At 08:24 AM 8/12/99 -0700, Frank Lucian wrote: >Scott wrote: >>I just popped in a tape of the Santa Cruz >>Surf Fest and guess what? I don't see >>one single person competing with either >>hand paddles, a Greenland paddle, or a >>non-feathered paddle. > >At the last two Santa Cruz surf contests I also noticed that everyone >was using feathered paddles. I guessed that this was because the >competitors often have a background in whitewater river boating, where >paddles seem to always be feathered. (Although they often go down to 45, >or even 30 degrees - so what's the difference? OK, OK, I won't go >there.) :-) I will. I really don't quite understand why whitewater paddlers use feathered paddles at all. Someone once suggested that when whitewater kayaking started out that the boats and paddles were adapted from sea kayaks (since they'd been around a lot longer). I really don't know much about the history of when whitewater kayaking actually started or when sea kayakers were first using a feathered paddle but it's easy to see how whitewater boats have progressively become shorter and shorter and the paddles have smaller degrees of feather as the sport grows. Perhaps there is some other advantage to a feathered paddle other than it's performance in wind that I'm missing but since wind doesn't effect whitewater paddlers to the extent that a paddler on open seas or a large lake does I wonder why whitewater paddles have any feathering at all. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Aug 12 1999 - 09:40:23 PDT
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