Creeking Paddles Review - Canoekayak.com

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These paddles enable you to be one with the water and stave off disaster when things get gnarly.

By Chris Joosse

First appeared in Whitewater 2006

A paddle is a paddle, as they say, but your creeking paddle is more than just that. When things are going well, it's your primary means of feeling and touching the water - a good one will extend the neurons in your fingers out to the ends of the blades and beyond. When things are going badly, you use it to stave off certain death.

As a creeker, I want certain things out of my paddle: it should be indestructible, weigh nothing, transmit all the feel of the water, and have just enough "give" to make it painless to hit rocks but not so much flex as to delay the availability of the one thing I want most above all: power. Right now.

If the samples I got to work with are any indication, paddles have improved since the last time I shopped. Materials, engineering, ergonomics, and blade shapes have evolved such that I was pleasantly surprised by the improvements. What's more, the evolution of paddles is still going on, as different engineering approaches are used to home in on the "ideal" paddle articulated above. Some use a stiff shaft with slightly flexible blades, while others have rock-hard blades and a springy shaft. Materials used range from carbon fiber to nylon matrices and beyond-it's like the space program has finally made it into paddlesports. Paddle engineering is one area in which we have never been so well served as we are today.