This year, we’re co-sponsoring the fourth annual Gales Storm Gathering, a rough-water symposium designed for intermediate and advanced paddlers. It’s a terrific event, featuring top midwest coaches and a guest coach from afar (this year, Jeff Allen from Sea Kayaking Cornwall) — an opportunity to take all the skills and confidence you’ve worked on all season and put them to use in more challenging water.  Far too many women are intimidated by this prospect. So this year we’re offering something new: Rough & Ready, a pre-Gales track at the annual Ladies of the Lake symposium August 15-17. Both events will be in Munising, MI this year. If your paddling aspirations include paddling in rough water, surfing waves, rock gardening and pushing your paddling skills to the next level, Rough and Ready will help you get there. It’s designed to increase your confidence and skills in bumpy conditions. Like all LOL courses, we’ll fine-tune the course based on where you are and where you want to go, but we promise to take you to the next level.  The goal of Rough and Ready is to prepare you, physically and psychologically, to attend The Gales Oct 3-5. As an added encouragement, ladies who participate in Rough and Ready will get a $75 discount on their Gales registration, space permitting. This track is limited to eight participants, so get your LOL registrations in soon and let us know if you plan to be in this track. Those who sign up will get additional information prior to...

   OK, the title of this post is a little misleading. We just wanted to see how it would affect our analytics. But this is a post about sex — the female sex — and the issue of all-women’s classes and symposia. Ladies of the Lake, the spirited midwestern all-women’s symposium, begins shortly.    Over the years, Sharon and Hannah have taught a number of classes that are specifically billed as women-only. We’ve written about this before in greater depth, but in our experience, women-only classes offer opportunities to address: woman-specific paddling issues, such as having less upper-body strength and more upper-body bulk than most male paddlers (not to mention how to pee while on the water); woman-specific insecurities, such as dealing with a male paddling partner who is faster/stronger/bossier or has a different set of expectations for a day on the water;  woman-specific strengths, including our ability to encourage one another while we overcome our fears and learn new skills.    Some symposia have a women’s track or some women-only classes. But the upcoming Ladies of the Lake (now in its seventh year), sponsored by Downwind Sports, is a women-only symposium.    Just because this is a women’s symposium doesn’t mean it isn’t every bit as exciting and challenging as a mixed-gender symposium. We work on strokes, rolling, braces, navigation and incident-management, and if the surf’s up, we go out and catch the waves. And just because it’s a women’s symposium doesn’t mean we think we can only have this kind of fun with women. In fact, many of us instructors love paddling with men, learning from men, teaching men and even competing with men. We’re sure the same is true of many of our students.   But there is something very powerful about gender camaraderie, especially for a gender that has historically been discouraged from pursuing physically challenging activities. And if registration numbers for this year’s Ladies of the Lake symposium are any indication, the appeal of women-specific kayak classes is still...

Ladies of the Lake is a unique symposium. Put on by Downwind Sports and sponsored by Impex and Werner Paddles, this all-female kayaking event features one day of local paddle tours, two days of instruction, a featured guest instructor, and a themed costume party complete with a raffle of gear generously donated by its host and sponsors. Grand Rapids-based instructor Lori Stegmier teaching a class on edging and bracing. Numerous other symposiums offer women’s classes, but this is the only one we know of that is women-only. (It does, however, offer a “Man Camp” for partners and spouses, taught this year by Kelly Blades and Danny Mongno.)There is something special about women-only classes. They tend to attract women who learn best in a supportive, all-female environment. Some are refugees from bad paddling relationships with men who have too much machismo. Some are looking for ways to improve their paddling that take into consideration female anatomy. Some are intimidated by men in mixed-gender classes. Some simply appreciate the camaraderie of gender-specific classes.A women-only symposium offers a weekend of immersion in these benefits. Participants get to watch each other and help each other improve over time. They aren’t embarrassed about how they look as they attempt to scramble back into their boats. They don’t apologize for their lack of upper-body strength. They eagerly adopt strategies that emphasize technique over muscles. In a rescue class, we teach the rescuer to wrap her body over the deck of boat. Strong men might get away with stabilizing the boat using only their arm strength, but that doesn’t tend to work for many women. The midwest is fortunate to have a remarkable group of female instructors who are dedicated to making the sport accessible to women of all ages and abilities. That’s the spirit of Ladies of the Lake. Chicago-based instructor Wendy Madgwick stands up for female kayakers...

Sharon with Lyn on a Chicago beach. Every community has its unsung heroes—people who make a difference without fanfare. The kayaking world is full of such people. Often they’re instructors who patiently teach a wide range of students, making them better and safer paddlers. In the coming months, we plan to profile some of these people, with a focus on ones in the midwest. Lyn helps a novice paddler get settled in his boat at the Great Lakes Sea Kayak Symposium. Lyn Stone is our first victim in this endeavor. Sharon first met Lyn in 2006 at Ladies of the Lake, a kayaking symposium in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. (It moves around. This year, it will be held on Drummond Island from August 21 to 24. Get the details at Down Wind Sports.) The meeting was classic Lyn (and Sharon, for that matter). Sharon showed up for a BCU three-star training without her spray skirt, which was hanging back in the campsite several miles from the put-in. Lyn, true to form, had a spare and offered it to Sharon.We later learned that Lyn has a spare or a repair for practically every essential piece of gear. She’s has a remarkable depth of knowledge about kayaking, but she shares it selectively, not boastfully, when it’s requested or needed. And she’s bicultural, in the paddling sense of that term; she prefers a Greenland stick but teaches mainly with a Euro paddle.Alec first met Lyn at a Geneva Kayak Center staff training the following year, where he was impressed by her down-to-Earth attitude. But best of all, she’s always willing to help out, whether a friend needs new deck rigging or a student needs coaching.Lyn is part of our instructor cohort. She and Sharon were certified together by Sam Crowley in September, and the three of us have trained and taught together since then. We rely on one another as we refine our ideas, reflect on our experiences, and grow as paddlers and instructors.After we returned from Michigan’s east coast, we spent one day paddling our home waters with Lyn. We put in at the 59th Street harbor and paddled past the fishermen and docked motorboats and out onto the lake. We retrieved balls and balloons that children had lost while playing at the 63rd street beach, and took at detour into the 57th Street harbor to visit Maynard Welch, the retired harbormaster who continues to best represent the spirit of that lovely harbor. (For a profile of Maynard, check out the Nov. 22, 2005 issue of the Chicago Tribune.) Then we paddled down past The Point, where we held our engagement party 20 years ago. The water was a little bumpy, with...