The 1960s and 70s were the golden age of whitewater canoeing in the United States, and I sometimes lament having missed out. But I did get into the sport soon enough to witness scenes like the one in this photograph. A big open canoe seems awfully clunky by today's standards, especially when the paddler is just kneeling in the bottom of it with his rear end against a thwart, without the aid of thigh straps or a pedestal. But that's how we paddled when I was a kid at summer camp in the early 1980s.
We practiced on the lake in aluminum canoes, and for river trips the camp owned a trailer of six "OCAs" manufactured by the Blue Hole company of Sunbright, Tennessee. In any given summer each craft saw an untold number of pairs of campers hopping in and out, so there was no custom outfitting in those boats.
Somehow, we learned and executed all the basic whitewater moves: ferries, eddy turns, peelouts, even some surfing like the man is doing in the photo above. It's hard to believe that my little 110-pound frame could push one of those barges around, but that was the point: you got the river to do as much of the work as possible.
Eventually I wandered into whitewater slalom racing, where I had a much more nimble boat to paddle and had to develop a more sophisticated skill set. Then I moved on to paddling surfskis on flatwater and open water, where both the boats and the paddle strokes are quite different from anything I'd done before. But the basic idea remains the same: use my body in combination with the forces of nature to move my boat.
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