Lesson 8: There’s A Lot To Be Celebrating
Written by Amira Aleem
In September 2015, after two months of not finding work on his return to London, Andy had been part of a group from London on a five-day river trip down the Mississippi River, guided by a local adventure travel tour company. But like Andy points out, Quapaw Canoe Co is hardly a regular tour operator, with staff sharing their stories around the campfire and creating a really wonderful wilderness experience.
Six months later, now back in London, the Mississippi trip group received an email from Quapaw’s founder John Ruskey detailing how their base, known as ‘The Cave’, had been flooded unexpectedly. All of Quapaw’s maps, all their artwork, all the books John had accumulated over 30 years — everything had been destroyed.
The Sunflower River flood had risen 25 feet in 24 hours. And so Andy and Chris Barnes, a friend from the Mississippi trip group, decided to help the fundraising for Quapaw with a 24-hour paddle challenge in Surrey, just outside London. Andy set to work creating a webpage, inviting friends and organising equipment.
When the Quapaw 24 Big Paddle took place on the rivers Wey and Thames a few weeks later in April 2016, a new friend, Ben Arthur, pointed out that there was a great opportunity to do paddling with groups of people more frequently.
At the time Andy had been playing with idea of starting an adventure podcast, but on the Sunday morning of the Big Paddle (cold and wet after falling in the Wey), he thought:
“Why would I want to do a radio show about adventure when I could just create more adventures — that’s way more exciting.”
Through conversations with other friends and a little bit of last minute organisation, the first meeting of the LittlePaddle group came together a few weeks later on a Sunday afternoon in May on a small river in the Cotswolds, a place Andy has come to fall in love with.
LittlePaddle has become a regular group of around 30 people with an average of 10–12 joining each month. Each paddle is different and the routes and formats have become more complex over time. This works because in the group, looks after each other and ensures new know what to expect.
“People crave this sort of thing, they crave the connection, they crave having fun, but they don’t know where to look for it, half the time.”
The story of getting a group together to raise money for something unfortunate isn’t entirely new in Andy’s life. It sounds much like the crowdfunding campaign in Bali that Andy was part of in the aftermath of the fire at the Clear Café, in November 2014.
The difference with the Big Paddle, he says, is that both he and Chris were equally invested in it and that made the experience in itself quite different. He also points out that unlike Bali, Big Paddle acted as a catalyst for a regular meetup, setting in motion a creative ‘canvas’ for a community run event.
As the LittlePaddle group has grown, Andy finds that the group organises the weekend paddle trips itself and is not dependent on him for planning them. Recently, 12 members went through a feedback process to make sure everyone was agreed on what LittlePaddle is, and what it isn’t. Andy says “it felt amazing to be part of such an honest, open experience where members we so happy to talk and challenge each other”.
Andy’s conclusion on: There’s A Lot To Be Celebrating
The LittlePaddle experience has proved to me that the idea and the group is something our members identify with for themselves, and that has been really special. And although there is always some chaos in the lead up to a paddle event, we have now figured out a system amongst them that makes it work.
It always works itself out at the very last minute, because everyone cares for each other. And after so much loneliness and struggle these last three years, that’s something worth celebrating, which is no better shown that where we had 23 members attend the Christmas paddle in early December 2017.
