Re: [Paddlewise] AKT Skills Symposium

I'll second Mark's rave review of the Atlantic Tours Kayak Skills Symposium.
This was the first and only Symposium I've attended in which the entire
focus of the event was refining and developing kayaking skills. There was
**no** commercialization, no effort to sell anything at all, except kayaking
skill and safety.

Like Mark, I attended the two-day Coaching Process workshop before the
Symposium. It was an intensive affair, with perhaps six hours of lecture
material and four hours of on-water coaching practice and demonstrations of
coaching techniques on *each* of the two days. The emphasis was on how one
learns, in general, and how one might best teach, in general. The material
could apply as well to teaching piano or martial arts as it could to
kayaking. It was - quite simply - wonderful. If anyone who is truly
interested in kayaking has an opportunity to take this course, don't pass it
up. You don't have to be a coach to benefit immensely from it.

As for the three-day Symposium itself, there was just too much excellent
material to include in an e-mail, or in several e-mails. Mike Devlin,
director of coaching for the BCU, gave several excellent talks. Bill Taylor,
Mike's second in command, gave several others. (Bill and Mike were also the
presenters for the Coaching Process course prior to the Symposium.) There
were four other level 5 coaches from Wales, in addition to the staff of
Atlantic Kayak Tours. Nigel Dennis gave a superb slide talk on his trip to
Antarctica. Chris Duff gave his talk on the trip around the south island of
New Zealand. Doug VanDoren gave a three-part mini-course on traditional
paddling techniques. Nigel Dennis gave a masterful 90 minute talk on the
bare essentials of kayak navigation, and then he and the AKT staff helped us
through an interesting on-water navigation excercise.

The paragraphs above don't begin to convey the excellence of these days.
Even after one good night's post-Symposium sleep I'm apparently too fatigued
to write coherently - but I'm very grateful that I had the chance to be part
of this event. My one disappointment is that, because of a shoulder
subluxation I suffered a couple of weeks before the Symposium, I had to
cancel out of the post-Symposium 5 Star training I'd hoped to take. So - as
I write many of the men and women I met this past week are out on the
eastern tip of Long Island (New York) waiting for the training to begin
tonight, directed by Bill Taylor, Mike Devlin, Chris Duff, Bill Lozano, and
other American and Welsh Coach 5's. When will there be as good a training as
that one?
Because attendance at the Symposium was limited to 80 participants, each
"course" was manageably small, including a senior coach and an assistant
coach, and 6 to 8 students. Even thos participants who had kayaked for years
at a reasonably high level of skill were exposed to dozens of helpful and
innovative tips and a great deal of new knowledge.

It was a privilege to be present with a group of "students" some of whom
were relative newcomers to the sport with not-quite-3 Star skills, and
others who are BCU 4 and 5 level paddlers, some who are "just" very
part-time kayaking coaches and others who are experienced coaches with years
of full-time experience - all students!


Bill Hansen
Ithaca NY

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