Boat Equipment Oars and Paddles

It turned out that propelling the boat forward by pushing the water to the back with a paddle or oar has a pretty long history. So a simple project quickly turned into a very deep rabbit whole …

How the idea of building paddles came about

The boat came with a set of paddles. They fit me very well as a child. They were rarely used, because we were on a sailboat after all and we sailed everywhere when we could— to jetties, to mooring buoys and into harbours.

But we always used them to get from the mooring buoy to the jetty (or the other way) when we hauled the boat out or in. When my dad handed the boat over to me, I was assigned a new buoy that was in the neighboring mooring field, which doubled the distance to paddle and I had to do it alone now (but that's a different story).

On one of those trips it clicked: A few days before I had found out that those paddles I got were indeed varnished blanks for children's paddles when I visited a local canoe supply store. The decision was made to build a new set of paddles and on this trip, I thought about what paddles for boats of this size (6.50 m length) might look like. Maybe I could make oars. But what I hate about oars is that you usually sit backwards in the boat to use them. But the Venetians use oars as well and they row looking forward. And they use a single oar. So I decided to look into venetian oars.