Canoeing and Kayaking: The Most Elegant Form of Travel

Canoeing and kayaking are the most elegant forms of human-powered travel beyond walking and swimming. To travel on water without a craft, unless competitively skilled, requires one to flail arms and legs in the water to move forward at a speed easily matched by even an unskilled paddler (even when under load). To use a canoe or kayak requires no mechanical parts. Body English and human power provides all the motion and maneuvering power.

Other human powered watercraft include the raft or the glorified raft known as a paddleboard. Tying together boards into a mainly flat rectangle lacks the design choices to be considered elegant. Elegant defined as a solution to traveling on water that is pleasingly ingenious and simple. While a raft and paddleboard may be simple, the design choices aren’t pleasingly ingenious (throwing a flat piece of plywood onto the water could never be considered pleasingly ingenious in design) even if fun – for who wouldn’t want to paddle a raft down the Mississippi in a fun adventure.

The ingenuity to create a canoe or kayak’s complex sweeping and pleasing design that varies in curves and sectional shapes but yet flows smoothly from shape to shape is unmatched, and to do it originally out of the material growing in the woods or hunted along the shoreline kept these craft simple. There are no more required materials to build from than those that could be found on a walk in the woods or along the ocean’s shore.

Elegant, ingenious and simple are the canoe and kayak.

Some would argue that the sailboat is just as an elegant of a way to travel by water, and while the sailboat may look pretty, it is removed from simplicity in that it requires mechanical attachments, pivoting rudders and a dagger board to keep it tracking. When it heels under strong wind, a sailor’s body English must fight a capsize instead of directing the boat’s path. When the wind isn’t blowing, even a small sailboat is a beast to move. To overcome that, sailors attach oars to mechanical pivot points and propel the boat forward while the sailor looks backwards. Just imagine having to look to where you have been instead of where you are at and where you are going — talk about a backwards vision! While a solution to traveling on water, the argument can’t be made that it is as simple and as pleasingly ingenious of a way to travel as canoes or kayaks. For it is complicated when compared to paddlecraft. Indeed, it is harder to move and control than even a raft or paddleboard. It cannot compare.

Ingenious and simple is the canoe, and ingenious and simple is the kayak. There’s no doubt that among watercraft the canoe and kayak are the most elegant. When on the water, they are the most elegant form of travel.