Talking about paddles amongst paddlers is like a never ending story. Nowadays there are so many types and shapes of paddles that it is hard to have an opinion upon all of them. But we still distinguish the flatwater paddles and the more river/whitewater paddles. Also the 2 mainstream grip types are still in the running.

Paddle Parts

1 picture says more then 1000 words, so here is one picture with a couple words on it:

Grips

Let's start with the grip types. The following image shows 2 types.

The two paddles on the left have what is called a T-grip. The paddle on the right is outfitted with a palm grip.

The palm grip is found mostly on flatwater paddles. This type of grip spreads the grip throughout the palm of the hand quite evenly and is nice to move around in the palm of your hand.

The T-grips are found more often on river and whitewater paddles. The most left one is a narrow wooden one, the middle one is a bit thicker and made out of plastic. The reason for T-grips on whitewater paddles is that is allows a firmer grip on your paddle, giving less chance to the river to knock your paddle out of your hands.

Blades

The blades for whitewater and flatwater are also different. The following images shows a whitewater paddle on the left, a flatwater paddle on the right.

The blade surface of both paddles is about the same, the shape is totally different.

• As you can see a flatwater blade is remarkably longer then a whitewater blade. This has several reasons.
  On the river you encounter rocks, roots and other nasty stuff. The longer your blade, the more chance of hitting them. On a lake you don't have those features so you can use a longer blade.
• This longer blade means that you have a longer time before the blade is totally submersed in the water, being smoother on your joints
• Having a longer blade allows you to dive deeper in the water with your blade, searching for a firmer grip on the water. After all, the deeper you go in the water, the stronger the bite of the water on your blade.

The flatwater paddle shown above is a so called guide, one of the available shapes. The following image shows a beavertail.

Another well known flatwater shape is the so called ottertail. This blade is even narrower and longer. There are many more blades on the market nowadays. You can find many of them online. But if you haven't tried a flatwater paddle before, give it a try. Even in a playboat the difference is remarkable!

When talking about whitewater paddles, 2 major differences come into play: curved/spooned or straight, symmetrical or assymetrical.

Let's have a look at the spooned - straight difference first.

The left paddle is straight, the right one is spooned.

A straight paddle you can use however you want. The behavior is always the same. A spooned blade is something different. The blade is curved in a given direction, indicating a power or active blade side and a passive blade side. The active side is supposed to be the hollow side. This making hollow of the blade is meant to provide a better grip on the water, catching more water on a curved surface then on a straight one.
The backface of a spooned paddle is important. If the backface is just the other side of the curve, water tends to poor of even smoother then from a straight blade. Providing less grip on the water then with a straight blade. You'll notice this when backpaddling, doing a stern pry or trying to roll. In my opinion good spooned paddles have a rib on the backface, providing a shape that has an equally good grip on the water as the power side. The following picture shows 2 backfaces of what I think of good spooned blades.

As you can see on the images above, both shapes are not the same. Not only the rib is different, but the length of the paddle blade left versus right side of the blade is identical for the left paddle, different for the right paddle.

The right paddle is a so called assymetrical paddle. This shape is meant to provide a maximum bite at the water for the paddle since optimal verticality is most of the time not present. This assymetrical blade has as goal to compensate for this little lack of verticality.

Paddle length

What is the ideal canoe paddle length. That's a tough question to answer. Every person has another feeling for paddle length. But luckily there are a few general rules.

Your shoulder can sustain a maximum force when your arm is perfectly horizontal. You can easily test this by leaning against the wall, having your hand and shoulder height, higher or lower and feel the difference. So ideally your grip hand is at shoulder height when the paddle blade is fully submersed.

When paddling whitewater we can use some extra leverage. So here it's the time we have to choose between optimum shoulder height or more leverage. The compromise that's often taken is to have the grip hand at nose/forehead height. A longer shaft might bother you with certain strokes, especially with cross forward strokes.

The following diagram illustrates the paddle length once more. The gray grip-arm demonstrates the connection with a typical flatwater paddle. The red grip-arm demonstrates the connection with a typical whitewater paddle.

Note that the blade submersion is at exactly the same place but that the flatwater paddle is deeper in the water then the whitewater paddle. The length difference is determined by the shaft length.

This actually states that measuring full paddle length is total nonsense. It's the shaft length that one should know for both positions, from throat to grip.