Shoutout to Bending Branches and ZRE

I want to award mega kudos and bonus points to both Bending Branches and ZRE for excellent customer service.

Some years back Bending Branches was nice enough to sell me 2 symmetric wood grips that I used when shortening a couple of carbon fiber paddles. When I reached out again recently they sold me 4 more at same price as before. There are not a lot of options out there for comfy symmetric grips (pic).

Then Chad Swander, the new owner of ZRE, contacted me after I made some inquiries and he was.kind enough to do some research on some older (he may have said "really old") symmetric Zavs I have (pic) and he told me the blade was outsourced and the supplier went out of business and the tooling is lost.

So thanks to Bending Branches and ZRE I now have 2 very nice fully symmetrical paddles back in service plus I know the history of the symmetric blade. With both companies being under new ownership I'm just delighted to see the excellent customer service.

Excellent! Good to know that the Bending Branches grips fit a Zaveral shaft. I was thinking of doing the same with my ZRE straight paddle, which I want to shorten to use on shallow streams. The BB grips aren't ideal for palm rolling but I like them better than the hit-and-switch grips Zaveral uses. I was going to buy another BB grip to use but instead I'll just reuse a grip I'd cut off a BB Sunburst paddle. I noticed that Bending Branches now uses a carbon fiber grip on the Sunburst but it isn't clear from their website that it's still symmetrical.

I like that you can shape the stub since every carbon fiber paddle I've come across has a different inside size and shape. Although not as light as carbon fiber they are light for wood and the weight improves the balance of a paddle so it's not a bad tradeoff. Unfortunately those grips are now discontinued and no longer available (like the paddles I put them on) since Bending Branches sold their last ones to me and another site member.

There are a couple of interesting and inexpensive options on Amazon that I'd be tempted to try.