3 Tips to Improve Your Sculling Draw

Kayak Hipster demonstrates 3 things to try next time you're working on your sculling draw. An efficient sculling draw will help reduce wasting energy to move your kayak around.

Sculling is the idea of using your blade through the water as if you're spreading peanut butter or jelly on toast. The idea is, you have a climbing angle and as you move your blade through the water, that movement gives you the ability to make the kayak do whatever you want. So for example, right now I'm drifting because of the tide coming in. I'm going to use a sculling draw on the side to either keep me in place or to bring me back to where I was. I just wanted to give a couple of tips if you see that you're not being really efficient at it. Just three things to try next time you're on the water.

Go Slowly

The first thing is to go slowly. One of the things you see when people are not having a success moving the kayak is they're just moving the paddle very quickly through the water. They're not really engaging with the water. One of the things to think about is slowing things down, go very, very slowly and make your movements all the way from the front to the back. So you're really using every inch of your movement as you move from side to side.

Face What You're Doing

Second thing to try is to face what you're doing. So really try to twist in your seat and face with your shoulders what you're trying to do on the water. If you're facing forward doing this, you're not going to be as efficient as if you're looking where you're moving. And that gives you also the full range of motion from the front, all the way to the back. If you're facing forward, you're only getting to play with that quadrant over there. However, if you're facing the side, now you can really reach back then you can reach forward and use the entire length of a cockpit so that you can get a grip on the water. Remember to go slowly.

Think of that Upper Hand

The third thing to try next time you're doing this is to think of that other upper hand. Try to push it as far over as you can and keep it up top. This helps keep the paddle vertical and if the paddle is vertical, then you are using that climbing angle efficiently to move the boat sideways.

Sculling draw is really useful for moving the kayak around especially from side to side, but you could use it to move your kayak in any direction you want, as long as you change the way you are doing your scull. And when you find the sweet spot of your kayak, you can move it sideways and you can get it to turn as you're moving sideways. There's a lot of things you can do.

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