Nigel Dennis in the BCU’s spiritual home,
Anglesey, Wales. PHOTO: JONATHAN WALPOLE
Dave Ide on a 5-Star beach, Lake Superior. PHOTO: BRUCE LASH
d
espite its iconic status, the BCU wasn’t the first national governing body of paddle-
sports. The American Canoe Asso- ciation (ACA) started up in 1880, long before 1936 Olympic hopefuls created a union of English paddlers. But sea kayaking was barely known in North America when the sport’s highest stan- dards were set by BCU grandfathers and whitewater paddlers Hutchinson, Tom Caskey, Sam Cook, and John Ramwell in the 1960s. BCU programs are divided into
training and assessment stages. Since the beginning, the goal of the BCU’s top sea kayaking award has been to train and assess expedi- tion paddlers for their ability to lead groups in advanced sea conditions. In North America meanwhile, where
sea kayaking blossomed without for- mal instruction, the ACA’s only sea kayaking offering by the 1980s was a course that corresponded with the bottom rung of the BCU’s five-step ladder, says Dave Ide, who began paddling in Traverse City, Michigan, in 1983. “All the ACA had were be- ginner-level courses. The British were doing things like kayaking around Cape Horn and Nigel [Dennis] had kayaked around all of the British Isles.
Like a navy admi ral or a high-class hotel , many of the wor ld’s top paddlers can be ident i f ied by thei r 5 stars.
They were very into the adventure as- pect and the rougher ocean, and had an instruction program to back it up.” The British invasion began when
Czech ex-pat and former whitewater slalom world champion Stan Chladek began importing British-built sea kay- aks to his Detroit paddling shop in the late 1970s and BCU instructors to his Great Lakes Sea Kayak Symposium in the mid-1980s. Ide says that Brit- ons Hutchinson, Goodman and How- ard Jeffs were recruited by Chladek to oversee the ACA program. But it quickly became obvious that the Brit- ish system of instruction was more refined, and BCU North America be- came its own entity. Ide, a long-time AT&T telephone employee who still lives on the shore of Lake Michigan, admits to having an addictive personality. As quickly as he became hooked on sea kayaking, he also became one of North America’s highest-ranking paddlers. He surfed his 18-foot Nordkapp with Goodman, Dennis and Lash at Chladek’s Gales of November rendezvous on Lake Superior’s Canadian shore, explored Vancouver Island’s gale-battered
Brooks Peninsula and paddled the violent tide races of the British Isles. He achieved his first BCU instructor award in 1990. After taking Advanced Proficiency
Sea (now 5-Star Sea) training on Lake Michigan, Ide joined the 5-Star frater- nity in 1993 when he led a group of paddlers, including assessor Den- nis, in fog and five-metre seas on the boomer-ridden coast of Maine. “I was the only one with a chart and to get back to shore we had to follow a particular path around a bunch of is- lands,” says Ide. “When we made it in safely, Nigel said he’d be happy to sign my endorsement.” The Advanced Proficiency cur-
riculum was about “stretching the boundaries of your skill level,” says Ide. Still, it was doable. Ide says that then—as is still the case with the 5- Star today—candidates were told the skills and knowledge they were expected to demonstrate well before being assessed. “Some of the skills sounded in- timidating—like throwing away your paddle and rolling up with a spare in breaking waves,” he says. “But
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