Strokes & Braces

I love that there's various canoe cultures. If you paddle places like Quetico or the Boundary Waters…

To paddle a canoe in a straight line there are a number of innovations. You can power forward and then…

One of the greatest things about kayaking is that pretty much anybody can hop in and do it. But you need…

The upright position boat edged, all my weight is in my right hip. My left knee is up, and that's giving…

Kayak outfitting has become more and more comfortable. So comfortable in fact, that it often promotes…

This video demonstrates the Greenland Side Sculling maneuver and breaks it down into a few useful steps.…

What makes kayaking so accessible to women is that it's really about finesse and not so much about…

Becky Mason demonstrates the useful Canoe Sculling Draw stroke in this short video. The Sculling Draw…

This video demonstrates the forward sweep and the reverse sweep, emphasizing that the power for these…

The J-Stroke is a version of the Forward Stroke that gets used by both solo and tandem stern paddlers…

Side slips move your canoe laterally like when you need to pull away from a dock or the…

The Stationary Bow Draw is a stroke that only works when you have forward momentum. It's used by the…

Another beautiful day here on the Kesagami. This would be day three, if you count the day I got dropped…

One of the greatest challenges for the solo paddler is paddling in a straight line. And, of course,…

To look at turning a moving canoe, we're going to break the turns down into four parts. The first…

When paddling solo you can move backward in a straight line by using a combination of back strokes and…

A pivot is used to turn a canoe that's sitting still, around its center point, and it's pretty…

Like the Stationary Bow Draw, the Cross Bow Draw is a stroke primarily used with forward momentum. It's…

The three golden rules are a set of rules that when followed, will let you paddle the most efficiently,…

Sometimes you're going to want to go sideways in your kayak, and one way of doing that is a Draw Stroke…

Quite often, you'll want to go sideways with your kayak, maybe to get to a dock, maybe just to pull up…

Forward paddling, that's your powerful straight line paddling, but your kayak really wants to go in a…

A stroke that will make the kayak glide straight, for example, when you have a wind behind you, and it's…

Paddling a kayak is mostly about going from point A to point B. The stroke that you use for that is the…