Although their skinny legs barely reached the foot pedals, and the paddles stretched taller than the paddlers themselves, nothing could stop five young kayakers as they took to the water recently, navigating around blooming lily pad patches and concentrating on the perfect stroke.
"I'm going to drop my oar," one small voice shouted.
"It's a paddle. Not an oar," said patient Piney Run kayak instructor Jess Hall, for the third time. "Not. An. Oar."
"And don't worry," she said. "Paddles float."
Hall was teaching an afternoon session of kayak lessons for children ages 8 to 11 at the Piney Run Park in Eldersburg.
One of Piney Run Park's summer programming highlights, the courses for children, adults and families teach a basic set of skills for kayaking in flat water.
After completing the course, new kayakers are invited to use their skills on park-sponsored trips to local rivers and in the lake.
The goal was for the five elementary pupils to leave the lake knowing how to control a boat with a paddle, by moving forward, backward and turning right and left.
After they grasped those skills, Hall showed each pupil how to flip his or her kayak right-side up while in the water, in the unfortunate event of a tipped boat.
But for this crew, the flipping and tipping was way more fun than it might be for an experienced kayaker on an afternoon trip.
Hall, a rising senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, who has taught kayak lessons for three years, said she is surprised at how quickly even the youngest pupils catch on.
"We put them in a kayak, give them the paddle, and in an hour, they're fine," Hall said.
As pupils paddled furiously from one side of the lake and back, racing each other and playing follow the leader, moms and younger siblings watched from the shore, exchanging tips on where to buy bargain kayak gear and marveling over their kids' burgeoning kayaking skills.
Stephanie Hamel, of Woodbine, signed up her children, Jeb, 8, and Anna, 9, with hopes that some formal instruction would help develop them into independent kayakers.
"It's hard to go kayaking as a family if they don't know how to do it," she said.
When the Hamel family - two parents, Jeb and Anna, and 5-year-old Seth - takes a kayaking trip, it can get a little difficult to decide who gets to boat with whom.
When at least one child is comfortable and skilled enough to be in a boat without an adult, family trips will be more manageable, Hamel said.
