Hal Beilan, another active BASK member, decided to initiate a MYOP (Make Your Own Paddle) day to get a bunch of people started on making Greenland paddles. I was considering going to this event, but then it turned out that Hal didn't have a good place to have the event. I suggested my shop and although it is out of the way for most BASK members, many agreed to come anyway.
Eight people showed up to make paddles on Saturday morning. This included Val Wann, who has built his own boat, Doug Huft, who has made many Greenland and Aleutian paddles, an Steven Littlebear who recently made a Baidarka and was here to carve a single-bladed Aleutian oar.
I tried to show everyone how I had made my paddles using a table saw to remove as much material as possible. This ended up working incredibly slowly and we decided that the blade on my table saw was too dull to continue. My skill-saw cut the wood faster, so we built a jig that clamped a piece of wood at the right angle to cut the taper on a blade. Because the skill-saw blade was small, it took 8 cuts per paddle to do this. Everyone was conservative and did not cut very much material off. I warned them that they were going to have to remove lots more material now by hand, but they didn't listen to me.
I had suggested that it is possible to make a Greenland paddle in one eight hour day, but only one person did. Perhaps because most people here had not made one before, or perhaps because there were so many of us waiting around for access to the power tools. The guy who did was Doug Huft who has made quite a few Aleutian style paddles. He demonstrated a technique of using a power grinding tool to remove lots of material in a short time. The conservative carvers were unwilling to risk their wood on this technique.
Several of the south bay BASK members stayed over at my house and we turned it into a pot-luck dinner and something of a party. Then the next morning we did a little more work on some of the paddles and went for a short paddle to try out Doug Huft's paddle on the Russian River.