Outfit3029_at_aol.com wrote: > > I would suspect that it would have to do with gov't funding and > standardization. The American Red Cross was the primary source for canoe and > kayak education (read funding recipient). Resources for the larger part have > been shifted to the ACA. If I am not mistaken. I believe that the Red Cross got totally out of the certification of canoeing back about 10 years ago. Certification is always an interesting subject that I tend to stay away from. It invariably leads to battles over who or what agency has the authority to certify and whether there should be any certification at all. Back in the late 1980s there were major battles over the issue of certification when the ACA first started moving toward an established curriculum and certification of paddlers and instructors. There were at least 5 camps that I counted. Although I know it seems pretty impossible to have 5 vehement positions on an issue there were with people attacking each other verbally or not speaking to each other. The camps were led by many of the household names of sea kayaking at the time, some of whom are still around. Certification can lead to abuses. One of the reasons that the BCU was able to establish such a strong beachhead in the States in the last half dozen years was because one ACA certifier ran a touring/instruction business and reportedly was ready to flunk his competitors. In one case he did. In another case, the competitor did not want to subject himself to such abuse and skipped the ACA route and instead embraced the BCU big time. But even before that the ACA itself had an internal battle. The person heading up the Sea Kayaking subcommittee constantly clashed with the person who headed up instruction, the latter feeling that there was no difference between whitewater and sea kayaking. The SK guy got caught in an embarrassing position and resigned in a huff. So SK instruction went to the Instruction guy who made a botch of it. SK instruction eventually came out from under him and got its act together. But then the abuses mentioned above set in in one geographic region. The problem with certification, be it by the BCU or ACA or anyone else, is that there are plenty of competent paddlers who just don't want to go through any of it but who can still paddle decently, self-rescue, and avoid getting themselves into predicaments in the first place, which is really what should be the bottom line in instruction. There is always the danger that a certifying body can get to a point that it does dominate. And its domination turns into a tyranny. It can get to the point that liveries will only rent to certified paddlers; group trips limited only to the certified; etc. What was behind the battles over certification a dozen years ago was precisely the point in the previous paragraph. Certification certainly has its value in setting up a curriculum and benchmarks against which an interested paddler can measure him/herself. By its nature, at least in the BCU certification, it lends itself to growth and reaching higher star levels. All of this is fine for the achievement minded kayaker. What I miss though is something that would help the masses of kayakers who are not oriented in that direction and that would help them learn a modicum of skills and savvy to keep them out of trouble. The real world of trouble in kayaking is in the masses of kayakers getting into recreational kayaks and entry level sit-on-tops. It would be great to see something real simple for them. Unless I am mistaken, someone showing up with an SOT or Keowee would perplex a BCU instructor. Or in a double folding kayak. There is really nothing aimed at them. ralph diaz -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph Diaz . . . Folding Kayaker newsletter PO Box 0754, New York, NY 10024 Tel: 212-724-5069; E-mail: rdiaz_at_ix.netcom.com "Where's your sea kayak?"----"It's in the bag." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced/forwarded outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Sep 07 2000 - 04:18:09 PDT
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