Cambridge canoe club has been helping the community since 1988

When the Ancient Mariners Canoe Club of Cambridge started in 1988 it had 21 members, now they have over 130.

The founder of the club, Eric Thomlinson, wanted to create an opportunity for seniors to socialize, stay active through canoeing and help the community.

Paddling downstream in his honour, the Ancient Mariners continue to help Cambridge through charitable programs like their annual Grand River cleanups, pollinator preserve, volunteering during Canada Day and looking after the gardens at Lisaard House, Waterloo Region's first residential cancer hospice.

To be part of the Ancient Mariners Canoe Club, members must first be part of the local senior centre. 

The members paddle mainly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays when the river is quieter. 

Arthur Alyea, who helps coordinate the club, says the Ancient Mariners have nearly doubled in size since he and his wife first joined 20 years ago. 

"There are some members that paddle every month of the year."

The club provides weekly social events for Cambridge senior citizens, even if they don't feel like paddling that day. 

Alyea says the club does its best to source all the things they use to canoe from Cambridge or the surrounding area.

With so many people in the club, they generally have someone who has the skills to help them repair something or whatever else they may need, keeping costs to run the club low. 

For over 30 years, the Ancient Mariners have been mainly a self-funding club, often fundraising through local can drives.

Alyea said the city has provided some funding in the past and has given them free items to use for the river clean-ups such as plastic sticks to pick up trash with. 

Every spring and fall the club can be seen canoeing in large groups in the Grand River, fishing garbage and other material out of the water.

"We always want to give back to the community, were all retired, so we all have the time and want to do it," Lynda Alyea says. 

They often are the first ones down the river in the spring so the Ancient Mariners clean up any tree debris or garbage that could be blocking river ways. 

The club members said they noticed there wasn't as much garbage going into the river during the pandemic.

It's been nice to see people in the river using it more frequently for recreational activities like canoeing or kayaking, Alyea says.

They hope that using the Grand River will inspire more people or clubs to help clean it up. 

Another environmental protection initiative the Ancient Mariners Canoe Club has taken on is the pollinator preserve created in 2009 in River Bluffs Park.

It's known as one of the first pollinator preserves in the area.

Lorna Ferguson has been in the club for over 20 years and helps with the pollinator preserve.

She says students and the public come here to learn about pollination, how it works and what bugs are pollinators.

They had large educational signs donated to them from the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory that they raised funds to have installed within the Cambridge pollinator preserve.

"We were very careful about which flowers we planted, as you can see everything is blooming now, but we wanted to create a natural habitat for this area using certain plants that they would have pollinated from before they were removed," Ferguson says.

Before it was a pollinator preserve the two-acre space used to be a dog park, where most of the natural habitat was removed from.

The Ancient Mariners were able to convince the city to let them turn it into a place where pollinators like butterflies and bees can flourish again, after dramatic declines in their populations over the years.

The club is committed to maintaining and promoting the pollinator preserve to help educate more people in the future.