Saturday, December 15, 2007

kayak course (1-star)

woke up damn early, around 6.30am. Then chugged on 960 to Bugis, then transferred a station down to Lavender.

fast forward to the actual introduction; the friendly instructor Mary attempted some ice breakers. Many participants are secondary schoolers, followed by a small portion of college students, finally 5 university students from the big 3. Then she went on to brief us on the types, parts of a kayak and paddle plus safety considerations.

didn't know there are so many considerations in handling the kayak - lifting and carrying it, embarking and disembarking. Our first task? swim 50m! Luckily with our lifevests, cos i haven't stepped into a swimming pool since BMT. With the lifevest it wasn't a big problem =x

today was the basic techniques (from the booklet) - forward/reverse paddling, stopping, rotating 360 degrees, moving sideways and capsizing! The capsize drill meant we had to purposely flip the kayak over, then come out from it underwater together with some funny action - knocking on the hull 3 times before coming out, after coming up lifting up the paddle and shouting help, then swim back with the capsized kayak in tow. Sam did a demo for us, however some had a bad scare when he dislocated his shoulder during the demo... lol.

tomorrow will be to test us further on the capsizing, however further out sea. And we have to try the TX rescue technique. It's fun! But my arms and legs are aching.... really painful. And the kayak itself is HARD to manoeuvre; found myself spinning in the water so many times.

It rained so heavily towards the last hour. argh..

Nice number - SBS 8888.

1 comment:

Gerard said...

I'm Gerard. I just got my 1 star course cert. We can kayak together.