It's a funny thing - I've been paddling since I was about 12 years old (which, god help me, makes that 32 years so far) - and one thing seems to be an almost universal constant - paddlers are nice people!
As you know I am spending a year away from my beloved home of Kangaroo Island, enduring 12 months of anaesthetic upskilling in Orange, NSW. Whilst a necessary evil for me to gather the skills I need in anaesthesia to ensure the safety of my small island community for the next 20 yrs or so until my retirement, it means time away from my beloved partner and time away from the ocean. Neither of these is a good thing.
There's some small respite this weekend - I am down in Sydney for a rural doctors/anaesthetic conference. I travelled down early today and thought I'd indulge with a visit to one of the kayak stores, as it's a rarity for me to see any other paddlers or indeed kayaking kit when back on KI.
And as I got closer to the shop, I spied two very slick looking 'Hybrid' kayaks on the roof rack of a parked car - then the smiling, lithe Andre Janecki doing some business.
So we got talking, and within 30 seconds was invited for a paddle, a BBQ and offered a bed for the night. Sadly have had to decline as I am staying close to the City and the concept of bringing a kayak down was alien to the hotel where I am booked (bugger, bugger as it's shaping up to be a beautiful weekend and I'm yearning to get wet - Orange is a 'mere' 4 hrs drive form the coast and my waistline is ever-increasing as I can't get out in my beloved Nordkapp).
This is in stark behaviour to the storeowners, who barely said hello and were clearly more interested in taking my money than any sort of relationship. I get it, selling kayaks is a business, but I do miss the 'old days' when even commercial stores made a connection with their clientele.
But I digress.
The point I am trying to make is that such behaviour (thanks Andre) is almost the norm amongst fellow paddlers. And that is a splendid thing which should be acknowledged.
Encountering Andre made me think of a William Nealy cartoon (anyone else remember the wonderful cartoons from 'Whitewater Tales of Terror' and 'Kayaks to Hell'?) in which two kayakers pass each other on the freeway - and both pullover, stop and run across to embrace each other as 'brothers'.
It's true that nowadays we are more likely to drive past other paddlers with barely an acknowledgment, but this is in part because there are so many sit-on-tops, tupperware barges and all manner of 'paddlers' out there that sorting the aesthetes from the masses can be difficult.
But overall, I think we're a friendly bunch and aside from the sheer pleasure of "messing about in boats" and the chance to interact with nature, such comradeship is just one more reason to love kayaking.
Apart from devising roadkill recipes, one of my hobbies is inventing 'collective nouns' - everyone's heard of a parliament of owls, a murder of crows....for my medical colleagues I've herd of gems such as 'a knot of surgeons', 'a body of pathologists' and even 'a snatch of gynaecologists'!
But what is the collective nouns for sea-kayakers? A dunk? An endurance? A sogginess? Suggestions are invited...
Anyhow, with comradeship and collectivism in mind, I invite fellow paddlers to drop in and say 'G'day' if you're visiting Kangaroo Island - there are some great places to paddle and once I get back in Jan 2012 the ki-yak website should be refurbished with paddle reports and local maps to some of the better paddling locations etc.
And Andre, I'll catch up next time I'm down in Sydney. Now, if only there was somewhere to 'park' a kayak for visiting paddlers...
