2008 Maui Paddle Showcase

The Paddle Showcase is complete. It took almost as much effort as the board showcase, we hope you find it useful. You can just click on the Paddle showcase tab to get right to the index, or there’s a copy of the index at the end of this article.

The showcase will continue to grow and evolve–we’ll evaluate paddles and add them as they become available for us to test. If there is a paddle you like to see included, please let us know and we’ll get to work on it.

Paddles are Personal and Critical
Paddles are personal, even when you’re done nothing to make them that way. Whether you start with a $18 plastic canoe paddle extended with a broken pool skimmer shaft or a $320 custom Malama they influence every aspect of how you do this sport. The right paddle makes everything easier, more fun, more rewarding. The wrong paddle can leave you with aching arms, back and shoulders, struggling in every wave or slow and wobbly in flatwater.

Hard or Fast?
The biggest paddle choice you need to make is whether you want to pull hard or pull fast. Racing paddlers look to “catch” the blade in the water then pull their boat or board past the paddle that’s frozen in the water. They don’t want to “stir” the water or form big eddies behind the blade–that wastes energy. When you see a blade with sharp corners or a wide base it’s a blade that optimizes catch, and it will give a lot of torque and acceleration.

Catch comes at a price:

• Corners and sharp edges generate tiny eddies that give the blade a “wiggly” feel under hard paddling.
• The hard plant of the blade delivers an abrupt pull when your muscles are extended.
• The blade also applies a lot of torque to the shaft and can be hard to control. Powerful or experienced and fit paddlers consider torque to be a good thing–when it’s controlled it’s how you put the power into the stroke. For less aggressive paddlers torque means a paddle you can’t control that’s carving ladders in your board rails.

A few of Sol Morey’s Homemade Paddles. Where did you get all those broken windsurfing masts, Sol?

Applying power
The power portion of the stroke is after the catch and before the release. At this point you can engage your core muscles, your arm and shoulder muscles are partly contracted and working in their most powerful configuration. A lot of the energy is coming from your abdominal muscles.

Some paddlers want to apply full power from the catch to the release, aiming to get the most out of every stroke. Other paddlers want a soft catch and really apply power for only part of the power section. They don’t mind that the catch is soft, they want to apply power where their body is most comfortable.

Most paddlers let the paddle drift after the power stroke and release it from the water automatically, as the board moves forward. But some want to get the next stroke started, they might even finish their stroke by turning the blade sideways and lifting it out of the water.

The factors that determine what paddle is right for you have mostly to do with your preferred paddle method. Unless you’re a trained paddle athlete this is mostly driven by basic preferences that seem almost genetic. For example:

• If you’re climbing a hill on a bicycle, do you prefer to be in a very low gear and “spin” the pedals or do you prefer to be in a higher gear and crank hard, maybe standing on the pedals?
• If you were pushing a piano, would you brace yourself wide so you could get full leg pressure into pushing, or would you keep your feet together and take little steps?

You can see where I’m going with this. If you’re a spinner you probably want a smaller blade that doesn’t catch hard, and you’d prefer to use shorter strokes. If you’re a cranker, you want a hard catch and you’ll sacrifice stroke speed for pull.

The other factor is fitness and injuries. If you have junk shoulders as I do, or a tendency for tennis elbow or other muscular limitations, you’ll want a paddle that’s easy on the joints. Soft catch is one factor, weight and materials is another. Wood paddles compensate for their higher weight by having a lot of damping, which your shoulders might like. Carbon fiber blades and shafts that have low swing weight and small blades with rounded profiles are also easy on the arms, shoulders and back.

Variable Blades
Some paddlers like the idea of longer paddle blades to give user-controlled resistance. The idea is that the blade can be partially inserted to soften the catch or fully inserted to harden it. You can also stroke these blades in an arc that begins with partial insertion to spare extended muscles and then deepens to fully inserted as the power stroke is reached. Otter tail blades take advantage of this principle.

On to the Showcase
This showcase is fundamentally subjective, but we’ll give you some guidance about the paddles that might suit you best. As with the board showcase, each paddle has its own page. The page includes:
A picture of the paddle
A technical description of the materials and design
A description section which comes from the company’s web or brochure copy (edited to be concise)
Evaluator’s comments from paddle evaluators
Summary comments derived from how the paddle was scored on the evaluator’s checklist.

Werner Spanker
C4 One-piece fiberglass 9
C4 One-piece Fiberglass 8.5
C4 One-Piece Carbon 9
C4 One-Piece Carbon 8.5
Kialoa Shaka Pu’u
Kialoa Nalu
Kialoa Kole
Kialoa S.U.S. (Stand-Up Surf)
Gillespie Powersurf
Malama SUP
Quickblade Kanaha
Quickblade Peahi
Oxbow (Bic)