Ottertail Paddle up for grabs in Raffle Contest

I've donated one of my older paddles to a worthy cause. The Maple Walnut laminated Ottertail Jay paddle is being used as the First Place prize in 2022 Raffle Contest. Proceeds will go to the Northern Lakes (Canada) Chapter of the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association. One of their programs that got cancelled during the COVID years was a planned program to restore old wooden canoes with urban high school students to complete their volunteer hours. The kids would learn some practical wood-working skills while making derelict old canoes water-worthy again. Hopefully the program will restart again in the fall. To cover the cost of materials as well as expenses for items such as exhibition space, advertising and mandatory insurance, the Chapter is holding its first ever raffle fundraiser contest with three prizes up for grabs. 

First Prize

 58 inch ottertail canoe paddle

This full-sized artisan canoe paddle is made of Maple and Walnut and features a unique guide style grip. The blade is decorated with a hand-burned image of a Blue Jay perched amongst some tree branches. Paddle is fully sealed with marine grade spar varnish and is ready of immediate in-water use or for display. 

Second Prize 

Framed 18" by 24" Peterborough Canoes historic reprint

 Grace your walls with this large colour poster (18" x 24") mounted in an attractive wood-finish frame. This historic reprint outlines some of the various hull designs and construction methods of the world famous Peterborough Canoe Company, active from 1892 to 1961. 

Third Prize

Paddle making book and DVD set

This set of resources has all the info you need to learn how to carve a variety of one-piece and laminated paddle designs. Includes a brand new, unused copy of Making Canoe Paddles in Wood by Graham Warren and a DVD copy of Paddlemaking with Graham Warren. The DVD (runtime 90 minutes)  includes ten full-sized, digital blade plans (*.pdf format). 

Raffle Details and Tickets

Draw Date: Friday, September 30th

Tickets for the Northern Lakes Chapter raffle are reasonably priced at $10 a piece or 3 for $20. Only 250 tickets in total have been issued. Tickets will be available for sale in person at each of the various upcoming events in their event calendar. 

Virtual Tickets can also be purchased by Interac email-transfer (sent to Chapter Head, Alex Guthro) or by sending through this PayPal Link. Funds are in Canadian Dollars. Virtual Ticket purchasers will need to provide their Name, eMail and contact phone number. This information will be manually written onto each of your numbered tickets. A scan of your completed ticket(s) will be emailed to you serving as your receipt. 

The draw will take at the tail end of the paddling season on Friday, September 30th with winners announced through this website and email. You do not have to be present to win. However, winners will be responsible for pickup of the prizes from locations in Southern / Central Ontario. Please note that prizes cannot be shipped.

Mark L's Exotic Wood Voyageur Paddle

Mark Lafontaine's blog recently had a post about his latest paddle creation, a 61.5 inch "modern voyageur" design made of exotic Lacewood (Grevillea robusta) and ash. I've stayed clear of using exotic hardwoods mostly because I've read they are hard on the handtools and don't plane very well without tearing. But after seeing the gorgeous lacewood grain on Mark's paddle, this inconvenience looks to be well worth the effort.


Mark's Lacewood & Ash Voyageur Design


Lacewood grain pattern


Laminated grip
More pics of Mark's efforts as well as a synopsis of things he learned with this project can be seen on the original full post here.

Whitewater with Battenkill Grip: Part 1

Many thanks to Graham Warren for directing me to the April 1997 issue of Wooden Canoe Journal where an article by Barry Beals describes an interesting asymmetrical grip. Co-developed by Beals and Jim Walker of Battenkill Canoe Ltd, the unique grip is a fusion of two popular styles, the standard pear and T-grip. In theory, the flattened portion of the half pear cradles the palm more comfortably and the half-T portion allows the thumb to curl around into a more natural position while still providing a positive hold on the paddle. Below is a blurry shot (apologies) of this grip design sketched out in pencil on a piece of maple stock.


Battenkill Grip
Despite the fact that I don't do much extreme white water paddling, I've been wanting to make a functional whitewater paddle for when I encounter some basic rapids on river runs. I envisioned this grip really shining in whitewater conditions and so decided to make another whitewater paddle using Graham Warren's blade design.

I had another piece of birdseye maple stock from which the Sparrow Solo had been made carved back in '08 and this would make the bulk of paddle. Since the edges had been planed square at the mill, some waste pieces of black walnut were easily laminated for the edges.


Laminating walnut edging
A slip of the sawing at the throat of the paddle left a major flaw in symmetry but I'm hoping to correct this by reshaping this area when it has been thinned out more. Below is a shot of the blank so far...


Whitewater paddle awaiting work
If anyone has made a Battenkill grip or come across paddles with this grip design, feel free to post a comment or send me some pics for posting.

Walnut Laminated Voyageur

A common paddle design marketed today is the so called "Voyageur" blade, essentially a straight side paddle with a wide, squarish tip, and recurved shoulders at the throat. Despite the persistant occurance of this design in modern stores, there is little evidence that it resembles anything that the real voyageurs may have actually paddled. Certainly in the paintings of Frances Anne Hopkins, the paddles don't resemble this blade design. The only other time I've seen the recurved shoulder design is with an early Mi'kmaq design documented by Adney.

Graham Warren refers to this design more precisely as a "North West Voyageur" simply because it appears in the voyageur art of Howard Sivertson. For some examples, I checked out a book of his entitled, The Illustrated Voyageur: Paintings and Companion Stories which has some delightful anecdotes and illustrations, although probably not entirely accurate.

Cover of Sivertson's Voyageur themed book

In any event, I had made this blank many months ago from scraps of black walnut and a 3/4" wide strip of yellow poplar. Given the small width of the poplar, the walnut was laminated from the grip all the way to the blade resulting in a neat contrasting look in the shaft area. Walnut and Yellow Poplar are both very easy to carve and the simple, straight edges meant that cutting out and shaving down the blade and grip was very quick. This was one of the fastest paddles I carved out from a blank. Here are some pics of the job.


Unfinished paddle; Blade Closeup
Since I was using left over cutoff scraps, the grain pattern isn't perfectly symmetrical on the blade. There's also point on the blade where the grain reverses suddenly giving the appearance of a horizontal "scratch".

I've read plenty of criticisms of this blade design on canoeing forums with many paddlers literally calling this blade shape a piece of junk. Personally I found it an acceptable design although the larger squarish tip certainly made for a noisy entry and the recurved shoulders tended to cause some cavitation and loss of power when paddling with a quick pace. But I found that if I slowed down and relaxed the pace it handled well with underwater recoveries. The walnut-poplar lamination also resulted in a super-light paddle and there's no denying the rich-chocolatey appeal of the wood. Instead of adding any additional pyrography to this one, I've settled on simply oiling it and using it as an occasional light use paddle


Final work all oiled up

Cherry Edged Beothuk - Part 3

With all the fun distractions this past summer, I haven't sat down and worked on a paddle for a while. So I decided to get back in it and work on the Cherry Edged Beothuk that had been giving me problems since it was started back in July of '08. When I last posted on this different design, the cherry parts of the bobble grip were being laminated onto the main gripface.


The initial square grip with sketching; Cherry pieces, Glued up
With the glue long dry, it was time to start shaping the octogonal grip into something resembling a spherical bobble. Problem is that with time being limited resource as a new father, multi-tasking has become a necessity.

Lately our little one has been more finicky than usual and needed constant rocking during one of our little excursions to the small lakeside beach at the cottage. In an effort to sooth the boy while also making some time for the paddle, I set up a bushcraft-style nomadic hammock recently taught to us by a relative overseas.

Known as a "Gypsy Swing" in Turkey, this ingenious contraption is found all over the countryside and may be the saving grace for any parent. All that it requires is a rope (I had a 20ft line of cheap polypropylene), a medium sized Turkish Kilim (a large beach towel would suffice), and two sticks. After some experimenting with Evenk Knots and other hitches from a Ray Mears episode on Bushcraft the lines were all set. Some creative folding of the kilim and stretching out with the sticks and the little hammock was set up complete with a view of the lake. To control the swing, an extra line was attached to big toe to provide the foot power rythym.


Set up between the trees


Drifting off to nappy time


Toe powered with hands free to carve
He drifted off quite quickly and I was able to crudely shape the grip into a fair-sized bobble. While not exactly perfectly shaped, the amount of labour involved and the never-ending drive of attaining spherical perfection made me stop when the grip felt comfortable in the hands.


The Bobble Grip
Not being able to resist, I took the paddle for a quick test spin in the lake even though it had not been thoroughly sanded with fine grit. The blade, very similar to the cherry edged Kayak Paddle I made last year, handles well and the bobble is actually quite comfortable to use for basic forward strokes. As a solo paddler however, many correction strokes require quite different positioning on the grip and in this regards the bobble is limiting. Still it's quite logical (and an unusual paddling sensation) to use a spherical grip which actually fits the shape of a relaxed hand quite nicely. I'll be taking this one back to the city to decorate the blade over the winter.


Unfinished Beothuk Paddle

Cherry Edged Beothuk - Part 2

Another paddle awaiting some attention was my attempt at a cherry edged, birch-cherry laminated paddle based on a surmised Beothuk design documented in Adney's sketches. Unfortunately the sharp recuve at the tip was too much for the cherry striped edging and the glue did not hold when the clamps were removed. The rest of the blade was fine so in order to salvage this paddle, I redrew the tip a bit higher and re-cut the blade with this ultimately, more narrow tip. A while back, I had set up the shaving horse outdoors and did some work in the brisk spring sunshine.


Split Edging; Redrawn blade


Working on the shaving horse
Adney documented the surmised grip on this paddle as a spherical bobble and this would be my first attempt at something like this. Given the cherry edging, I thought it appropriate to laminate some extra cherry pieces onto the grip which could then be eventually shaped into a sphere. The approximate grip size sketched on the birch (with internal sketches of an octagon) was cut when originally shaping the blank. Additional blocks of scrap cherry were cut to size and then sawn to remove the angled edges resulting in an octagon effect when glued up. The plan is to further shape it with a rasp down to a bobble shape confortable in the hands. Here are some images.


The initial square grip with sketching; Cherry pieces, Glued up
I still haven't worked on the paddle shaft yet as there is more fine tuning to do on the blade region, but here is the work in progress so far...



Sept 1/09 Update: Part 3 has now been posted.

Laminated Kestrel Paddle

This weekend while Toronto experienced another mild spell in the weather, I finally finished another full-sized paddle. Back in the fall, work began on one of my many remaining laminated blanks - in this case, an ottertail laminated with a central strip of cherry, 2 strips of basswood, and some large cherry pieces for the blade and grip. I found the dark cherry and creamy basswood to have a nice contrast.


The blank last fall
Graham Warren's book mentions the importance of bookmatching the panels on laminated paddles to maintain a symmetrical look, but I was more interested in using up the offcuts to minimize wood wastage and I didn't really pay much attention to this approach. Given that the cherry was cut from the same board anyway, I assumed there would be a natural symmetry.

When carving down the blade however, some light coloured streaks of heartwood began to show - so light that the normally amber toned cherry looks as pale as the basswood strips on either side of the central shaft. Not so bad on the first side, but on the other, it gives the illusion of an uneven blade. Purely cosmetic of course but this non symmetrical look makes the whole thing look somewhat flawed.


Uneven grain pattern on blade
I decided to decorate the blade and grip in a manner that would offset this visual blemish and ended up with another birding image, this one of an American Kestrel (Sparrow Hawk). These diminutive little birds have a colourful coat of feathers which I tried to replicate with various shades and textures. Some freehand leaves and branches were added as accents. Varnishing will have to wait until the weather warms up again.


Kestrel Image on the blade; Leaves on the grip


The unvarnished paddle

Aleut Kayak Paddle - Part 2

One incomplete paddle project that's been haunting me lately was the attempt at an Aleut style kayak paddle made with some left over walnut and maple stock (see the Part 1 post). The blank was cut out in the fall of '07, but the actual carving didn't being in ernest until the late Spring of '08. With the frustration of working with a a wavy grained wood that I shouldn't have used in retrospect, the paddle has been sitting and collecting dust in the locker room for months now. So in an effort to finish what was started, I decided to forgo any major pyrography decoration (wouldn't show up will with this dark piece of walnut anyway) and simply sanded it down and oiled it.

Aleut kayak paddles tend to have an interested off centered grip area with a spine ridge running the length of the blade. Here are some pics to illustrate this:


The offset laminated loom


Two shots of the blade powerface


Backside and Powerface pics
I'm not much a kayak paddler anyway, but intend to give this one a test trial in the spring and will report back then.

Interesting Epoxy Laminated Paddles

I came across a page on the MAS Epoxy site documenting the work of Doug Roberts from West Virginia who uses the adhesive in making his many laminated paddle designs. The writeup mentions his use of various woods including butternut, white cedar, spalded beech, curly maple, and cherry. Also interesting is that he used epoxy with food dyes for an interesting colouring effect. I like the inlaid look of his paddle tips as well as the pattern of the checkerboard paddle. Might be a great addition to a back-country trip where a relaxing game of chess or checkers could be played after a hard day of paddling




Shots of Doug Robert's creative laminated paddles
Epoxy is tough on blades and handtools but it is more gap-filling than the polyurethane glues I've used on my paddles. I might consider making more paddles like these with all the accumulating wood scraps in the future.

Mixed Laminated Blanks

A little while ago, I decided to put the the loads of large cutoff scraps littering the locker room floor to good use and came up with a bunch of combinations for various laminated blanks. After another visit to The Carpenter's square I shaped this remaining blanks to size. Here's a before and after shot


Glued up scraps before


Specific paddle shapes emerge
The designs are (left to right):

• Narrow Ottertail with Decorative Maliseet Grip (Poplar/Cherry/Birch)
  
• Western Cree with square mushroom grip (Poplar/Birch)
  
• Large Ottertail with straight Maliseet grip (Cherry/Basswood)
  
• Voyageur with tripper grip (Maple/Cherry)
  
• Algonquin blade with Adirondack grip (Cherry/Basswood/Walnut)
  
• Reshaped Beothuk with bobble grip (Birch/Cherry)
  
• King Island Inuit (Cherry/Basswood/Walnut)
  
• Mini Maliseet (Poplar/Walnut)
  
• White Water with Battenkill grip (Maple/Walnut)

I had also decided to continue using up some of the smaller scraps to do some craftwork...basically cutting out some spoons, forks, spatulas, wooden blocks, knife handles, mini-paddles, and any other stuff to whittle out this summer. I brought a bucket full of these scraps and ended up with quite chache of goodies for intended projects down for down the road. At home, I layed out the inventory on the floor of my den and took a shot (with my wife's feet sticking into the shot).


Buckets of scraps; Inventory laid out on the floor

I guess they'll be plenty more posting on the blog to come.

Cherry Edged Beothuk - Part 1

Another paddle design that intrigued me was that of the Beothuk paddle descibed by Adney. The tragedy of the Beothuk extermination in Canada means that nearly all reliable info on this tribe has been lost to history, but Graham Warren has a nice plan of a surmised paddle with a "bobble" style grip in his first book that I blogged about earlier.

Given the graceful sloping design of the blade and its similarity to the 17th Century replica paddle I'd been working on, I thought I could steam laminate some cherry edging on this one as well. This paddle is cut from Yellow Birch (Betula alleghaniensis) and following my steaming procedure from before, a cherry strip was heated and clamped around the edge of the paddle blade. I took these shots while working the garage up the cottage.


Steaming the cherry; Clamping to the blade
Unfortunately, this time around, once I removed the screw clamps, the cherry split under the pressure at the tight turn at the tip and the foaming Polyurethane glue sprayed everywhere creating quite a nasty mess. The bulk of the cherry edging is fixed quite well however, so to salvage this paddle, I resketched the tip a few inches higher and will have to settle for a shorter blade length and an incomplete edging effect.


Split Edging; Redrawn blade
Rather than re-sawing this out by hand, I've decided to wait on this and bring it back to the city for a visit to The Carpenter's Square where it'll be reshaped with their bandsaw. We'll see if this major mistake can be corrected or if the paddle will need to be cut up and made into something else.

Update: Part 2 posted HERE