PADDLERUK 6
Photo :
The Paddler ezine covered a story featuring a group of paddlers who went to see the remains of Watkin ’ s base camp on the east Greenland coast .
December 2014 issue read here …
Not long before those days , it was considered dangerous by the British Canoe Union and banned in competitive slalom . But you have to go a little further back to find the first Briton to perform the move , and that was Gino Watkins .
Watkins was not only incidentally a kayaker – he was first and foremost an Arctic explorer who led , at the exceptionally young age of 19 , his first expedition to the frozen north ( Edge Island ), and three more before his death at the age of 26 , when he was on his second trip to Greenland to survey the north Atlantic for a proposed transatlantic air route , at the behest of Pan American Airways .
The two published biographies on him ( by his close friend JM Scott in 1935 and by the explorer John Ridgway MBE in 1974 ) focus on his exploration , but we gather that Watkins was not only able to roll his 18ft-long traditionallybuilt sealskin Greenland kayak with ease , but was an accomplished seal hunter and able to perform the ‘ Eskimo ’ roll without a paddle and in a number of variants of the sort we see today from Greenland specialists .
Watkin ’ s demise
“ In spite of their great expertise in the kayaks , the stark fact remained that one-quarter of all Eskimo deaths was caused by drowning ” wrote Ridgway . Sadly , this was to be Watkin ’ s demise , when he paddled out to hunt seal on 20 August , 1932 . He got out and stood on an ice floe on a routine stop to sort his gear out better , when a falling ice block behind him caused a strong wave to pass under the floe , knocking him into the freezing water and unable to climb back onto the floe or into his kayak , which drifted away . His body was never recovered .
Hans W Pawlata
According to John Dudderidge ’ s ‘ History of Canoeing ’ however , it was in fact the Austrian paddler Hans W Pawlata who was the first European to perform the move , and that was in 1927 . Pawlata was part of the beginnings of the folding boat era , in which northern European paddlers ( particularly Germans ) began to discover the joys of running the Alpine rivers when the snow they had enjoyed their winter skiing on began to melt in the summer – a tradition that , of course , continues to this day .
Unlike Watkins , who learned directly from Eskimos , Pawlata taught himself the technique from their texts . Arguably this was an even greater achievement , although we know even less about Pawlata than we do about Watkins . His extended paddle roll , known as the ‘ pawlata roll ’ has fallen out of favour these days compared with the ‘ c to c ’ but was throughout the 80s and 90s the preferred beginners ’ roll , the paddler holding the blade of the paddle for better leverage and feel .
Inuit people
Finally , just to confuse things more , it has been suggested that Pawlata was not in fact the first to roll after all ! An authoritative article on Wikipedia states that “ a number of European missionaries and explorers had previously learned how to roll from the Inuit people of Greenland , Paul Egede probably being the first in the 1730s . Rolling was demonstrated in 1889 at Sandviken , Norway , by Oluf Dietrichson , a member of Nansen ’ s 1888 Greenland Expedition .”
For this reason , Pawlata ’ s position in history , although his achievement is greater than Watkin ’ s , is less secure . Like many things in kayaking , the history is far from clear , but it seems unchallenged ( so far ) that Watkins was the first Briton to roll . SO we ’ ll roll with that . And from that basis of being able to self-right , new in Europe but known to Greenlanders and Aleuts since before records of such things began , the sport began its transformation from the era of straw-hatted gentlemen on placid waters to the exciting extreme sport we know today .