Steve Brown said: Let's ask: Any Olympians, international or national slalom champs, flat-water K1 racers, surfing worlds champs, or their trainers out there who actually gave un-feathered paddles an equal chance or conducted a controlled study of any kind comparing them to feathered paddles? Once again bringing the Stone Age to mind, when I raced sprint boats our team trained at the home club of the great Danish champion Eric Hansen before a race in Denmark. I was amazed to learn, and see, that he had a large supply of paddles with many different angles of feather. This was 1970 when everyone in sprinting that I knew used a 90 degree offset. He said that he used a paddle depending on the wind, ninety degrees in a head wind, about 40, I think, with a tail wind. Never asked why there was no unfeathered, but I could guess that the change to unfeathered would be quite radical. By the time we get to be really good at racing, we are so accustomed to a feathered paddle that it might be tricky to give an equal effort with an unfeathered one. I have done time trials over a marked sprint course to learn about the speed on my SOF boat used with a Greenland paddle. But never trials with two different paddles in the same boat. My 18.5 foot long, 17.5 inch wide SOF can go 250 meters as fast as me in a sprint boat. The start seems slower, but by the end of the minute plus, the boats/paddles equal out. Jim Tibensky *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Sep 09 2004 - 13:08:41 PDT
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