Whatever Paddles Your Canoe

Hmmm… a solid six months since the last blog and I’ve definitely lost the habit. Then again, I did blog pretty consistently for eleven years, so I think I deserved a sabbatical. (Also everyone should really get a pass for pretty much anything that they were supposed to do but didn’t, or did do but weren’t supposed to for about the last eighteen months, right?) Now, though, I’m properly back in London and life has sort of calmed down again and I feel like I really should get back into it, partly because Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Readers deserve better (all twelve of you), and partly because it’s actually a good mental exercise and it's nice to flex those writing muscles and force myself to get out and do things and pay proper attention to them while I’m doing them.

When last we left out humble blogger it was May and she’d just got out of enforced quarantine at HMP Heathrow. I only had a very short amount of time back on the boat once I was paroled, much of which was taken up by all the life admin stuff that needs doing when I’ve been away for a while, with the added bonus that my phone was hacked AND my wallet stolen in the same two day period, which necessitated a whole lot more life admin and meant I didn’t really do or see much. I did manage a nice day out tromping across soggy fields with Piran, which included my first proper pint in a very very long time, and I got to a few hash runs, and failed to get the boat engine running (of course), and got my first jab, and then I packed my bags again and took another taxi to the airport. Considering how little travel most people have been able to do in the last year and a half, I feel like perhaps I may be overcompensating.

The destination this time was Dubai, once again. I returned to do the Opening Ceremony for the World Expo in Dubai, which was frustrating and time-consuming and not too COVID-y and eventually came off reasonably well. I didn’t have a ton of spare time while I was in Dubai, and even when I did, I didn’t have much motivation to get out and do things. For one thing, I was there from May to October, which is the hottest part of the year. And it really was hot. So hot. Ridiculously hot. AND humid. You probably think it’s dry and desert-like in the UAE right? Well Dubai is on the ocean so the humidity gets very high, which, coupled with the 45+ degree temperatures, and the UAE’s strict policy requiring masks one hundred percent of the time, even when outside, makes the whole business of being outdoors just insanely unpleasant. (Actually you’re allowed to take off the mask if you’re doing vigorous exercise outdoors. Which is good, as we shall see.) Also, I was in Dubai to do a job, and the more time I spent out mingling with the COVID-y random public, the greater the risk. So even when I had time off I often spent it in the comfort of apartment because leaving was just not worth the effort.

I did meet up with the local Dubai hashers when schedules permitted. And I took the metro to the nearby mall occasionally, and I had one boozy Friday brunch. So there really was not much to blog about. That is until I innocently messaged my local hasher friend Caleb about whether there was anything to do over the weekend and he replied "Saturday morning 6am Kite Beach - outrigger canoe paddling.” This is the exchange that followed:

There were going to be pastries! And it’s not like I had anything else to do at 6am on a day off.

And that’s how I ended up hailing a taxi at 5:30 in the morning to get here.

So… outrigger canoes. They exist in lots of ocean-going cultures, but the ones used by the group in Dubai are Hawaiian/Polynesian style. (Outrigger canoeing is actually the state sport of Hawaii.) These six-seat canoes have a deep, narrow, very heavy fibreglass shell and the outrigger to the left. The outrigger is called the ama (“AHH-muh”) and the arms that attach it to the canoe are the iako (“YA-koo”). As with traditional North American canoes, you face forward and use a single paddle (often called a blade) and alternate paddling on either side of the boat. Normally half the occupants paddle on one side and half on the other side of the boat. Each paddler has a different focus, depending on their position in the boat. The front seat - one - is also called the “stroke”. They set the pace of the boat, with those behind them trying to exactly match their stroke rate. Two’s job is to match the rate of the stroke for the paddlers on their side. Three and four are mostly there for power, and Three usually also calls the changes so that everyone switches sides in unison. Seat six, at the back, steers. And five is where they put the newbies.

Of course seat five is where I ended up. I really didn’t know what to expect, except Caleb said it would be vigorous - two hours of hard paddling. He also sent me a YouTube video of a famous outrigger canoeist (who knew there was such thing?) outlining the precise details of the stroke, which all seemed a lot more intense than I’d imagined. My response after seeing the video: "This seems quite technical. How serious is this group? I was kind of relying on my innate Canadian canoe-sense and Girl Guide training to get me by…”

Here’s what the big canoes look like - this one’s rigging was being checked to make sure the ama and iako were securely fastened. Because without the ama, these canoes would be impossibly tippy. (Actually, even WITH the ama they are not the most stable… more on that later.)

It turns out I was right to be concerned. First of all, it was an exceptionally humid day, even by Dubai standards. And the guy at the front setting the pace took off with what seemed like an insanely high stroke rate. I hadn’t exactly been expecting a casual sight-seeing trip, but equally I was not expecting a gang who appeared to be planning to get to Bahrain by lunchtime. Nonetheless, my Girl Guide training did me proud and I sort of managed to keep up, though mostly I was just concentrating on keeping hold of my paddle when changing sides, which happened about every fifteen strokes. 

One of the many things I did not understand about outrigger canoeing is that it’s really an endurance sport. Races tend to last hours, not minutes. This was not Olympic canoe sprinting. This was cross-the-ocean-to-populate-a-new-continent kind of stuff. (One of the most famous races is the Molokaʻi Hoe between the islands of Molaki and Oahu - 41 miles.) And did I mention it was humid? Sooooo humid. And hot. Like the sun was trying to kill us. 

Of course we took breaks. But because it’s an endurance sport, the sessions between breaks tend to be fifteen or twenty minutes long which is approximately eleven lifetimes when it’s your first time in the boat and you can barely manage to hang on to your paddle. On the breaks you drink a lot of water, and if you’re lucky you also get frozen section of oranges which are the most delicious oranges IN THE UNIVERSE. And sometimes on a break you jump out of the canoe so you can cool off in the water. But the joke is on you because BWA HA HA HA the water is as warm as a bath because THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE SUN and then there is another 14 years of paddling and then it’s only five kilometres back to the beach which is ok except one of your arms has literally fallen off and floated away and you’re hallucinating and losing feeling in your legs because your ass is actually three inches wider than the canoe that you’re wedged into.

And then it’s over and you’re lolling in the water at the beach and it’s all kind of ok.

I really can’t overstate how difficult that first paddle was. But after we’d regained consciousness and hauled the canoe back up the beach and rinsed it and swaddled it in its special canvas covers and put away the paddles and laid in a daze in the nearby hut for a while, we really did go for coffee and pastry. And I managed to dump half the beach on the floor in the Costa Coffee disabled toilets while changing into dry clothes, and it all seemed like it might have been kind of fun. So clearly at that point I was still hallucinating.

But the next week I went back anyway, much to the surprise of anyone who’d been there the week before. They’d been certain they’d never see me again because even the experienced paddlers admitted that the previous week had been insanely hot and difficult and not exactly the kind of introduction to the sport that would encourage a return visit. And yet there I was again. And I kept going back whenever my work schedule permitted. And I even bought a giant insulated water bottle to fill up with ice, and a beach towel, and a big droopy caftan to change clothes under, which I think the cleaning staff at the Costa Coffee must have appreciated.

Pam + goofy grin + really beat up hat + guys in the background tying off an ama.

I did get more comfortable and confident in the canoe, and the group was very friendly and welcoming, and it was really nice to be out on the water with a lovely bunch of people doing something physically challenging as a team. I even tried the single seater canoes a couple times, on days when there weren’t enough people to take the six-seater out. Which is when I discovered, as I mentioned earlier, that even WITH an outrigger, these canoes are still quite unstable. 

The term for when the canoe flips over is “huli” (“HOO-lee”), and I’d only been on the single seat canoe for about 90 seconds when I managed to huli for the first time. A slight shift of the weight too far to the right, the outrigger tips slightly too far up out of the water, and everything goes over much faster than you’d expect. It’s even more dramatic when one of the big six-seater canoes goes over. We spent an hour one morning on a Huli Drill, where we deliberately tipped the big canoe so we could all learn what happens and how to recover. It was weirdly fun.

(Tragically, I lost my sunglasses on that first single-seater huli, when they came off my head and went to a watery grave not far from the beach. This was sad, because I got those sunglasses for free when they’d been left in the rental car I had in Winnipeg for Christmas 2019. So they had history, those glasses. Miraculously, the incident was merely another chapter in the history of those sunglasses. Because the next morning I was out with the gang again, this time in the 6-seater (the only time I went two days in a row) and we actually located the sunken treasure where it had landed on the seabed the previous morning! Caleb dove in and retrieved them, and I’m pleased to say I still have those sunglasses, though they now sport a snazzy blue lanyard to keep them on my head. Those sunglasses have a real story to tell, and I don’t want to lose them again!)

Thanks to Caleb for this shot, which shows a whole boat on the water.

Eventually though, work got busy and I had to stop going out to paddle. Because it turns out that you can’t be 52 years old and get up at 4:45am and paddle hard in hot weather for two hours and then go to work until 10pm without literally falling asleep at your desk at some point during the day. Or at least I can’t do that. But once the ceremony was over and the packing was done I found the time for a couple more early-morning runs. On my last outing, there were a lot of very new people and Caleb and I ended up being the two most experienced people in the boat (after our steerer and fearless leader Tina, of course). So Caleb sat stroke, setting the pace from the front and I sat in three calling the changes. Which was kind of a cool way to end things.

My other “last paddle” that week was in a single seater, when Caleb snapped this amazing shot which is totally going in my “Funeral Photos” file, along with the picture of me riding sidesaddle on the back of a scooter in Bali, and the picture of me standing in the water at the very edge of Victoria Falls.

Outrigger Canoes. Who could have predicted that would be the most satisfying and enjoyable part of my four months in Dubai? Luckily, I’m supposed to be heading back there in the New Year to work on the Closing Ceremony, and I’m definitely planning on setting the 4:45am alarm again.