The Need for Workshops 

Whilst having conducted workshops and lectures in the United Kingdom, Fiji, Hong Kong and Australia, there seems an urgent need to address the need to focus on renewed energies here in Australia, where the sport seems to be finely balanced between decline or at best a plateau of its development. 

 

I can think of few other sports which seem so profoundly confused about the technical merits of the 'how to' aspects of its existence. I make no claim to be an 'expert per se' but I can claim to have made a study of the sport and travelled to most every significant region on the planet where the sport is practised and have been fortunate enough to compete and be successful in competition. Paddlers whom I consider friends, some of which I paddle with or converse regularly are amongst some of the finest exponents.

 

It seems incongruous that many paddlers who give advice freely, allude to being experts and have rarely travelled much beyond the immediate sphere in which they live; meanwhile those with genuine knowledge, wisdom, insight and ability, humble in victory and defeat, refrain from becoming involved in squabblings over the how-to's preferring simply to get on with their paddling lifestyles, yet what they have to share is vital to the expansion of the sport.

 

At a recent clinic, facilitated by 'Woogie' Marsh and myself, a coach criticize his paddlers for attending, labelling it as waste of money on account of the fact '...there was nothing they were going to learn, that they did not already know.' which only reinforces the expression, 'You don't know, what you don't know.'

 

 

Currently a series of clinics are being conducted in Queensland, initiated by the South East Queensland Zone of the Australian Outrigger Canoe Racing Association. Facilitators include; Travis Grant and Chris Maynard - conducting workshops on the Gold Coast and Steve West and Woogie Marsh - conducting clinics on the Sunshine Coast.  

Diary

Feb 17th 2007 - Steering Workshop, Gold/Sunshine Coast 
April 14th 2007 - Stroke Workshop Gold/Sunshine Coast 
April 21st 2007 - Steve West - Suva, Fiji Clinic