
reservations, set up a date and time to meet, made sure there were 
enough shuttle vehicles, someone to collect camping and/or food fees,
gather and distribute directions, and basically, someone who just 
started the ball rolling for a group of people to get together to 
paddle.  As I said, we were an informal lot. :-)  But gosh did we 
have fun!  

As the club grew and we were joined by an ACA officer who wanted a 
more rigid structuring of club events and began to warn us about 
liability and tell us how much we needed insurance and we should join
ACA so we would be covered, much began to change.  We realized there 
were topics of which we weren't aware and being aware was probably a 
good thing. The more we became aware, the more the focus of the 
club began to change from strictly social to more of instructional 
and safety awareness.  Also, more trips were scheduled outside the 
club. Talk of liability does seem to have its impact, even though we 
knew of no cases whatsoever of paddling clubs being or having been 
sued.  I still don't (I feel a need to say this often :-).

Trip hosts/coordinators are hard to come by.  It would be a shame
to discourage someone who is eager to put together a trip.  Even 
with almost no experience under my paddle, the trips I hosted turned 
out to be great fun (great company). We used our heads, did a lot of 
scouting, always had someone more experienced along and learned 
a lot. Some clubs announce non-club sponsored trips in a separate 
section of the club newsletter along with a disclaimer. 

This might seem to contradict all the safety speech, but I don't
think so.  While they can't hold everyone's hands at all times, clubs
can go a long way in offering safety awareness training and 
instruction when beginners come knocking at the door.  As well as
offer a few old-timers (that would like to learn) new technique and 
an opportunity to find more paddling partners.

It would be interesting to read how other clubs view club-sponsored
events as well as handle club member events where the club does not
want to be considered official sponsor for whatever reasons.  

Cheers,

Jackie

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