I’ll start this by acknowledging that most of my paddling experience is in a sea kayak. But perhaps experiencing so many ins and outs in sea kayaking has lent me a somewhat enlightened perspective on paddling overall.
If I look at this past weekend, Friday I did a nice lively ocean paddle with a little surfing involved in a sea kayak. My Saturday morning paddle was in my solo canoe. My Saturday evening paddle was on an Epic V10 surfski. My Sunday paddle was a pretty calm ocean paddle in a sea kayak, with a bit of surfing, but waves were around 1’ , so even riding a wave was pretty calm and peaceful. I’ve also done a bit of dragon boat paddling and OC-6 paddling this spring.
For my canoeing I have mostly worked on getting comfortable and effective with a J stroke, and I think I’ve enjoyed some good progress since starting out. Turning the power face of the single blade canoe paddle outward at the end of the stroke seems pretty important to a good number of people, and I’m happy I’ve gone with that from the start. Something that surprised me is that when my wife and I took a whitewater touring canoe class at Nantahala Outdoor Center near Bryson City, NC this spring, the instructor made a point throughout the day of getting me to stop doing “that Canadian stroke” and to turn the back face of the blade outward for directional control at the end of a stroke. It isn’t difficult for me, as that’s how I use a double blade kayak paddle, but I was surprised! Is this a whitewater specific thing, situationally specific, or are there two distinct camps on this at odds with one another? I really don’t know.
What it did do was make me feel at liberty to experiment with it, and this little liberation was part of what made me more comfortable concentrating on a switch forward stroke. I really love controlling the canoe paddling on just one side. And there’s almost always some wind that makes good forward progress easier from one side than the other due to weather helm, so sometimes it’s really easy to paddle that way. It’s enjoyable, and I’ve no doubt I will continue to work on it. But this is where the dragon boating and OC-6 experience come in. My limited experience with these has been a constant team effort at achieving speed. So a lot of thought goes into achieving speed with a single blade, and all the other distractions fall out of the way of that purpose. In an OC-6, everyone switches sides every 12 or 15 or however many strokes each time the caller calls “hut”. So you get good and practiced at switching sides without missing a beat. I also know that decades ago when someone decided to go at a canoe race with sit and switch paddling, everyone realized in short order that it was the faster way to go, but there are still a myriad of reasons to not let that be my only canoe paddling style. But because of this Nantahala Outdoors experience, and the dragonboat and OC-6 experience, I’ve come around to being ok with putting some emphasis on sit and switch as a more worthwhile skill to master in my canoe. And I’ve already found that I’m blending the two styles, and seeing the benefits of everything working together.
In researching, I seemed to find 2 camps. Powerface out for directional control J-stroke versus back face out - what I’ve read labeled goon stroke or some such things. (Honestly, at the class, that was the first I ever heard anyone specifically say to not use J-stroke technique) J-Stroke versus sit and switch. So am I justifiably at liberty to blend now, or am I just confused?
Blend every technique in your favor and advantage.
The J-stroke versus the ‘rudder stroke’ ( a.k.a. thumb-up J-stroke, goon stroke or a stern pry when using the gunwale as a fulcrum) mostly deals with the fact that when using a more stationary version of the J-stroke you often just as well can make a ‘rudder stroke’ instead.
If the river were a highway there would be a lot of different vehicles going different speeds, with different purposes. In the pursuit of ww efficiency, the less correction you do with the paddle blade, the better off you are. By changing the tilt (angle)of the boat (your weight and postioning) and the entry and exit placement of the paddle blade into the water, you can minimize paddle drags and drive the boat forward. It may even be a bit of a bow draw on one stroke and a bit of a sweep on the next. If you need to drive the boat forward quickly (up to speed in just a few strokes) use power strokes with quick exits for correction. A subtle correction is to catch a bit of water by flattening the blade as the paddle exits the water (pitch stroke). Four or five quick strokes should get you up to speed. Ultimately its about finding a style that works for you. Do ditch the j stroke for whitewater. Think more cab forward and drive the boat where you want to go. Instead of applying outward thrust for correction think more upward as the blade leaves the water. Literally mess with feathering the paddle while the paddle is still in the water and catching a little bit on the top of the outer blade. There’s not one way to paddle but I think the folks at the NOC are just trying to make you efficient. In general they want you to strive for eliminating all paddle drags, including pitch strokes. Sometimes we need a little help to get there.
Now if I could just get my own paddle blade all the way in the water, slow it down, and clean up my exits I might be able to pass the beginner sea kayaking stroke class!
The goon stroke works the best when you have a good surface to pry rudder off of. A favorite of ww paddle-raft guides in flat pools. It can certainly work in a rec canoe as well.
And let not us forget to all situation
so seldom there’s “perfect” technique.
And three-legged dogs can’t quite hop like frogs,
but darn if they don’t hop beds they seek.
So paddle all day, be Goony, be Jay.
Thumbs up, thumbs down, Richard, Gene.
I find with my wrist there’s often time for new twist,
I’ll turn up to turn down fatiguing.
(or I left port to the starboard switch-hitting)
Yeah, that all makes sense. Boat angles and edges definitely seem to make all the difference jumping from eddy to eddy. And it can certainly become critical to eliminate unnecessary drag. So I’ll continue to experiment and mix it up. My normal canoe environment is sandy bottomed tidal creeks and rivers on the coast. So we like to take advantage of our opportunities in the mountains. I just need to remember that if I’m gonna go goon, I’ve got to own it.
One of the differences between a "J"stroke and using a pry is the latter is much more powerful. The J is great to correct at the end of each stroke but when you need to make a more aggressive move, a pry off the gunnel is much more effective. Having paddled canoe both touring and WW, I had no problem deciding the strokes to use. When the water got bouncy the pry came automatically, no matter what boat I was in.
A great video to watch is Bill Mason’s “Path of the Paddle”. A bit dated but still a wonderful movie in 4 parts.
Reading the replies, I figured out that I correct with a rudder stroke (thumb up). Works for me on lakes and slow streams.
You mean the knifing J-stroke (a.k.a. Canadian stroke for paddlers in the U.S. 
?
The ‘pitch stroke’ is a forward stroke with a course correction during the stroke.
Especially for paddlers who are doing a ‘trailing J-stroke’ the rudder stroke is much more effective in ‘whitewater situations’. For touring purposes a pitch stroke, a (dynamic) J-stroke and knifing J-stroke are more efficient, but more difficult to learn (in a few hours that is).
There is a stoke for every purpose.
The J-stroke (thumb down, power face out) is a cruising stroke that keeps you going straight. Stern pry (thumb up, power face in) is a turning stroke. In a whitewater boat, the options for going straight are the J-stoke (yes, you use it) or alternating forward/cross forward strokes.
If you are trying to turn or spin a whitewater boat, the stern pry is much more effective, and might even become a reverse sweep. The pry/sweep will kill your momentum, but you are usually using it to spin the boat into a forward ferry or into an eddy, so you probably need to kill some forward momentum anyway.
Sit-and-switch is another cruising stroke (or maybe technique) that keeps you going straight. It is fast and efficient by eliminating any corrections strokes and focusing on pure power strokes. You generally don’t switch sides in a whitewater boat, you use a cross forward strokes instead. In flatwater with a bent shaft, though, sit-and-switch is tough to beat over long distances.
I would not call it a stroke because it is a technique that uses the switching of paddling sides to go straight or to manoeuvre (although going straight is in fact a manoeuvre too). So for a turn to the left, the solo/stern paddler paddles on the right side of the canoe and vice versa.
It is often called “sit and switch” probably because it is mostly done by paddlers who sit when paddling, but this ignores the essence of this paddling technique as it can be as useful too when kneeling.
For that reason I too prefer to call it “hit and switch” because it can also be used when kneeling and is not only a paddling technique to go straight but also to maneuver, especially in solo canoes, as is shown here very well by Jessica Fox:
The J stroke keeps power in the forward momentum. I often use the knifing j stroke as it provides a more subtle correction as the paddle moves forward through the water. It can also be quiet if you don’t lift the paddle out of the water. It even works for me with a bent shaft paddle which is usually used as a hit and switch which has no pry or draw to it lacking a correction component. The thing with the pry is on flat water it acts a bit like a brake and is a more aggressive act which works well as a fast water correction. You haven’t mentioned the C stroke which starts with a draw and ends in a pry. Indeed, combining strokes yields better control. A static draw or pry at the beginning or end of a stroke or active draw and pry all are useful depending on what you want the canoe to do and how much forward momentum you want to keep. And let’s not forget the sweep stroke, which in a tandem is only the first half of a sweep for bow and the last half for the stern paddlers. The combination of strokes are the dance steps of canoeing.
You’re right, you can do it kneeling, and it is not just for going straight. You can do sweep strokes to turn, or not switch and let the boat turn. For whitewater, though, I am more of a Tom Foster guy - pick a side and stick with it. I am a lefty (right hand on the grip) and I am pretty good at onside and offside (cross) strokes from that side. Problem with that is that I’ve never developed my right side. Other than a forward stroke I am pretty limited on what I can do from the right. I am no Jessica Fox, that for sure.
Personally I also regret that I did not switch sides regularly in the first 5 years of my canoeing career because I was also told to stick with one paddling side.
As an instructor I can imagine though that it is easier to work on one side first.
Better to be able to perform well on one side than suffer on both sides, I quess.
That’s the switch I learned with the OC-6 paddlers. Let go with your top hand, and use that hand to grab the paddle just below your other hand. Then slide the new upper hand up to the top grip. Quick and always in control.
No regrets for me - I am fine paddling from one side, and cross strokes look much better that switching sides
It is easier to exit out of eddies paddling on your downstream side. It’s also easier to catch eddies by paddling and pivoting on the side they are on. Cross strokes can be quicker and done to achieve the same thing without having to switch sides. Running rockgardens on the moose river in maine years ago was a lot of fun running tandem and using cross strokes in the bow to thread our way down. Techniques can change with the stream and the flow and the boat.
When I started on the New and Gauley where features get dynamic (powerful) It made more sense to switch sides situationally- busting out of a recirculating eddy, crossing over boily eddylines and fences I would go with the most mechanical power and readily switch sides if need be. If you’re doing an up stream ferry then by all means paddle on the downstream side of the boat. It doesn’t have to be an all or none approach. Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to switch sides to achieve a certain move or objective. That being said I paddled on the left side of my c1 90% of the time. I had a good low brace and would tend to take everything on my left (reactionary waves, holes etc). Most of the time, when I flipped over it was on my left and it was my much stronger rolling side. The few times I rolled up on my right side the water would do the work, sometimes in holes you could just change the set up from left to right, and the river would flip you up without even having to hip snap. Mostly though if I had to roll paddling on my right or if I found I had to switch my grip to the right to facilitate a roll, then chances of swimming went way up. So which side I paddled on had a lot to do with my bracing and rolling ability and not just about physical advantages of paddling on a certain side.
Kayaking now has me a bit more symmetrically balanced. Now I can suck at paddling and rolling on both sides!
the pitch stroke as shown above in a whitewater canoe, may look a bit mechanical and exaggerated for demonstration purposes.
In a touring canoe my pitch stroke is much more subtle and fluent, up to the point that it is almost unrecognizable – as someone who paddled behind me once complained
Also the problem with the pitch stroke is that one needs a decent forward and J-stroke before being able to use a pitch stroke well enough to go straight. Some paddlers will get to this point
instinctively, but when asked what they do their answer is the J-stroke…
I’m not much on terminology. As a child whoever was in the stern help steer the boat by forcing the water back against the canoe (goon stroke) or pushing against the canoe with their paddle (stern pry rudder). I think we figured out that if the front (bow) paddler did an arcing stroke (bow sweep) it also helped turn the boat back straight. I got to see a lot of the river (bank to bank) when it was just me and my brother in a canoe. He was older (ten years old) and he got to sit in the back and steer while I sat in the bow and only wanted to paddle on my left side!
About the time I was in middle school my Dad decided we needed to run the rockcastle river in ky. Our first foray into ww. My job was to carry the gear around while my oldest brother and father paddled the rapids. I knew enough to know they were clueless. We were using rented aluminum canoes and banging rocks and breaching yet all the same I wanted a turn at the bigger rapids.
The extent of my paddling education in high school was based on the old milwaukee commercial shotgun rapids. https://youtu.be/XcmI7-2UMyM?si=4cdJL7HJDkWNbGdt
With this solid instructional foundation (paddle fast, paddle hard) I started taking my own trips down the rockcastle with my high school buddies. We also started taking commercial rafting trips on the New in Wv.
At 18 I got some decent canoe paddle instruction from the Boy Scouts in Maine. I focused on the j stroke when in the stern. Always I found it awkward to rotate the wrist down. So I started to modify the stroke. When we were running ww on the west branch (roll dam) and east branch (webster brook, stair falls, bowlin camps) of the penobscot, we naturally shortened our strokes and started incorporating a lot of draws and prys and the occasional cross draw in the bow to get around rocks and catch eddies. We did a lot of back ferries. The wisdom of Cliff Jacobson and Bill Mason crept into our paddling. I was a sophomore in college when I saw Mason’s film on a reel to reel projector, Path of the Paddle.
At some point I was told my j stroke was actually a pitch stroke. I was paddling an m.e. and flashback in those days and still taking the scouts out in tandem canoes on wilderness canoe trips. So I’ve stuck with that terminology. Not sure it is correct.
When I went from the ww canoes to the gyramax c1 my stroke became even shorter. I was paddling very much like the video of the guy in the ww canoe doing the demonstration pitching. I like castoffs “knifing” terminology because it can feel like you are a slicing a bit of water on top of your flat blade as it exits the water. In the flatter New River pools I hit and switched or pitched and often stayed on my right side to save my left for the rapids. It was a good work out. I got out and filmed (vhs) rafts at the rapids so very often I had to paddle aggressively to catch up and film the next rapid. I used a lot of techniques to “get up to speed” in ww, not just one stroke. I filmed about 350 trips on the New and Gauley and dang sure didn’t paddle the same way every day. There was high water, there was low water.
Diagonal bow draws were a favorite of mine in the ww c1. I also really liked prys in the bow of a tandem open canoe, and it felt at the time like a lot of folks avoided prys, just don’t jam it in under the boat and hit a rock! The pry in the bow of a tandem was a very powerful stroke for me. Great for adjusting downstream ferry angles. I could teach a scout to do it and it was way easier than me trying to move the stern around. “Give me two pry strokes”. If you got a bow paddler and take the time to teach them then ultimately your job (steering the boat) becomes much easier Another thing that really helped with a tandem bow paddler was having them do the opposite stroke once the bow cleared an obstruction. Okay so now you’ve got the front of the boat around the rock. Now do the opposite stroke to help clear the stern. Getting them to understand that when you make the bow go left that the stern will pivot to the right so an opposite stroke is required .
To me a j stroke just feels awkward and slow. Even lake paddling I prefer to pitch. That’s me. I ain’t sayin’ it’s the right way, it’s just a way. I’ll even pitch a little in a raft when everyone else is taking a break and use the tube for leverage sometimes or in a canoe it can be a very subtle thing with just a wee bit of water catching the paddle edge as it exits. This guy calls it the canadian or guide stroke. https://youtu.be/a_VOWk7VSu4?si=0N7H6sQjpDJtpL7o In general his strokes are a lot longer and smoother than my own.
I found this topic has helped my understanding of the greenland paddle forward stroke. What did we do before there was the internet, paddling schools, and an aca curriculum? We tried stuff out and figured out what works. Our idea of “best practices” was finding someone better than you to copy and talk to. I know we can all strive to do better…and take advantage of professions but sometimes it’s all right to just mess around and be a hot mess. Heck if you can’t be a hot mess in a boat than where can you be a hot mess?