Video: How to Do Spins in Canoeing

Learn how to do one of the many spins for flatwater canoeing in this free outdoor extreme sports video from our kayak and canoe expert.

Video Transcript

The next manuver we're going to work on is a spin. A spin is a way to turn in a circle maintaining your position; staying pretty much in one place. There are a bunch of different ways to do spins. You can use a bunch of different comboniations of strokes. One of the easiest ways is with a sweep stroke on your on side and a draw stroke on your off side. That will look like this. If you watched that spin carefully, what I'm doing is a little hop over the bow and it's almost like a continous stroke. It's almost like my cross draw stroke starting over here, continues right across the bow and all the way to the stern. The opposite way to turn will be toward my on side, I could do a reverse sweep followed by a cross forward sweep. That cross forward sweep is a very strange stroke. It's sometimes called the pretzel stroke because it really makes your contort in ways that you don't usually contort in. For the cross forward sweep is like a cross forward stroke except that you drop your top hand across your bottom arm and you make a nice wide sweep out to the side just as you would for an on side sweep. Notice the paddle shaft becomes more horizontal then. The cross forward sweep when you get good at it can be very effective. One of the tricks of the cross forward sweep is as you approach the stern, as you get back in here, it becomes very delicate because if you let it go too far it gets caught under the boat and you do a spectacular flip to you off side. That's how you do spins left and right.

How to Do Spins in Canoeing

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