Guest Blogger - William Garvey: The Making of a Proper Paddler
A first-person account of the Skills Building Track at Spring Auxiliary Training (SAT2026)
The U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary Paddlecraft Safety Program (AUXPAD) organizes paddling skills training and instructor certifications for community-based volunteers conducting boating safety outreach in their communities nationwide. This year, the Spring Auxiliary Training event expanded to include 5 different training tracks designed to strengthen skills, leadership, and community outreach in paddler safety for Auxiliarists, active duty and civilian Coasties, state employees and local leaders involved in boating safety education and outreach. William Garvey joined the event as an embedded reporter to offer you this first person experience as a local paddler going through the formal skills training.
Skills for all ages; Future lifesavers all
By William Garvey
My pleasant anticipation began to diminish daily as the date drew closer. Although I’d been paddling, albeit infrequently, since Boy Scout summer camp days, those were many decades ago. So, I was wary registering even as a lowly novice for the Spring AUXPAD Training event (SAT2026) held this past May 4-8.
The voice in my head: “Hey Grandpa, this involves four long, hot days of hard physical effort. Are you ready, really?!”
Fortunately, when our Track A/B team, the “Screamin’ Eagles,” first gathered, I looked around and felt relieved. While most members were generations younger, several had hair as white as mine. Whew.
Turns out, we were a diverse assemblage that included a college professor, an attorney, a USCG chief warrant officer, an editor and more. Most were members of the American Canoe Association (ACA) and the USCG Auxiliary, the organizations co-sponsoring this third annual gathering. There were five Training Tracks in all, and the members of our group ranged from beginners to those becoming advanced instructors. It was a truly national group with folks who hailed from Miami to the St. Lawrence Seaway, from Boston to California and with experience that varied from whitewater vets and sea kayakers to … well … me.
Our eight half-day sessions were led by Bev Cosslett, an ACA Board member; Michelle Stoddard, an Auxiliary national staffer; and Luke Chachula of the James Island County Park staff. All three were highly experienced instructors and effective communicators who demonstrated exceptional paddling, teaching, observation, and evaluation skills and, thankfully, exhibited boundless patience.
Our classroom was a spectacular place to gain or improve outdoor skills: James Island County Park in Charleston, South Carolina. A 643-acre, Spanish moss-draped green wonderland of shaded trails, open fields, campgrounds and cottages, spray playground, climbing walls, marshes and fishing dock, wildlife galore and a wide-open, 16-acre, paddlecraft-friendly lake complete with side creeks to explore. In other words, a flat-water paddling paradise.
The park had hosted SAT2025. Those who attended in 2025 were so pleased with the facility’s venues and structures, equipment, screened-porch cabins and the smiling service and assistance they received from staff, the organizers happily reserved the place again for SAT2026 and for SAT2027.
This year's activities opened with a waterside welcome for the 48 trainees, 15 instructors and additional volunteers. In all, we had 65 attendees from 19 states.
The hosts were Roland McDevitt, a member of the Auxiliary National Staff and Paddlecraft Safety Division Chief; and Scott Szczepaniak, USCG Recreational Boating Program Specialist for the Southeast District.
After introducing some VIPs, McDevitt and Szczepaniak brought the ultimate purpose of the coming week’s activity into focus. They noted that the growing popularity of paddlesports comes with a terrible cost – some 200 people die annually in the doing, with paddlesports being the only segment of recreational boating fatalities that is growing. They noted the causes of these preventable tragedies include alcoholic impairment, lack of a PFD, paddling alone, ignorance of common hazards and other easily preventable factors.
So, they explained, the mission of SAT2026 participants was to gain the skills as paddlers, exemplars and friendly communicators to help others appreciate and learn the right way to pursue the activity. As a result, they continued, “You might save 50 or 100 people in the next five years,” and closed with, “Thank you for being lifesavers.”
There followed barbeque, cold beer and lots of good cheer. The on-water work started 12 hours later.
Every paddle day began the same: Lift each kayak, which varied by make and dimensions, off a trailer and carry it to a launch area next to a well-treed creek. The park supplied the watercraft, paddles and life vests for all who arrived without. Bev, our lead instructor, and Michelle would outline what we’d be doing in the session and invite any questions or concerns. She emphasized that we’d not be following a rigid curriculum but rather working to achieve our personal paddling goals and competencies.
After helping each other launch, we set out in single file to the lake. Our first session was a familiarization float facilitated by tossing a ball to one another by way of introduction. It was fun to learn the occupation, hometown and paddling background of each classmate.
That afternoon there followed a paddlecraft baptism -- capsizing intentionally and then exiting one’s kayak while upside down and fully submerged. I’d been concerned about how I might react in this signature “wet exit” test; I need not have. When my moment came, I leaned heavily to starboard and suddenly I was fully immersed, a bit shocked by the cold, slightly disoriented but seconds later was upright, head above water, my eyes blinking in the bright sunlight. My reaction had been automatic and correct. Unlike what followed.
The focus on any paddler in my circumstances is to reenter your kayak as quickly as possible. Bev had demonstrated the technique of launching your torso onto the aft deck, grabbing onto the far coaming, lifting a leg into the cockpit and then rolling one’s body on board. Some fellow trainees matched that procedure … but not all, including yours truly.
Initially, I tried launching up onto the stern. Wrong. Then I targeted the section aft of the cockpit, but in every attempt my PFD’s fat front proved too much of a barrier. Soon growing tired and cold, I was directed ashore to warm and relax. But my bright orange rashguard provided little protection from the unexpectedly chill afternoon breeze and soon my hands were trembling and teeth chattering.
My Day 1 was done, but was I done and out? I was thinking that maybe a person born when Truman held office was simply too long past prime for such effort.
But the day finally closed with a most welcome, post-paddle gift. A sympathetic Screamin’ Eagle stepped forward and handed me a spare neoprene dive shirt for the remaining sessions. Shivers be gone! And after that, things just kept getting better.
The following days were rich with more useful instruction conveyed on water and land. Among many things, we learned:
To maneuver one’s kayak to stabilize an empty paddlecraft, helping ease an in-water paddler’s re-entry;
Different paddle strokes to move a kayak laterally;
Nautical chart markings for marshes, average low tide, sunken cables and more;
Paddle signals for Stop, Come to Me, and Go There;
The signs of someone suffering from hypothermia and how to respond;
Details of a float plan to be left with a loved one;
How to safely secure and tow a kayak;
To conduct low-brace, sweep, draw and power strokes and why;
Move forward, turn and stop quickly;
Working through a GAR (green, amber, red) for a team and trip you’re preparing to lead;
Why ABC – anything but cotton;
The person whose safety is most important on every outing: You!
The list of skills and knowledge acquired could rightly go on and on since those sessions were so instructive. However, it would be remiss to fail to acknowledge SAT2026’s social and environmental treats.
Here were total strangers so committed to that same special interest that they traveled hundreds, even thousands, of miles and sacrificed personal days to get tired, wet and often frustrated in pursuit of new on-water skills and knowledge. I was delighted to make their acquaintance. In the doing, I was fascinated to learn the Coast Guard underwrote the cost of the CWO’s college degree; the lawyer had once served as an air traffic controller in Greenland; that Michelle, an accountant, has among her ancestors the Marquis de Lafayette and Mary Todd Lincoln; and Bev had been a software engineer living 15 minutes from where I resided. We still live close, but now in suburban Charleston.
And it’s our Low Country in-the-wild neighbors that predictably drew the rapt attention of SAT2026’s out-of-towners. They were delightedly surprised to see mullet leaping near, over and occasionally onto kayaks with a resounding “thump”. Or watching, mesmerized, as eagles, egrets, wood storks, osprey, herons and hawks wheeled overhead. Throughout, large turtles maintained close watch from shoreline grasses, and sharing that role were the park’s true celebrities, its ‘gators, who kept a good distance from all those splashing paddles and hard-hulled craft.
While the many communal capsizings and recoveries conducted throughout the week were simulations, there was one memorable exception. We Screamin’ Eagles were transiting a narrow creek thick with overhanging branches when a muffled voice and splash sounded at the rear of the group followed immediately by a shouted, “Man overboard!”
Turning to look, the rush of activity confirmed that this was the real thing; an overturned kayak whose former occupant was in the water and others were moving in to help. Because the channel was shallow and the shore mere feet away, the save consensus was for the paddler to access terra firma and climb back into his uprighted craft. And so it came to pass. Though we’d not trained for that, a save is a save regardless. Turned out the capsize occurred when the paddler leaned sideways – too far, obviously – to avoid getting snagged in a low branch. And so, three more lessons: keep clear of obstacles, don’t lean excessively, and use common sense, were learned by all.
Notably, that same day, following a complicated self-rescue demonstration, a trainee plopped into the lake to mimic the procedure. He took the paddle, slipped the sleeve of a yellow paddle float over the blade, and blew air into its mouthpiece, inflating it. Next, he cinched the line around the opposite handle, let the free line drift under the hull and into his grasp. Placing the paddle across the craft aft of the cockpit with the paddle float well over the water, he looped the line tightly around the near handle, but leaving U-shaped portion to dangle in the water. Then he put one foot in the loop using it as a stirrup, stepped down while reaching up and over and grabbing the far coaming. The paddle float acted as an outrigger, holding the kayak upright as the paddler pushed and pulled until his body was completely out of the water and onto the craft.
The process was clumsy and ugly and needed lots of refinement. But the save worked. Tired and smiling, this Grandpa had done it, hushing the inner voice of self-doubt. That quiet became golden when Bev later suggested I should consider joining her local paddling club.
Along with my fellow Screamin’ Eagles, I found this year’s event both challenging and richly rewarding. So, it will be fun to see how SAT2027, set for April 27- May 1, 2027, tops it, though that’s now part of this wet and wonderful gathering’s tradition.
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