How to do a Draw Stroke in Canoeing

Video Transcript

"The draw stoke moves your boat toward your paddle side. In order to do a draw stroke there are 3 main principals. The first one is we're going to face our war. We're going to turn our torso toward our on side so that our torso is facing the direction of the stroke. The second one is that I'm going to stack my hands. Top hand right on top of the bottom hand and they're both out over the gunnel with a nice vertical paddle shaft. Now with my blade buried in the water, I'm going to draw the boat toward the paddle and then I'm going to recover by turning my blade so it's parallel to the direction that I want to recover in and slicing it back away from the boat. Now, I'm purposely keeping the blade a little bit out of the water here so you can see the angle of the blade. Here's the stroke again, here's the recovery. I'm doing that recovery by turning my top hand thumb out away from the boat to slice the blade back out. You can also do an out of water recovery. That first recovery is called an in water recovery. An out of water recovery you do a draw stroke toward the boat, drop your top hand forward, lift the blade slightly, and go back out to the next stroke. Generally, if you're going to do more than one of the strokes in a row and in water recovery is a more efficient way to do it and certainly it's a more smooth way to keep the boat moving to the side. That's a draw stroke."