>> OK, for us little old ladies in the audience, what is a "sliding stroke"? e Elaine Harmon - eilidh_at_dc.seflin.org - eharmon_at_cs.miami.edu >> A sliding stroke is a classic Greenland technique in which the paddle slides back and forth in the paddler's hands so that the longer end is the one in the water. It is used to effectively make a short paddle longer. It is because of the sliding stroke that I sometimes call the Greenland paddle a variable-length paddle. What I call the full sliding stroke was described in Sea Kayaker by John Heath over a decade ago. Since then it has also been described by Alan Anderson in the Atlantic Coastal Kayaker and by Doug Van Dorn in his Greenland kayaking video, so it is well known by Greenland-style aficionados. To start a full sliding stroke, begin with both hands in the center of the paddle loom, thumbs touching. To stroke on the left side of the kayak, slide your right hand out onto the blade about a shoulder's width from the left hand, and then stroke. At the end of the stroke, during the recovery phase, slide the right hand back to the center. When the thumbs touch, grasp the loom with the right hand and slide the left hand out for the following stroke on the right side. This stroke is used most often with the Greenland storm paddle, which has a loom no more than about two handbreadths long; indeed, it is the only practical stroke for that paddle. What I call the partial or short sliding stroke is much less well known. I have never seen it described in a magazine article, but it can be seen in the video "Amphibious Man" and the classic 1932 film by Greenland ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, "Palos Brudefaerd." In "Palos Brudefaerd," which was filmed in the Angmagssalik district of East Greenland, all the kayakers can be seen using it. Members of the British Arctic Air Route Expeditions of the early Thirties also learned to use it, as F. Spencer Chapman mentions in _Watkins' Last Expedition._ The short sliding stroke is used with a standard Greenland paddle. The hands start in their normal position on the paddle loom, but the top hand slides only six to ten inches out on the blade and then returns to the starting position. The hands never meet in the center. Doug Van Doren is of the opinion that this stroke was used only when the paddler was in a hurry, but in "Palos Brudefaerd" it is obviously used for casual paddling. I frequently use it for cruising, but since it slows my cadence somewhat, I am likely to drop it when I am in a hurry. An advantage of the short sliding stroke is that it accustoms you to sliding the paddle back and forth in your hands, so that if you need to extend the paddle to brace, it becomes an extension of your stroke. I read somewhere that Greenlanders use it also because they think having more blade immersed gives more control. Of course, Greenlanders also regularly slid their hands out onto the blades for extended braces, rolls, and sweep turns. A big difference between Greenland practice and the style often taught by instructors in North America is that the Greenlanders never grasped the tip of the paddle when extending it; to do so might have snapped off the bone tip. Note that Greenland paddles and Greenland paddling style are and were peculiar to Greenland; they are not generic Inuit paddles and paddling styles. Immediately west of Greenland, on Baffin Island and the eastern shore of Hudson's Bay, paddles, though superficially similar, were longer, wider, and clumsier -- up to eight or nine feet long in some cases. See "Nanook of the North" some time for a startling contrast with Greenland style. In other parts of the arctic, looms were longer and the blades were leaf-shaped. Chuck Holst *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:33:00 PDT