We paddle a granite coast that is beautiful in June and unforgiving in March, and we write each trip down the same evening so that the next decision is argued against a record instead of against somebody's good mood.

Driftwood Paddlers is between seven and ten people, depending on the year and on who has small children. We began in April 2018 with four secondhand sea kayaks, one roof rack that did not fit properly, and a shared nervousness about water that sits at six degrees in May. We paddle the granite and skerry coast west and north of Gothenburg, mostly in day trips of fifteen to thirty kilometres, and a handful of overnights each summer. Nobody in the group is an instructor and nobody is paid. We share a garage, a set of spare paddles that have all been broken at least once, and a habit of arguing about weather in a car park.

I keep the log, which means I write the trip up the same evening while the numbers are still honest. Wind speed as the forecast gave it and as it actually felt, water temperature off the thermometer clipped to a deck line, launch and landing times, who turned back and why. It is an unglamorous document. Roughly a third of the entries are about trips that were shortened, abandoned at the slipway, or replaced with coffee. That proportion is the point. A log that only records the good Saturdays is a photo album, and a photo album has never once helped us decide whether to cross an open sound in a rising westerly.

Nothing here is teaching. We are amateurs who have made most of the ordinary mistakes and a couple of unusual ones, and we write those down too, because a group that hides its bad calls repeats them. We do not name the shops where we buy things, the clubs whose pool evenings we have borrowed, or the people who have patiently pulled us out of the water. Places are described the way we describe them to each other, by what the landing looks like and which wind direction ruins it, rather than by anything a visitor could treat as an instruction.