Split Rock Blog

Interested in canoeing with your partner? Your relationship better be ready for it. 

"You're not paddling hard enough!" "What are you doing??" "Why are you turning us?" "I'm not turning us—you're turning us!" "ROCK!"

If you are reading this and you are not super-experienced with canoes and are planning to go canoeing with your partner/spouse, know this: you might be heading towards some conflict. The thing is, canoes don't go straight (and your relationship might go sideways too). People who know how to paddle properly make it look like canoes go straight, but they don't naturally. It's all tricks and it causes a lot of blame to be thrown around. Consequently, canoes have become known as "divorce boats." 

It really makes me wonder—how many divorces have been caused by canoes? They can certainly cause floating frustrations, and perhaps be enough to tip relationships over the ledge leaving some dumped. During my time as a canoe guide, I witnessed so many endure the hollering wrath of an ill-informed paddle partner. So much suffering has been caused by the myth that if both paddlers paddle with the same intensity or rhythm, the canoe will go straight. Nope. That's just not how it works. When guiding a high school group many years ago, I witnessed a teacher berating students for going off course because they weren't paddling perfectly in sync. The dude was pretty intense, so, to my everlasting shame, I didn't publicly correct him. (To those students out there who may have never paddled again, I'm sorry!) 

Speaking of outfitters, have you noticed that several of them have moved away from renting canoes in favour of little inflatable "kayaks"? I mean, I would never want to paddle one of those, but it's a brilliant idea! Far less drama when everyone is in their own little comfy, inflatable, hard-to-tip, floating armchair.

But thinking back to before I learned to canoe—I get it. The damn things just don't go straight! My first memory of steering a canoe with a friend in my early teens, mostly consists of me blaming him and telling him to paddle harder. (That, and the fact that the canoe fell off the car while driving, and that wasn't his fault either). 

But as any canoeist knows, the position of the stern and bow paddles in the water will always cause the canoe to turn to the stern paddler's offside. To counter this, a slight turning stroke, the opposite way, is added to the stern's forward stroke—the J stroke. When done right, nothing happens—but that's the point. The natural turning is cancelled. Lacking this one tiny bit of information changes everything for your enjoyment of the whole experience, and of your partner. Sure, anyone can zigzag down the river or lake by switching sides repeatedly (and some have managed to paddle across the country solo using this method), but it's the J stroke that separates canoers from canoeists. It's the calling card of those who know how to paddle and maybe the saver of relationships too. 

The brilliance of the J-stroke is both in its simplicity and its counterintuitiveness. People aren't likely to figure it out on their own by playing around. Experience alone will not give it to you. When you're shown how to do it, you're a part of a long lineage of humans going back millennia, passing that information on to others. Yah, I'm sure a lot of things are like that, but this one feels more important. "Go straight by turning." It also serves as a nice example of how in order to really enjoy canoeing, there's some stuff to learn. 

This is, of course, multiplied in any kind of faster-moving water where there's a lot more to learn. The partner-blame can come easily. Even for more seasoned paddlers, the instinct to blame can be intense. Whitewater introduces more factors that are counterintuitive. It requires a kind of meditative approach to understanding your relationship with the river which is indifferent to you and doens't mind tossing you around. But if you and your paddle-partner work together, understanding what needs to be done, and the sometimes narrow options provided by the river, you can get through (and have a blast!) 

I'm sure this makes some interesting parallels to relationships in general, but I'll leave that for you to find. My general point is that a lot of suffering can be avoided with a little bit of pre-learning. (Feel free to watch some videos in our "Learn to paddle" section). Canoeing is awesome, but it's a bit more complicated than you think. Give your partner some grace, and do some learning on how you both can go forward together. (ok, yeah the paralells are really starting to stand out now 😁).