Bent Shaft Paddle
A bent shaft paddle
A Bent Shaft Paddle
The original idea here was that East Greenlanders sometimes made paddles that looked very much like other Greenland paddles except that they seemed to be warped so that instead of being straight and symmetrical, they were bent toward one side. John Brand, after seeing a number of these supposedly warped paddles concluded that they were made this way on purpose. In any case, the offset of the blades from a straight line was very small, at most two degrees. So I decided to do these one better and go for an even greater angle.
Construction
Normally, for bent shaft paddles, I just glue up the blank so that the plane of the blades is flat and to get the thickness for the loom, I glue some extra wood to one side of the blades. Then I plane the blank so that all the curvature and taper is on one side of the blades while the other side of the blades lies in a flat plane. For this paddle, I did the usual glue up, but while the glue was setting, I also clamped the paddle to put some extra curvature into it. Once the glue dried, the curvature was set and stayed after I released the clamps.
The paddle is glued up as usual with the extra wood on the side facing the paddler.
The blade has the conventional Greenland style form.
Performance
The bent shaft paddle handles pretty much like a regular Greenland paddle except that you don't need to work to get the right angle of entry when dipping the paddle into the water. The offset of the blade from the loom makes it orient itself automatically so that the flutter that you normally get when you pull a Greenland blade straight back is avoided.
This photo clearly shows the curvature of the blade. When you paddle with it, you hold the paddle so the concave side faces forward.
While the curvature of the paddle helps to avoid flutter, rolling and sculling with the blade requires a little more attention, because it is not symmetrical and depending on which way you have the curvature facing, you need to use a little different motion to scull effectively.