Hanko is a small town on the Southern coast of Finland, 130 kilometers east of Helsinki in the Finnish Archipelago. Since 2008, 70 volunteers of the Nordic Sea Kayak Instructors Association have organized an annual get together for 250 kayakers. Over the course of two and a half days, more than a hundred training sessions are conducted on the beach just outside the town.
I arrived by train from Karjaa, which is easy to reach from Helsinki in under an hour. Because I am not an internationally renowned kayak instructor, nobody was waiting for me to drive me to the event. I walked. I got there early, before registration started at 4PM. The info desk had already been set up, and I was quickly shown around. I set up my tent in the forest like everybody else at the required minimum distance of four metres from other tents, but not much further, as requested, so that all participants would be able to find a spot. Next to my tent was a fire extinguisher and a large tub of water, which, as I was soon to discover, was not an additional requirement of the Finnish fire code, but a paddling-boot washing station.
There was a little Thai food cart that served dinner for those paddlers who had not brought camp stoves, like me. The first course started at 7 PM. I had signed up online for two courses and had an option for another one. I had selected them using the only meaningful criterion; they would be in English. There were two instructors from Britain, Jeff Allen and Simon Osbourne from Sea Kayaking Cornwall. Courses had titles like Aallokkomelonta, Edistyneemmät melontatekniikat, which made me think of the names of all those Greenland rolls I cannot do, but that otherwise provided little practical information. All I knew was that “melonta” meant something like paddling. It took me a while to figure out that the courses were offered at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. It turned out that I, an I intermediate paddler at best, had signed up for a beginner course (Duh) and an advanced course that required a helmet (OMG!). The organizers had set up a big board with all the courses listed, the names of the participants that had preregistered printed and open spaces for people to add their name if there still was space available. People who changed their mind about which class to take would scratch out their name on one sign-up sheet and then add it to another. People who wanted to take the spot that became available would then add their name next to the one that had been scratched out. When the course were about to start, the organizers would remove the sign-up sheets from the board and bring them to the beach, and leave them in a box for the instructors. This worked remarkably well, and insured that registration was open and flexible until the last minute. The maximum number of participants was 8. All courses ran simultaneously for 1 1/2 hours. New courses were announced all the time, and I quickly signed up for Body, Boat, Blade with Simon.
I had arranged to rent a boat from Paddlingsfabriken, a kayak builder in Ekenäs, 40 kilometers from Hanko. It was a wood strip kayak, surprisingly light, which unfortunately did not fit me very well. I almost sank the boat and struggled to keep the spray deck on, taking on so much water that it destabilized the boat so much that I went for a swim. What a impressive start! Fortunately, even though the course was geared to beginners, the participants knew their T-rescues and I was back in my boat in no time. Simon adapted his beginner level course to the expressed needs and expectations of his not-so beginner students. He gave some of the nicest demonstrations of kayak skills I’ve seen, and explained his topics with impressive clarity and simplicity, always explaining why things worked the way they do, and in keeping with the title of the course, covering three aspects of each skill he taught; what we do with our body, how we use the paddle and how the boat responds. At the debrief, he asked us to summarize what we had learned. Two of the students said they were teachers, and mentioned how impressed they were with his pedagogical skills. Finnish teachers are supposedly some of the best in the world, so that must have been a nice compliment. I was cold and a little disheartened by my capsize, so sought some warmth and comfort in my sleeping bag. A large group of people went for a night paddle and didn’t return until midnight. It does get dark in Finland eventually, and they were all outfitted with glow sticks.
The next morning I switched boats and started at 9 AM with Boat Handling Techniques. The class decide to work on skills like the hanging draw.
At 1:30 I took the Advanced Sea Paddling Techniques with Jeff Allen. It turned out I would be fine without a helmet, we weren’t going rock gardening or landing in surf, but instead looked at techniques for paddling in high winds. Having learned my lesson about using custom-built boats, I had arranged to borrow a Tiderace Vortex from the kind people at Welhonpesa Oy. The boat fit like a glove and made me feel like I knew what I was doing again. The sales person had suggested it as a “nice, stable beginner boat”. Tiderace advertises it as “a performance playboat for you and a stable, well-mannered sea kayak you can put your friends in”. And that is exactly what it is.
Jeff’s class was primarily about using the wind to our advantage when turning. That turned something that I used to think of as a bit scary and requiring a lot of effort into something that felt stable and almost effortless.
Later in the afternoon we made an attempt to break the world record for most paddlers simultaneously performing greenland rolls. Each paddler is given two minutes to perform five rolls, and then raises their paddle when successful. The judges take a photo and count the number of raised paddles. We match the current record, 81, but did not break it. One greenland rolling instructor who had decided not to participate in the attempt had a lot of explaining to do.
At night, there was a huge dinner party and a band. Finns, in my experience, like to party until about 4 AM, and Sunday started with two land sessions and an instructor who needed one more coffee than usual. The first was about Risk Management. We discussed a model that was more focused on people than on some of the risk management models I have been taught in Canada I have found to be more focused on the potentially endless list of things that can go wrong. Jeff talked about how we as instructors or guides should work from within our Comfort Zone, how learning occurs in the Stretch Zone, and what happens when we leave the Stretch Zone and enter the Terror Zone.
For many people, Sunday’s program consisted of a 3 1/2 hr Euro Paddle Pass exam, which seems to be an effort to come up with something that is going to bring everybody together and make skills assessment a bit more transparent and transferable. The rating system seems to corresponds to the one that the BCU uses. Member countries are Finland, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Slovenia, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Norway seems to be an observer. There appear to be four different educational systems in place in Finland: BCU, NIL, Finland Canoeing Instructors Association and Finnish Canoeing and Rowing Federation.
I talked to Kai Lindqvist of the Finnish Canoeing and Rowing Federation which acts as the umbrella organization for rowing/canoeing/kayaking clubs in Finland.
Most kayakers in Finland are members of a kayak club. The membership costs are modest, about €100/yr, and the clubs have very nice glass boats available for their members. The clubs seems to have a good number of younger members. The boats I’ve seen are mostly brit-style, Valley Nordkapps, SKUK Romanys, Tiderace Xcape, etc. I had expected to see more boats that are manufactured in Estonia, like the Tahe. Boats by Swedish manufacturer Point 65 and Norwegian Seabird Designs were equally underrepresented. Brands I wasn’t familiar with were Lettmann (German) an SKIM, a Finnish manufacturer.
The second class, also by Jeff was about towing. Jeff has designed his own towing system, a very flexible system that looks like a modified throw bag. He showed us how to set up a tow system for getting an injured or unconscious paddler through surf. We all left hoping we will never have to do it for real, but inspired to try out some of the components of this complex setup in other, less intimidating tows.
My last class, with Simon, on Sunday afternoon was about strokes, the high and low brace and their uses as support and recovery strokes respectively. For this class I had rented another boat, the SKUK Explorer from Jukka, the owner of Sea Kayaking Finland. I’ve noticed the low brace get dismissed as not very useful in a course I took in Ontario once. This class gave me a fresh look at a sometimes overlooked and under-appreciated stroke. I used to immediately go to the high brace. Wrong! You can transition very easily from a low to a high brace, but the other way around is much more difficult. Simon made us listen for just the right sound that the paddle makes when we punch down for support and had us experiment with blade angles. I had been thinking about listening to the sound the blade makes in a forward stroke, but had never thought to apply that to other strokes as well.
I often find the last moments of such events a bit odd, as people start to leave and the event peters out without any real close. Here we took the group photo as our last “event”. I returned the packed up my gear, put on my hiking shoes and walked back to the train station. 
Kiitos! Tack! Thanks!