Videos: Canadian Style and Freestyle Paddling in Wood Canoes

[Glenn MacGrady]

Here is Sue Plankis demonstrating Canadian Style paddling in a wood/canvas tandem canoe. Note that she explains how heeling the canoe not only enhances turns, but also reduces the need for correction by shortening the lever arm between the functional "keel" and the paddle blade.

In this next video, Paul Klonowski briefly demonstrates some American Freestyle moves in a birch bark tandem canoe. Note that for freesyle he paddles from a more centralized position, both longitudinally and rotationally, than a Canadian Style paddler. This allows him to pitch the canoe either stern down or bow down, to heel in both directions, and to use cross strokes, as he shift-pivots his body position to face either bow or stern—all to effectuate various types of turns and translation strokes by paddling in all four quadrants of the canoe.

 

[lowangle al]

I noticed that Sue paddled her boat backwards even though she probably had no intention of sitting on the bow seat. Kneeling on the either thwart would give you the same trim, so why paddle the boat backwards?

 

[yknpdlr]

"ONE" of the most important things, IMO, that Sue said was "Canoeing isn’t just big chunks of strokes, it’s little ones you are doing all the time. As you become more practiced, you don’t even think about it."

I have always felt that the successful canoer has well practiced access to a number of standard strokes and their variations, enough so that linking one stroke with another as needed at the moment becomes automatic without any necessary thought on how to do it.

 

[yknpdlr]

On day1 of BSA adult trek leader wilderness guide training (typically college age), I would gauge overall canoe skills by observing the student launch and get in a BSA Grumman canoe, then paddle out 50 yards to a couple of buoys and make a turn around one while paddling on opposite side of the turn direction (hopefully easy), then on the next buoy, paddle on the same side of the turn direction (?) before returning to land again. After that I give them a compass and map and ask simple questions about how they would navigate in the observed terrain around us. I knew then who I would have to work with the most for the next week of training.