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Friends to Practice With
A River to Paddle
Understanding how balancing weight affects tracking.
How to manage the paddle power in your boat
Discussing how micro adjustments keep you moving downstream.
In this lesson, Nathan and Trevor discuss weight distribution and paddle power. Many newer rafters run into trouble when they do not have a proper system for distributing weight and paddle power across their boat. You may find that your raft is tracking poorly or pulling hard in one direction or the other. If you are continuously experiencing this issue and you have properly inflated your raft it is time to look at how you are loading your raft to understand where you are having trouble.
Having an uneven weight distribution leads to one part of the boat sitting lower in the water. When you are newer to whitewater this will cause you some serious frustrations in how your boat tracks and moves. As we mentioned in our momentum and tracking lesson having a deeper draught will cause you to have more drag on your boat. If only one side of your boat is deeper in the water that point will experience more drag. If the front right tube sits lower for some reason your acceleration will suffer and you may keep pulling to the right because the front of the boat is plowing water and creating more drag, thus slowing down the right side of the boat. Since the left side experiences less drag, then it will naturally glide faster on the water eventually causing you to spin in circles.
The goal in this case would be to move paddlers, equipment, or both around your boat to make the other tubes share the load more evenly. this will make your boat sit flat on the water and evenly distribute the weight so that no one side experiences excessive drag compared to the others. This could simply be moving a cooler to the other side of the boat or you may have to rearrange the seating positions of your paddlers. Unfortunately, if you have one person who is noticeably larger than another you may have to place more paddlers on the other side of the boat to compensate. Remember it is ok to ask people what they weigh to make some quick calculations on which side has more weight, just make sure to preface that with letting people know that you need to balance the load in the boat and explain why you are bringing up the topic.
With weight often comes more power since people who are physically larger than others tend to have more leverage or weight to put behind their paddle strokes, however this is not always the case. As a simple example let’s say you have 2 people who are 5‘4” 140 lbs. (63.5 kg) and a 1 person who is 6’2” 190 lbs. (86 kg), form a sheer leverage and power perspective it would make the most sense to place the 6-foot person on one side of the boat and the smaller paddlers on the other. It would also be best to put the smaller paddler with more power across from the largest paddler since they will still have a disparity in strength, but it will be reduced since the person in the back could always add a couple micro adjustment strokes as needed.
When you get your crew to the raft look at your paddlers and try to quickly judge which ones will be the strongest then make sure each side has an even distribution of strength. There are a few things to bear in mind when you are going through this process:
Size does not equal power, so look for taller and more muscular people then start by placing them on opposite sides of the boat. Even though size does not equal power, leverage does equal power so taller paddlers have a paddle power advantage over smaller paddlers due to leverage.
Fear trumps paddle power, so even if you have a giant person strapped with muscles, if they are timid and afraid of rafting you won’t get much power out of them so they become dead weight.
Take some time at put in to assess how your crew is paddling. have them take a few paddle strokes without you adding any adjustments in and see which way the boat is turning and how fast it turns. This will tell you which side is stronger at paddling and allowing you to move folks to the weaker side before you get to the rapids.
There will never be a perfect balance of weight and power and thus it falls to the guide or the more experienced paddler in the boat to correct for this eventuality. Micro adjustments are small pry or draw strokes that you need to add as your boat is tracking to make sure the boat stays on course. if you are on the right guiding in the back of the raft and the boat is naturally turning to the right you will need to add in a couple of small draw or forward strokes. If in the same seating arrangement, the raft is pulling to the left, you will need to gently pry off the stern to keep the boat tracking straight. You can think of these strokes as more of a ruddering micro adjustment techniques rather than full on navigational strokes designed to rotate the raft in one direction or the other. Alternatively, you can keep you paddle in the water and do small sculling strokes to make sure the boat stays on course.
