By this point, I’d got into a bit of a habit of hiring a canoe and paddling up the river on nice Sunday mornings. Up the river? Yes, I think so. Up river to the road bridge, which is a little way before the weir. If you go down the river, you have to get under a very low arched bridge and then spend the next three miles dodging expensive yachts moored up the middle of the river. I can dodge them just fine in a kayak but I’m not that good in a canoe.
I’d started to realise that I felt quite comfortable in a canoe – they’re wide and feel stable and I like to feel like I’m Ratty or Moley, “messing around on the river” before going off for an ice cream. But I was also becoming more and more acutely aware that I find kayaks so much more manoeuvrable than canoes. Why do I only have a single blade in my canoe? Surely there’s a way of paddling that doesn’t require me to swing it over my head after every stroke? My instructor took a canoe out on our Explore day and not only was he perfectly able to keep up with two kayaks, he was able to keep up without becoming a splashy mess. He could paddle one-sided and go in a straight line! So I googled it. I discovered something called the j-stroke. It’s a forward stroke but you curve it round before you pull the paddle out of the water in the shape of a j and it counteracts the turning power of always paddling on the same side.
So I hired a canoe and had a go and got frustrated that I couldn’t do it. I mentioned it to the owner as he was hauling me back up the slipway and he said “Oh, that’s no problem, we do lessons – I can book you in if you’d like”. Lessons! It never crossed my mind that the nice-weather hire place could actually teach you to paddle properly! So of course I booked in a lesson there and then!
A certain amount of it is the same as in a kayak. Paddling is paddling. I learned that I’m probably applying too much power to my forward stroke, which is why I swing violently in a kind of virtual slalom as I make my way along the river. But sweep strokes are much the same and draw strokes are much the same. But then we came to the famous j-stroke and… I still can’t do it. I can do something that feels like a kind of stern rudder or even stern brake. Move forward, slam on the brakes, move forward, slam on the brakes. It does stop me pulling so violently to the side but it’s so slow and so jolty and it’s really not either what I was picturing or what I wanted to achieve.
Next we moved onto c-strokes, which… well, I can’t really remember what it’s for, other than maybe helping keep the boat in a straight line. I did get on a little better with the c-stroke than the j, which is more a measure of how much I struggled with the j-stroke than how well I did the c-stroke. I began to feel like I do when I’m snowboarding: I can’t do this but the teacher has taught me everything and it just isn’t in me to be able to learn any further. I understood the theory but in practice, all I could do was a kind of emergency stop over and over again.
I went out for a while afterwards on my own to try it out, experiment and otherwise consolidate. I do entirely understand why some hire places won’t hire a canoe to a solo paddler – it must be so much easier to go in a straight line if you’ve got one person paddling on each side – but I like canoeing. Kayaking is so much easier but I always feel like I’m kayaking with a purpose whereas canoeing is just something I do for the joy of being on the water – and yet when I’m canoeing, I’m almost always going up against the clock to the get to the road bridge and back. If I was to take a canoe out on a lake for an hour or two, what would I do? Where would I go? So maybe I like having a purpose. But still, I like kayaking because it’s easy and I like canoeing because it’s relaxing.
I’ve been out a few times since. It’s still my favourite thing for a summer Sunday morning. I still can’t do it properly, paddling the j-stroke on one side but I can do it a little better than before and I know now that, really, paddling one side then the other is a choice rather than something forced on me by my incompetence, and that in itself feels more comfortable.
Bumblebee Paddles 