If you want to learn any skill, you'll need to practise. That's self-evident to most paddlers for physical skills - most folk take time to master new strokes, and everyone I know is on a long-term journey to practise and improve their forward stroke. But what about the mental skills, like planning? If we want to get better at planning trips, we'll need to practise that too.
When I teach the sea kayak award, I focus heavily on trip planning - deciding where to go and thinking through the day's paddle. I think it's one of the biggest things I can do to develop independent paddlers - if people can recognise and plan simple and safe trips, they can go paddling without me. As their skills develop, they can work up to more complex environments, but without the skills to recognise trips that suit their current skillset, they'll never make that step to going out with their peers.
Obviously, it's great to do this for real - getting people to grapple with a real forecast and paddling the plan to see if it fits with expectations. However, to speed the process I also run mock planning sessions for hypothetical trips. We can sometimes use real weather forecasts for this, but the forecast can often be too benign, too awful, or simply not allow people to explore the effects of different conditions in one session. So, we ended up printing off a few hypothetical forecasts on bits of paper to use to drive these planning exercises.
In an idle moment early this year, I wondered if we could do better and stumbled across MakePlayingCards.com (MPC), a website that does pretty much what you'd expect, for really not that much money. So I'm now the owner of 2 packs of rather pretty looking playing cards with wind forecasts.
Clearly, there's zero benefit to these compared to the bits of printed paper that I used last time, but they are very pretty, and I'm really pleased with them. I guess if I ever manage to navigate Paddle's UK provider process and start delivering the CNTP course, they might make me look a bit more professional?
I guess I could try selling these, but I imagine the demand would be at the level of about one pack a year! If you want a set, the artwork is available here, and the MPC site makes it pretty easy to order a set. If you do, please let me know - I'd be intrigued to hear if anyone else has a use for these things!
