I promise this post has to do with paddling

Well, now it can be told.  The secret has been declassified.  Where was I last week?  Taking a class at the Country Workshops school of traditional woodcraft in the North Carolina mountains.

It was a coopering class.  "Coopering" is the craft of shaping wood into staves and assembling them to make buckets, barrels, and other vessels.  Old-time milking buckets and beer and wine kegs are examples of vessels that were coopered.  Most modern-day coopered vessels are machine-made, but there are a few people out there still doing it by hand, and the mission of Country Workshops is to keep such skills alive.  In the class I took, all the students made simple buckets; mine is pictured at right.  The staves are eastern white pine, and the two hoops around the bucket are maple.


Coopering is probably the most challenging woodworking endeavor that I have tried to date.  The staves contain compound angles (i.e., a plane is tilted by x degrees on one axis, then by y degrees on another axis) that must be cut very precisely so that they all will fit together snugly and form a nice circle.  Even more challenging is to make the ends of the hoops lock together to form a circle of just the right size to fit around the bucket.  Since the "male" and "female" parts of these locks are at opposite ends of a strip of wood, no "test-fitting" is possible until the strip is steamed and bent to form the hoop.  And so very precise measuring and cutting is necessary to make sure they fit together nicely and form a hoop of the right size.

The instructor for this class was Mr. Carl Swensson of Baltimore, Maryland.  I had taken a class in Japanese woodworking taught by Carl last summer and come away feeling that my skill level had improved markedly under Carl's tutelage, and I eagerly signed up for this class so I could work with him some more.  I am not disappointed with the results.

Carl puts a lot of thought into how people--not just woodworkers, but people in all fields--become skilled.  Here are just a few of the remarks I have heard Carl make in the two classes I have taken from him:

"The highest-achieving people are the ones who do the basics better than anyone else."

"It's better to be focused and precise for one hour than to be less so for many hours."

"The best people are making just as many mistakes as you are, but their mistakes are smaller, and they recover from them more quickly."

"When you find yourself struggling with something, it's foolish to think that just sticking with it for another hour or year or decade is going to make you any better at it.  Rather, you should ask yourself, 'What can I change?  Is my tool sharp enough?  Would a different grip be better?  Should I get help from a book, or a video, or a fellow woodworker, or a teacher?'"

In the class, Carl broke each phase of the project down into steps that at times seemed absurdly small.  To achieve that compound angle on the edge of each stave, he had us use our hand planes to establish an edge at the first angle, then an edge at the second angle.  And each of those steps was broken down into even smaller steps: after marking the lines we wanted to plane down to, we chamfered the edges with a carving knife, colored the chamfers with crayon, and then planed until the crayon had disappeared; in this way we "sneaked up" on a surface that was at the desired angle to the stave's broad face.

All along, we cut a little, then checked the result, then cut a little more, then checked again.  If we made a mistake, we caught it early and corrected it.  In a sense, the project was just "one long repair job."

"Information is king," says Carl, when you start to learn a new skill.  Before you try something you've never tried before, don't start from zero; seek out information in a book, or on a video, or from samples of other people's work.  Many of us can make significant advancements simply by observing and imitating others.  Sooner or later, however, most of us will reach a plateau and will need some further guidance to take our skills higher.

In the early going, a person's work will be slow and probably not so accurate as his brain works hard to process the new information.  But with practice, his response to a mistake becomes quicker, and as a result the mistake is smaller because it has been caught early.  The more automatic this response is, the more accurate the work is.  Think of a highly-skilled woodworker using a saw to cut to a line: when the saw begins to wander from the line, the craftsman senses it immediately and makes the necessary adjustment.  The result is a very accurate cut.  His cut is in fact "one long repair job" just like that of a beginner who cut a little and checks and cuts a little more, but because his response time for little errors is so short, he eliminates that step of cutting and checking, and it appears that he's just making the cut with no errors at all.

During the week we watched a video of Reudi Kohler, a Swiss master cooper, making a bucket.  He was doing all the things to make his bucket that we were doing to make ours, but much more quickly and matter-of-factly.  As Carl put it, he was skipping those intermediate steps that we were following because he had the skill and the experience and the muscle memory to do so.


Okay...  I can hear the groans.  You're all sitting there thinking, "Come on, Holmes, I read your blog because I'm interested in canoeing and kayaking.  What's with all this woodworking stuff?"

Well, I'll tell you what's with it: I think these same methods we used to learn to cooper a bucket apply to paddling, as well as about every other sport.

I can't tell you how many paddlers I've known over the years whose skill level was stagnant because they wouldn't let go of the poor techniques that they had become comfortable with.  I've known paddlers who would drive to the Ocoee every weekend of the summer, run the river two or three times each trip, stop at every playspot and play until they dropped; and yet by the end of the summer, they didn't seem to be any better as paddlers than they had been at the beginning.

The reason they weren't improving is that they weren't seeking better ways to paddle, but rather reinforcing their bad habits.  Furthermore, as their hours on the river mounted each day, they got tired and developed even more bad habits.

I'm not saying it's wrong to spend a day playing on the Ocoee or any other fun river--that's the reason we paddle, after all--but the best paddlers I've known over the years have not relied on that to advance their skills.  For them, paddling is something they do for an hour or two each day, on whatever little river or lake is near their home.  On easy water they're not distracted by big waves and holes and drops, and they can focus on the small things that make up a move or even a single stroke.  They're always asking themselves if there's a better way to do something than the way they've been doing it.

Finding such answers is not always easy.  I know I've been stuck on a few plateaus.

Racing slalom certainly raised my overall skill level.  The idea of having to train for something motivated me to spend some time each day in my boat on easy water here in whitewater-poor Memphis.  I saw surprisingly good results when I made a weekend trip to a whitewater river.

It was in the races that my weaknesses were exposed.  Though I was a good learner by watching the other racers, and my results improved as the years went by, a lot of guys were still getting down the course a lot faster than I was, and it took me a long time to understand why.  Apparently, being in good shape and having solid whitewater skills wasn't enough.

Eventually, attending several training camps and getting some advice from coaches, I began to see what was going on.  The best racers--the ones who were making the national team regularly--had exceptional command of the basic skills that allowed them to concentrate on what really mattered, which was getting to the finish line.  They positioned their boats relative to the direction of the river's current so that every single stroke was a good, strong stroke that propelled them toward the next gate.  I, meanwhile was always sneaking in little rudder strokes and other corrections, so even if my run was penalty-free, it was slow.

It's important to note that a top racer makes lots of mistakes during a run.  But his mistakes are small, and he recovers from them quickly.  If his boat veers off his intended line, he gets it right back on with one stroke or even just some body english.  Just like the master craftsman making a saw cut, he corrects his errors so quickly that it doesn't appear that he's making any errors at all.  A less capable racer (like me) tends to let his errors grow into a major loss of time, and maybe some missed gates as well.

It's been about seven years since I last entered a whitewater slalom race.  But I still think about those racing days quite often: things I learned, things I accomplished, things I wish I'd done better.  At age 45 (as of next Tuesday), I've probably missed my window for challenging Olympic champion Tony Estanguet.  But I've got the eternal itch to go out and paddle my boat as well as I possibly can.

And so, when my coopering class came to an end and I went down the mountain for a day of paddling on Section IX of the French Broad River, I looked for one skill I could work on.  I decided to eddy-hop through each rapid and take precise strokes across the current between eddies.

A stream of current down a river is rarely uniform.  It usually contains ribbons of slack water and other disturbances caused by rocks beneath the surface.  So each time I sat in an eddy studying my path to the next eddy, I asked myself how I could get across the current in the smallest possible number of strokes.  I planned my strokes according to the strength and direction of the current, and made the crossing to the next eddy trying to use only the strokes I needed.  Just as taking one pass too many with a hand plane can throw a woodworking project off course and require extra time and energy, one stroke too many with a paddle can throw the boat off course and require extra time and energy.

Between the rapids I drifted along and enjoyed the beauty of the gorge that the river cuts through the mountains on its way to Tennessee.  I was getting tired with a couple of miles to go, so I eased up on the drilling and popped a few enders at Frank Bell's Rapid before completing the journey to Hot Springs.  I took out with that happy feeling of having done something I value and enjoy.

I probably won't be re-entering the slalom circuit, so the top racers in the U.S. may rest easy.  But it sure was fun to spend a week in the mountains contemplating my skills in the workshop and on the river.