Ha ha, there goes my evening tea all over my shirt.
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Happy Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1775)! ⛪🕯️🕛🏇🏼
Alexandra Conover Bennet Demonstrates the North Woods Paddle Stroke
- Thread starter Glenn MacGrady
- Start date
One of my favorite Canoetripping.net quotes. I don’t have a name for most of the strokes I do, but I get there and back every time.
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2017
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It's got a great name. Far better sounding than the Hal Stroke, which I use for hours on end when I forget that I'm even paddling.
Another nice demo video. I still haven't quite gotten that front edge of the paddle down during recovery without pulling the gunnel down.... need more practice always.
The Canadian stroke, AKA Guide stroke, AKA Northwoods stroke, AKA knifing J stroke, AKA loaded slice return stroke, can also be done with a palm roll at the end of the forward stroke pull, as I discussed in THIS THREAD. If you loosen both hands when you've reached reached the back end of your pull, with your grip hand fully thumb down, many paddles will "auto roll"—meaning, the paddle will sort of palm roll by itself without much twisting force required by the paddler. The palm roll, by itself, will substantially correct the off-side yaw, and thus you don't have to apply much force during the in-water return of the Canadian stroke, which completes the yaw correction.
In short, you can execute the Canadian stroke with or without a palm roll. Without is more common.
Notice also how Rolf Kraiker holds his paddle at a comfortable angle and slide-levers the paddle along and off the gunwale. Prying off the gunwale can reduce the energy expended over long hours of forward paddling. This is a contrasting forward stroke technique to that of the "vertical paddle" mantra often taught. The power-enhancing and yaw-reducing physics of the vertical paddle pedagogy makes sense, but often at the cost of discomfort and energy expenditure. This is especially the case for paddlers who are shorter-armed or are in wider-beamed boats. Such paddlers cannot comfortably or efficiently reach their top hand far enough to get a paddle near vertical without straining. Therefore, perhaps most paddlers who are kerchunking forward strokes for hours on flat water should consider settling on a "comfort angle" with which to hold the paddle without straining to reach, learning the Canadian stroke, and using the gunwale as a fulcrum if that enhances bodily comfort and energy savings.
Here are two rather famous and highly skilled paddlers 40 years ago paddling recreationally and just naturally holding their paddles at what I call a comfort angle, and they're doing it in narrow canoes. Do you know who they are?
Might those be Masons?
Neither. They're both Americans. The one on the left is still alive and working in the canoe industry.
