On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 7:21 AM, Nick Schade <nick_at_guillemot-kayaks.com>wrote: > > For a subsistence hunter with limited access to quality paddling-making > materials, reliability alone would probably be sufficient reason by itself > to settle on a paddle form. > Nick > There has to be a lot of sense in this. One of the most intriguing things about the GP form of paddle is that it had its genesis in a part of the world where there are damn few trees. I don't even recall seeing a lot of driftwood the summer I spent flying in and out of Greenland's west coast drilling for oil in the Davis Strait. Harvey Golden says that there was a lot of innovation in Greenlander's kayaks over the last 200 years. Which corresponds neatly to the Europeans discovery of the cod fishing grounds of the Grand Banks. The use of the dory to fish for cod must have created a windfall (no pun intended) of new material as the planking of those small boats started showing up on S and W Greenland shores. It would be interesting to be able to go back in time and catalog what was available on those shores and correlate that with what the Inuit did with their designs. Whatever it was it was almost certainly, as Nick implies, pragmatic and driven by reality. No marketing departments around to tell them what they reallly wanted. Craig Jungers Moses Lake, WA www.nwkayaking.net *************************************************************************** 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 Tue Jul 21 2009 - 09:36:03 PDT
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