Phil Meyer started his kayaking career in Colorado in the days when kayaks were made in the backyard out of fiberglass and river trips meant stopping in eddies to duct tape your kayak back together. He enjoys instructing kayaking and SWR almost as much as just playing on the rivers. While he was the manager for the Costa Rican Outward Bound School, he and friends captured several first descents. He was also featured in
We want to talk about paddling your canoe. So basically go ahead and get in the boat like we explained before, and there's two strokes that you want to learn for your canoe. The first one is your forward stroke. It's going to be very similar to the kayak stroke. You want to grab the "T" grip with your hand, one hand on the lower part of the paddle; you're going to put the blade in the water in front of you. It's going to go to about a three quarters depth. You'll be bringing it back straight alongside the boat. You'll do three strokes on this side, second stroke, third stroke, and then what you want to do is switch hands. So you'll actually switch your grip, it will be your left grip, left hand on the "T" grip, right hand on the bottom of the shaft, one, two, three, and then again switching sides. This will keep you going straight. Now, if there are two people in the boat, what you want to do is have the person in the front calling the stroke. So one person will be stroking on one side, the person in the back will be stroking on the opposite side. When you do your switch, the person in front will call out "hut", which means to switch sides. So again, one, two, three, I call out "hut", my partner and I swap sides so he's now paddling on that side of the boat; I'm paddling on this side of the boat, one, two, three. Now to do a turn stroke basically it's a lot like kayaking. You want to basically, that back part of the stroke, bring the stroke towards the boat, which will turn the boat. Same as what we learned in the kayaking video go ahead and watch the kayaking for the turning. It was called "The Sweep Stroke" and it's that last section of the stroke where it just pulls towards the boat, which will turn the boat for you.
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