Weeks and fellow guide Ben Ryan assembled us all on the rocky beach next to Tuna Wharf on Bearskin Neck for some basic instruction. "Hold your paddle over your head with your arms bent at a right angle," Ryan said. "Now keep your grip in the same place and lower the paddle in front of you. That's your paddling box. You're going to twist your torso instead of swinging your arms. That way you can paddle a lot longer and have more fun."
The novices nodded hesitantly, then dutifully demonstrated what Ryan had just shown. After a drill on rescue techniques and some basic paddling courtesy and safety tips, we began sliding into our kayaks.
"I just know we're going to tip over," said Marie Gengler, 14. "We're going to be so wet," her twin sister, Alice, echoed as they took their seats in an ultra-stable tandem kayak that Weeks slid into the water.
Their trepidation was unwarranted. Within minutes, we had assembled a small flotilla of nine kayaks (two tandems) and 11 of us were ready to set out. "We're so slow," lamented one of the twins as they tried to coordinate their paddling, "that everyone's going to be waiting for us," the other said, finishing her sister's thought.
Not so. Once we had reached the outer edge of the harbor and paddled across in a pack like schoolchildren on a crosswalk, we followed the coast along Old Garden Beach, making toward the gap between the Rockport mainland and the lighthouse on Straitsmouth Island. The twins had found their stroke and were making a speedy beeline near the front of the pack as their aunt Lisa Bingen, an experienced kayaker, periodically doubled back to check on them.
Bingen's husband, Mike Mather, was in a tandem with the twins' mother, Mary Gengler of Brookings, S.D., where she's a microbiologist at South Dakota State. Not only was it her first time kayaking, she admitted, it was her first time on the ocean.
