Beyond the Bunny Hill in a Boat

With skiing, it is the first time you are able to head up the lift with your kid. You know full well it likely may take an hour to get down to the bottom, and may even include some crying halfway down, but going up the lift, you are finally skiing with your kid. You no longer are on the magic carpet at the base. You are going skiing with your kid.

Our boys, Wyatt and Jessie, are seven and nine. Both started skiing around age three. By four they were going up the lift. Now, we just try to keep enough calories in them so they don't get grumpy, and try to keep up. Admittedly, especially with Jesse, we cannot keep up. He patiently waits on us...typically after landing a jump, to make sure we saw it.

In skiing, we clearly have turned the corner. The boys want to ski. Last spring, when Gina asked Jesse if he wanted to do spring soccer, he asked, "Will I miss skiing?"

Gina told him he likely would miss a weekend or two at the end of ski season. Without even pausing, Jesse responded, "Nope, I want to ski."

Turning the Corner in Kayaking

This past summer we took the boys down to Wet Planet right at Husum on the White Salmon River to a kayaking day camp for kids. Our niece and nephew visited and joined us for the week. Since Wyatt was too young for the camp, I took the week off work, and after dropping off Jesse and his cousins at kayak camp every day, took Wyatt for daddy kayak camp.

Every day was spent on different sections of the Klickitat, a great river for beginners. It does not have long pools to slog through, but there is only one II+ rapid toward the bottom. Mostly it is varying degrees of moving water with ample opportunity to practice beginner skills.

Thursday was the last day of the camp, so on Friday we all went to the Klickitat to go kayaking. This really was the first time we were able to all go kayaking in real hardshell kayaks together. Before this, I have been taking the boys out every Tuesday night after work on a short section of the Deschutes here in Olympia. It is little more than moving water. There is one wave, barely even enough to get the bow wet, but it is enough to work on basic skills.

This day on the Klickitat, at the end of the day it occurred to me. This day was exactly the same as taking the kids up the lift for the first time. No longer were we constrained to the bunny hill. Now, we are really going kayaking.

Learning Turning

In the following weeks, until the end of daylight savings time a few weeks ago, we continued our Tuesday night kayaking sessions. The boys look forward to it. They ask me on Tuesday morning if we are going, and if it is a wetsuit or drysuit day. When I get home from work, they are almost always dressed and ready to go.

Their skills have been progressing really well, so I asked them if they wanted to go to the slalom course on the Cedar River just outside of Maple Valley near Seattle. The answer was an emphatic, "YES!"

I seriously trained, raced and coached slalom for roughly a decade. Admittedly, my training was all in C1, and now I am trying to master this strange kayaking thing with significantly less fitness. Still, I really enjoy playing in gates.

We met up with a couple of other regular recreational slalom paddlers here in the Seattle area. Although the water was low, the boys were doing really well progressively working their way down the course, and waiting while we played around in three to four gate short course sequences.

We were able to convince Jesse to make a few ferries back and forth. Wyatt tried it a couple of times, but mostly just wanted to sit in his boat in the eddy and watch.

At the bottom of the course there is still plenty of current, and also plenty of gates. While we were sitting in the eddy for a moment, with no prompting from us, Wyatt started trying his own course he had figured out.

We watched, and, for the fun of it, we tried his course. Wyatt watched us, and once we had all done the course, without saying anything, he did another one. We did it as well. This continued for over a half hour until the boys were tired and starting to get cold.

Reflecting on this past paddling season, I am amazed. The boys really are figuring out paddling, even the multiple sub-disciplines such as rafting, river running and slalom. Having grown up paddling myself, and throughly enjoying so many of these sub-disciplines, it is really fun to see our boys starting to become interested in, and engage in these different aspects of the sport.

We aren't on the bunny hill anymore.