Tips Sail

After sawing out the Custom Solo Kingfisher blank from a decent piece of stock, I was left with a rather long cutoff piece of walnut. At it's widest point it was 3 inches but at least 58 inches long. Rather than simply waste the wood, I thought I could put it to use for an experimental paddle.

At the time, I hadn't graduated to making laminated paddles, so the idea of sawing out a straight section to make a shaft hadn't occured to me. Instead, I remembered reading somewhere that authentic voyageur paddles were quite narrow compared to modern standards, some as narrow as 3 1/4 inches with 30 inch blades. This seemed to be consistent with the paintings of Frances Ann Hopkins. She accompanied her husband, a Hudson's Bay Company official, travelling extensively by canoe along some of the most important fur trading routes during the late 1800's. Her detailed paintings are considered to be the most accurate representation of the Voyageurs during that time. The paddles do indeed look quite long and narrow, consistent for an occupation that required relentless paddling.

I thought I'd try to make one of these "authentic voyageur" paddles as an experiment with the remnant wood. The piece was 3 inches at its widest point, so I figured a blade would be feasible even if slightly narrow. Problem was, the wood tapered near the grip area, resulting in a width of less than 1 1/2 inches, so in order to form a grip, I'd have to improvise. I decided to glue a crosspiece against the face of the shaft area and carve a crude assymmetrical T-Grip. Not very authentic voyageur like, but experiments are meant to try something new, right?


Front of grip


Side View & Back View
As expected, the blade is quite flexible and not very powerful for solo paddling (I kinda knew that going in). But if imagined 7 other voyager paddlers in a 24 ft. Canot du Nord, I could see how paddling an narrow blade like this would prevent fatigue at 50-60 strokes a minute.

As for the decoration, the extreme narrowness of the blade and its faster pace usage inspired me to burn an image of a tiny, hyperactive bird - The Red-Breasted Nuthatch. I've seen these tiny creatures in action and they're quite interesting to watch climbing down tree trunks head first storing food in cracks of bark or searching out old stashes. As with most of my current work, I'll have to wait till spring to varnish. Here are the final pictures:

Red-Breasted Nuthatch closeup


The whole paddle

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.


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