There's a reason why the lead boat is all alone and the others are in a grouped pack some distance behind the lead. Changing from downstream to cross then upstream paddling, there are some odd and unsure applications of strokes in the video, as if some are saying "what do I do next?".
Downstream buoy turns are tough, usually resulting in a lot of overshoot far beyond the buoy, as is evident in the video. It makes one think there must be a better way, such as initiating the turn well before the buoy so that you are at a perpendicular or greater angle as the current carries you past the buoy. But in the case of the video I don't think there is enough space on river left to effectively make that happen before reaching the buoy. We all need more practice in making these kinds of turns.
I have no idea of the terminology since we learned on our own from paddling many, many years, (probably before you were born)
But assuming we want to turn left: I’ll hut her to the left and she will lean on it and tweak it as a perpendicular rudder while I am doing sweeps on the right.
Other times we will both be doing sweeps on the right and she will do a cross bow rudder while I continue to sweep
And still other times, she will be drawing on the left while I am sweeping on the right
Occasionally, but not very often since it slows us down, I’ll have to switch and do a rudder stroke.
We have won our class and placed in our class several times, so I guess we are not all that bad!
So . . . axles The current lingo of freestyle has been set forth and illustrated at length in these two threads.
It sounds to me that you usually do an on-side axle turn with an occasional cross axle, but I’m not entirely sure because you don’t specifically say how the boat is heeled, if at all.
If, on your left turn, the boat is heeled toward your wife’s paddle and you’re sweeping over the high side, it’s an axle turn. (In my whitewater days before you were born we called it a pivot turn.)
If you’re heeling away from your wife’s paddle and you’re sweeping over the low side, it would be a post turn (which we called a carve turn).
If you’re doing axles, maybe you could win your class by even bigger margins with post turns. No one knows unless they try.
While the majority of my racing is done from the bow of a C6 voyageur canoe, I am conscious of when I am leaning way out on the onside to power draw through a turn, I don't want to cause much if any heel onside. But with 4 other paddlers behind me with weight distributed in sliding seats on their respective gunwales, the stern paddler leaning offside doesn't do much to make for any meaningful offside heel. It is a little better in a C4, where the middle two paddlers are center-seated and can help to effect some offside heel.
I have only raced tandem a couple of times, with me in the stern along with a good but relatively race-inexperienced bow paddler. I definitely do heel toward the outside of turns in tight turns, but not as much as I would when not racing at speed. With a more race-practiced partner I would heel more.
I've raced the 90-miler several times in a Placidboat Rapidfire. Unfortunately the rules for that race class (solo recreational) require use of a double blade paddle, which I abhor. All of my recreational paddling and race training in that boat is with a single blade, unless I know I will be racing it in the 90 that year and I devote some time to double blade strength and maneuver training. Even so, during the race I put in a lot of offside heel to easily carve that boat around turns in Brown's, and have finished on the podium.
Videos of Browns Tract racing I’ve only paddled part of Browns Tract, but I woudn’t call it a sharp twisty creek, or a creek at all. It’s an inlet meander through a bog with little discernible current.
Viewing videos to see how racers take the bends is only partly informative. You don’t really know how good the teams are that are filming. Here are two videos.
The first one is a C4. You can’t tell what the stern is doing, but he’s clearly hutting the bow paddle to be on the inside of every turn to use drawing strokes. No cross draws. The heel is almost negligible. Sometimes think I see somewhat of a heel to the outside (a la post), but most times I’m not sure.
The second video shows the bow of a tandem team, and again the bow takes almost every turn with a drawing stroke on the inside of the turn. Sometimes both paddlers are on the outside of the turn to power around the larger radius bends. A few times in the second part of the video the bow does use a cross rudder to correct course overshoots. Again, heel seems to be negligible.
I’m not sure Browns Tract is the best place to practice or illustrate the sharp turns of “functional creeking freestyle” as, for example, the Jersey Pine Barrens would be. The Oswegatchie in the western Adirondacks at high levels presents a very twisty challenge with some pushy water.
War Canoes are different; quite wide with center paddlers sitting side by side. While an outside heel carves the bow through a turn faster that is difficult to achieve without an extreme bow jam. Normally the Avant will extend over the inside rail to achieve additional drawing distance, such action not affecting heel much at all.
C-4s seem widely variable, sometimes wider with seats that roll side to side, sometimes set seats in narrower hulls. It's a neat race idea, less ego exposure but the chance of practice time is more problematical. Obviously we don't want to heel a boat with rolling center seats; both center paddlers skidding across the hull towards the down side.
C-2's are easier to control because there are fewer moving parts. There, with easy heel control, the carving bow of the Post will almost always be the fastest turn, retaining momentum with some semblance of a brace. The maneuver came to FreeStyle through Harry Roberts, of fond memory, marathon racer, Sawyer Canoe spokesman and editor of multiple paddling magazines.
Browns Tract Here is a Google Earth image of Brown’s Tract. It is not as narrow as that of the recreational speed “creek paddlers” are in, shown in some of the previous videos here, and for recreational paddlers Brown’s many turns are easy and quite pleasant. But at a full tilt power in a long boat pushing 6 mph it can be a challenge, as evident by the number of canoes that stick themselves in the outside turn bank during the 90-miler. Not shown in the image is the usual thick blanket of lily pads choking either bank, and the wide shallow mud accumulation often hidden by lily pads on the inside of the turns, particularly during some dryer low water years. Twisty or not? The paddler decides.
some twisty places on my list: brown’s (NY), ciss stream (Maine), a portion of second creek (WV) blackwater river just below Zuni (VA).
Other rivers have big bends but because of the width you don’t feel it so much- Yough loop (PA) Oxbow on the East Branch of the Penobscot (ME) New River near Talcott and Grandview (WV).
Seen some impressive curves in pictures of the Green and Colorado. Turns make it more interesting- at least to me.
For instance I found “canal” paddling in Okefenokee to be disappointing but the rest of the park to be delightful.
Without the turns we couldn’t joke that it’s “just around the bend”.
I think we wander a little but the discussion is interesting.
The aim though is to address some issues that pertain to the beginning canoeist… I don’t think anyone wanted to overwhelm people.
The advice re boundaries of gunwales in the canoe has applications for the first time couple entering a canoe for example. If they paid attention to this little principle there would be less quickly cancelled outings.
The farther along you get in your canoeing “career” the more you tend to do what is right for you. There are no canoe police and for example I can think of at least half a dozen ways to do a post.
Racers have keenly honed timing and team work and there is a similarity there. But there are are rightfully differences and its probably not best to mess with success.
By “not a twisty creek” I was . . . . . . mainly focused on the word “creek”, which I’m thinking of as having gradient and some pushy current.
Browns Tract is twisty in a meandering way but it has no current. When you have twists and current, as in the Au Sable race video, that’s when the different “functional freestyle” tandem turning maneuvers involving static strokes, like heeled posts and axles, become more exacting.
There are lots of low current meanders in the Adirondacks: lower Oswegatchie, North Moose, Chubb, Kunjamuk, dozens more. Personally, I find many of them tedious after about an hour, especially when all you’re paddling through are ugly alders and willows. The Maine River in Maine is like that too.
Juniper Springs in Florida used to be a nice twisty and highly aesthetic run when it had higher water and stronger currents.
My exit summation on tandem canoeing "Canoeing" is maneuvering a hull with a single blade.
All canoeing maneuvers are of ancient origin. I don’t find any use for the word “freestyle”, but I respect that other people like to use it. However, if I accept the term “functional freestyle” for discussion purposes, I insist that there logically must be a “non-functional freestyle”. I’ll use the terms.
Regarding tandem freestyle, I’d say there are eight ways to turn a canoe left and eight ways to turn right. All these are from the perspective of the bow paddler. The clever paddlers of yore–now ancient or gone–could have listed and performed more variations, but I think eight is sufficient for discussion.
To turn right:
If the bow paddler is paddling on the right side, she can do a draw or cross-wedge, and she can do each one of those with the canoe heeled left or right. That’s four maneuvers.
If the bow paddler is paddling on the left side, she can do a cross-draw or wedge, and she can do each one of those with the canoe heeled left or right. That’s another four maneuvers, for a total of eight ways to turn to the right. There are complementary strokes by the stern paddler for each of the eight.
To turn to the left:
Ditto for everything except the on-side and cross-side are reversed. Eight ways to turn left.
Each one of these eight ways to turn has at least one name, and sometimes two or even three. ACA freestyle has engrafted some new names onto some of the ancient maneuvers.
Are all eight of these freestyle (= ancient canoeing) turns functional? It depends.
If you are on placid flatwater with no current, you can turn with any one of the maneuvers. You don’t need the others. However, if you consider fun and boat control and paddling for the sake of paddling to be functional, then you can enjoy all eight turns on flatwater. Soon you will be linking the turns together into a series of moves and maneuvers. Someone will say, “It looks like you’re doing canoe ballet.” Someone else will suggest doing it to music. And thus you will have re-invented, perhaps for the nth time in history, “interpretive freestyle” flatwater canoeing.
If you can do all eight turns on a placid flat waters, are they functional in river currents? Sort of, but not exactly and not right away. The freestyle turns have certain aspects in common with river turns, but the current in rivers adds a lot of complexity. Learning how to read river currents and eddies takes a lot of experience, and until you can do that, you will not be able to execute river turns with the same elegance you can execute flatwater turns. For example, cross strokes and off-side heels will feel a lot more uncomfortable in currents than on flatwater.
As the river currents turn in to real whitewater, or if you get involved with high speed flatwater racing, you will find some of the turning moves and heels becoming less functional and less preferred. The cross-wedge will probably be the first to go; then the wedge. In whitewater, you may find axle turns to be more comfortable and safer than post turns, and you may find cross-draws to be more effective in eddy turns and peel outs than draws. In flatwater racing, you may find post turns and draws to be more efficient for maintaining speed than axle turns and cross-draws.
But it’s all built on the foundation of the eight basic turns. Where can you learn them?
Probably the very worst way is from written descriptions, because the lingo and mental picturing becomes quickly confused. Videos would be better, but I defer to others to say whether there are any good good and complete ones available. The very best way to learn is from personal instruction. Instruction is the quickest way to have it all make mechanical sense, both mentally and in using the right muscle memory movements. Then you practice, practice, practice.
Very nice summation I think I was the one who coined the term “functional freestyle” though it’s possible that someone else used it earlier. I’ll be the first to admit that it is an imprecise term however, I’ve been hard pressed to coin something better to distinguish “functional” from interpretive.
Technical FreeStyle paddling received a booster shot of technique improvement from Tom Foster in the 90s. This isn’t always obvious because the shiny/flashy Interpretive display always seems to draw more attention than it deserves. I have contributed to that because, naturally, we tend to retain the flashy images too.
At it’s heart, good paddling focuses on Blade Physics, Paddler Bio-Mechanics and the Hull in the Water, in that order. What that means is shorter strokes with the blade ~ square to force load, and for forward strokes, vertical shafts employed parallel to the keel. Carrying the blade aft of the body complicates everything. We want to use the larger torso muscles, triceps, latts, etc, to increase power and reduce fatigue which requires locking the arms as struts and using torso rotation to increase reach and paddle range. Lastly, we want to keep the hull quiet in the water because it’s more efficient, and change it’s shape in the water to improve turning performance.
Two identifiable groups that paddle “technically” are Marathon Racers and FreeStyle Paddlers, so…
Yippee, we are both ! love to race, and love to meander through small wilderness creeks and rivers where we silently glide while waiting to come up on some unsuspecting critter around the next curve.
If either of us makes a paddle splash we lose points!
