My stroke was laboured,… come on stroke, where are you? Just because I have spent a winter skiing doesn’t mean I have aban- doned you forever. Repeat.Persevere through clumsiness until mus- cle memory kicks in and suddenly it is back. As the season builds, I move constantly between the nature


around me and an interior dialogue,watching my own technique, observing what works,what is getting better and what is not.Every hour or so,I pause and drink some water, eat something,look up at the mountains to the snow which stays well into the season. Later, when I am east, I float deep in the lees of the Georgian Bay archi- pelago, watching the charcoal, white necklaced loons who live in this bay as they raise the next generation just like I am doing with my children. Eugene Jensen spends his life trying to build the perfect canoe. I spend a lot of mine trying to find the perfect stroke. The perfect stroke—that elusive moment when you are in the


perfect trim in the perfect canoe, when your hours of meditative paddling now allow you to divide a 1.2 second stroke into a hun- dred intervals and know exactly what you have to do in each one to be able to deliver maximum power in the instant when physics and geometry can deliver maximum efficiency—and you are sud- denly in that moment, turning on the afterburner in a final shot of accelerating effort.You have made the canoe go as fast as it can.And then the canoe takes over,holding onto the speed you have given it in a long glide, a victory of inertia over friction thanks to the great designer who thought out your hull—and it waits for you to do it again.


CANOEROOTS2002


The search is the reward. I have paddled the same routes all my


life and they continue to give me something fresh each time out.A still, early summer rain shining the rocks and bringing out their colour as the lichen swells and softens, later, the first cardinal flow- ers telling me the summer is ending, crimson strokes painted along the ends of tough, thin green stalks late in the season.The search reintroduces me to my rhythms and gives the partnership of two good paddlers,the quiet pieces of shore on which you rest,the per- fect union of form and function in those quick and beautiful hulls.


I


F I HAD LOST THE RACE, THE WINNER WOULD HAVE PADDLED WELL.I DID- N’T LOSE.I WAS AHEAD FROM THE START AND INCREASED MY LEAD THE


whole race.Two kilometres later, I finished fifty yards in front.The new guy is second. Two hours later, my brother and I won the doubles race in the same hull. He is all strength, I am all tech- nique.We had the canoe humming early and we left good wake the whole race. The new guy beat me in the sprints a week later. I was quick-


er off the line but he gained speed and I couldn’t hold mine. He beat me by almost a length.He and his partner did it again in the pairs. His sprint technique was better.Next year mine will be too … and I look forward to it.


Ted Cape is a 51 year old paddler for whom the sport was reborn when he discovered the modern canoes designed by pioneers such as Eugene Jensen and their successors. Over the years, he has accumulated 6 of these canoes. For him paddling has become athletic as well as aesthetic and for this he thanks the designers whose creativity, thoughtfulness and will- ingness to depart from tradition have produced these beautiful hulls.


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