WINNING CANOE-O 2008
A Seven-Time US Canoe-Orienteering Champion Reveals All
By Aims Coney
USCA Canoe-Orienteering Chair
What’s the first secret of successful canoe-o? It’s pick your partner wisely. Many thanks to Bob Allen, Barry Fifield, Ernst Linder, Andy Hall, and especially J-J Cote’ who endured so much, taught me so much, and ensured the success for which I later got credit.
Since 2001, championship-level canoe-o has gone through a miraculous evolution. Back then J-J and I won the USCA Nationals by being the only team to bother portaging and dominated local meets by merely showing up with a racing canoe. Nowadays the racers who enter the Nationals make far better decisions and local meets attract plenty of fast canoes. It’s getting more competitive all the time, too. At the 2001 Nationals there was a 2-1/2 hour margin between first and last places but last year the total gap, first to last, was only 38 minutes. At local meets the long course often used to go unused, but now is often the most popular.
While for many of its participants canoe-o remains a relaxed, picnic-along-the-river activity, there’re now more teams jostling for the top prizes than ever before.
We’ll presume you already know a good bit about orienteering and want to learn specifics about canoe-o. So we’ll skip over stuff like orienting your map and go right to the heart of the topic.
Remember though that the perspective from a canoe seat is quite different from the map’s bird’s eye view, made even harder by the expanses visible over water. So while it first seems that a compass would be superfluous, in fact it can be invaluable. I’ve found that a basic wrist compass works best. Your hands stay free and it stays with you when you need to jump out of the boat. If you’re going C-2, both paddlers need their own compass.
Boat Selection
Choosing the right boat forces trade-offs especially with your budget. For many people, whatever canoe or kayak they already own is all they need to apply the techniques we cover here. For elite competition however the stakes increase to lightweight, fast cruisers, both canoes and kayaks, with featherweight paddles made from exotic materials. The last three decades cumulative engineering improvements to canoe and kayak equipment have benefited canoe-o, too. Go watch a canoe race and you’ll be amazed by the technology you see. You don’t know lightness until you pick up a carbon fiber paddle.
Lately kayaks have risen in the overall rankings, however for orienteering purposes canoes are easier to hop in an out of and to carry and so remain the choice of top teams. Two person boats which can also be paddled solo from a center seat offer the advantage of allowing splitting up, with one partner going for a control on foot while the other advances the craft to a distant rendezvous.
No one boat is ideal. However if I were starting out, I’d look for a used Kevlar or carbon-fiber two-person racing canoe. Orienteering is tough on equipment, so it’s smart to find and pay less for a canoe that already has a few scrapes.
Boat Setup
Next, you’ll want to equip your canoe for orienteering. Stealing an idea from ski-o, first priorities are clipboards at each seat to hold the maps.
A yoke eases carrying the canoe alone and the center seat works great when my partner is off running to a control. With a little careful fitting, you can squeeze both a center seat and a yoke into your boat. As a final part of the setup, add paddle holders so you can snap in your paddles and carry the boat and them all together in one piece.
Clothing
I’ve found long pants of rip-stop supplex to be best all-around. They protect my legs when running through the overgrown undergrowth, drain quickly after wading, offer less resistance running in knee-deep water than gaiters, and provide sun protection too. Old running or orienteering shoes are better footwear than sandals or flip-flops, both for running and for foot protection. Make sure your shoes are snug around the tops to keep out stones when you’re wading.
Consider Boat Speed versus Running Speed
Think about it. 7 MPH in a racing canoe is darn fast. A 6 minute mile is 10 MPH. The ratio seems to hold so that for the typical athlete, paddling speed is just about 2/3 of running speed. Even carrying the canoe is still a bit faster than paddling the same distance. The implication is obvious, whenever you can leave your boat and run to a control, or better yet portage and save a longer paddling distance you probably should. Now we’ll get into some specifics.
Going from 15 to 16, should you paddle or portage? The tradeoff is the time to paddle around the peninsula versus the time to get out of the boat, navigate across, and get back in. Adding to the complexity are factors like wind, current, fatigue, and difficulty of navigation. Sometimes it can be very difficult to find a shoreline control when approaching from within the woods yet in a situation like 15 to 16 it is probably worth it.
Practice your take-outs and put-ins. After running through the routines a dozen times in a safe spot like a beach, you can cut out more than half the transition time for portaging. It’ll also give you a better feel for the time it takes to portage and will help with portage or not decisions in competition.
Set Up for Take Off
Another key is planning your departure from a water control so that you can pull out quickly and easily. It may take extra effort to swing the boat in alongside the control in the direction you intend to leave but it saves a lot more spent on maneuvering if you nose straight in.
Split and Go
Perhaps the most exciting element of canoe-o is when one paddler gets out and becomes a runner and the other paddler takes over the boat alone. Beginning teams will land on shore, the bowman will go find the control, and then return to the waiting boat and partner. Elite canoe orienteers will drop the runner, the remaining paddler jumps into the center seat, and then both go hard and meet at a pre-agreed spot further along. Remember, keep the boat always moving toward the finish.
It’s essential though to agree on your meeting spot. If the shoreline is dense but the interior is open, the paddler might land and go inside to be more easily found. Or the paddler might wade out a bit to be spotted. Yelling to locate each other isn’t a bad trick either but can be confusing if several times are doing it at once.
Scouting
In an earlier version of this article I recommended scouting the venue in advance. That’ really only kosher at events where the course is open in advance for practice, such as at the USCA Nationals where orienteering occurs on Wednesday and paddlers are on the river all week getting to know it before the marathon races at the end of week. If so, study whatever local maps and satellite photos you can find of the meet area and envision how the course might be set. Drive up and down the shoreline and observe where the roads come close to the water, where running might be possible, and where it isn’t. But remember, no matter what it isn’t fair to go out the morning of the competition to find controls in advance.
NOW, STEP UP THE COMPETITION!
This year the United States Canoe Association’s Canoe-O Nationals will be held August 6th on the St Joe River in Bristol, Indiana.
Let’s hope that by spilling the beans on my secrets that all canoe-orienteering competitors benefit and the competitive level increases yet again. I can’t wait for you to be the one to rewrite this article in 2018.
Appendix
Three Simple Rules of Canoe-O Course Setting
1) Designate controls as Wet or Dry
Wet controls are hung along the shoreline or in a similar location are intended to be visited by boat. A runner attempting to approach a designated wet control on foot is unlikely to succeed. Dry controls are on land and are meant for foot access. Wet and Dry controls may be identified in a cluesheet or with a W or D added to the control code printed on the map. Sample maps in this article use the W and D convention.
2) Nothing yucky or dangerous
Wet controls should be hung so they can be punched without hurting the boat (e.g. on rocks) nor require the paddler to disembark into mud. The standard is to hang Wet controls so they can be punched from the center seat of an 18 1/-2 foot racing canoe.
3) Team finish
All equipment and team members must start and finish together. For example it is not allowed to abandon a boat on the course and run without it to the finish.