Sarah wrote; > 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... Despite more laws and rules than anyone can ever read people still break them or ignore them. Like locks that keep the honest people honest, club rules (I believe) keep the conscientious people conscientious and form a statement of the club's principles. Do they change behaviour? What I have always feared about a club passing judgement on a person's ability is that it implies that the club knows something about the topic (we have heard this stated elsewhere) and, more importantly, are willing to take responsibility. Unfortunately the one skill that is most important - good judgement - is not easily measured or evaluated. I would guess that most of us have encountered so called experts that were too stupid to pour piss out of a boot with directions on the heel. Their certificates actually make them more dangerous because people tend grant them more credibility than they deserve. Peer pressure in a club seems to be effective. The word gets out on paddler X and people shun them. In the WCA (although no one will formally admit it) there is a kind of black list of people you don't want on your trips and the underground network does a pretty good job of spreading the word on the high risk paddlers. Cheers, John Winters Redwing Designs Specialists in Human Powered Watercraft http://home.ican.net/~735769/ *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Mar 06 1998 - 05:28:24 PST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:29:54 PDT