Naming Paddle Strokes

What’s in a name?

We crossed the half mile from Marblehead Rock to Tinkers Island pretty easily. Winds were light, and only the mildest swells lifted our boats as we moved across the open water. We were looking forward to playing around the large boulders scattered offshore.

The group of geese huddled at the edge of a sloping rock looked less pleased to see us. At our approach, they shuffled their feet and called out a guttural cronk. Unsure of the threat we posed, their heads flicked toward us, then quickly away, perhaps eyeing an escape route.

These were Brant geese, though I didn’t know that yet. As far as I could tell, I had never seen them before. But later that day, I looked them up and learned they’re migratory birds, on their way back to Arctic breeding grounds. They’re common in our area, so it’s likely I had seen them before and just hadn’t noticed them. Next time we paddle out, I imagine I’ll see them pretty regularly.

That’s the funny thing about names.

Once you learn what something is called, you start to see it everywhere.

I experienced this years ago during a brief foraging phase. Once I learned about a plant called “goat’s beard,” I started seeing it everywhere—along driveways, at the edges of yards, and on roadsides along the Ipswich River. (People say the roots taste vaguely like oysters, though I never got around to trying it. Like I said… it was a brief phase.)

So what does this have to do with learning to kayak or paddleboard?

In our courses and lessons, we teach several strokes for controlling your kayak. Forward strokes help you go forward, sweep strokes help you turn, draw strokes move your kayak or board sideways, and stern and bow rudders give you fine-tuned control of your boat’s position and angle.

Here’s why naming matters: Paddling on your own, you might discover that moving the paddle in a wide arc away from your craft helps you turn. But once you learn that maneuver has a name (a sweep stroke), you can start to recognize and refine it. You begin to develop a shared language, one that lets you experiment with body positioning, setup, blade angles, and sweep arcs. You start to understand how each piece affects your boat, and when to adapt it to different conditions.

This is how we design our Foundations Courses. Over four weeks, through dry land discussion and on-water practice, we build a shared language of paddling—and then build on it to expand your skills, your confidence in rescue and safety, and your understanding of how wind and tides shape conditions.

It opens up whole new parts of the ocean to explore.

And if you’re game, we can paddle out together and start naming some edible seaweeds for future foraging 😉

And speaking of names, here’s a quick detour to Ancient Greece:

“Then, when the young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more, we put out to sea on the wine-dark water.”
~The Odyssey, Homer

In The Odyssey, Homer famously describes the sea as “wine-dark,” but never as blue.

It’s not that the Greeks couldn’t see blue the way we do (though the absence of the word led some early scholars to suggest just that). Rather, their language didn’t carve the world up in quite the same way. What we might call dark blue could be seen as shades of black or purple, and lighter blues as gray or green.

Which makes you wonder: when we look out at the ocean and call it blue, are we simply describing what we see, or seeing it that way because we’ve learned to name it?