Michael Krabach: The Best Paddle You Can’t Buy

SUPPORT TEAM QAJAQ USA'S JOURNEY TO GREENLAND

In this episode, Dubside talks with Michael Krabach at the 2025 Delmarva Paddlers Retreat about the craft, science, and obsession behind making Greenland paddles. Mike explains how he approaches paddle carving from an engineering perspective, why he thinks of the paddle as a hydrofoil, what woods he prefers, and why a sharp block plane may be the most important tool in the shop. Along the way, they discuss Home Depot lumber, Alaskan yellow cedar, tool sharpening, paddle flex, and why Mike’s handmade paddles have become known as “the best paddle you can’t buy.”

Transcript

[DUBSIDE]
Welcome to the Dubcast, with Dubside. Special guest today is a guy named Michael Krabach, who has a wealth of information about making a wooden paddle. We talked about making a paddle, using a paddle, some of the analysis of the stroke, the types of wood available, the trade-offs there.

The tools used in making a paddle, between a block plane, bandsaw, saber saw, draw knife, spokeshave. Talked about sharpening your tools. And towards the end of our talk, he has a story that involves a nuclear submarine.

This runs in the neighborhood of 40 minutes. 

It is Sunday of, second Sunday in October, and we're here at the Delmarva Paddlers Retreat 2025. And I'm talking to Mike, I say KRAW-bahk, or KRO-bahk, or you tell me.

[MIKE]
KRAY-bahk. KRAY-bahk.

The Bach is a Johann Sebastian Bach.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah. I first saw you maybe here a few years back, but I remember you had these very cool paddles, and you gave one to me.

[MIKE]
Well, I tried it, I didn't want to do it directly, so we arranged it to have it presented to, yes.

[DUBSIDE]
Oh yeah, however that was, yeah, yeah. And I took that paddle home, and I really like that paddle.

Your thing to me seems to be, you put that little bit of bend, it's thin enough so it bends, right?

[MIKE]
The basic thing on the paddles that I've been making, and I've carved about 80, maybe 90 now. Starting, I don't know, back in 2015.

The first paddle I got was when I made my F1 with Brian Schultz. And that was a quick paddle, because we had to get done, and we were going to get out in the water Saturday morning, so everybody's carving paddles.

[DUBSIDE]
So that was the first Greenland paddle you made?

[MIKE]
That's the first Greenland paddle.

[DUBSIDE]
Okay. And do you have a woodworking background?

[MIKE]
No. My background, though, is I've got an engineering degree in naval architecture and marine engineering, and I've got a master's degree in ocean engineering, and I've got a certificate in electronics.

I worked in IT. I've been basically involved in a lot of engineering projects, not final projects, but studies. EPA problems.

I worked 20 years in nuclear power facilities in the environmental department, and then I worked several years in the IT department. So I'm tackling my things from an engineering standpoint, not an artist standpoint. My woodworking capacity is, I've got a bench in the basement on one side, a couple vices.

I bought a nice new bandsaw to cut out the blanks, and I've got a table saw that I've had for 20 years or so. So my facilities are pretty simple. But when I first made my first paddle, and I was paddling with people who actually were using Greenland paddles.

I remember trying one once, and of course it fluttered. And it was a heavy paddle because the guy that made it really wasn't into Greenland paddling. He did it because his shoulders were sore.

So after a while, I started looking at it, thinking, wait a minute, maybe I can make this, you know, after the first Greenland paddle, which was kind of crude, maybe I can improve it. Eventually, I pretty much figured out—well I didn't figure it out, it's just the way it works— that the paddle going through the water is really a hydrofoil, as opposed to people think of it as airfoils, and you think of a thick wing that utilizes, it's curved and everything. But when you're in the water, you're in a very thick media, and things work different.

So lately, of course, the America's Cup boats are riding on foils. Surfboards are on foils. And a foil is very, very thin.

All you're essentially doing is a blade that's going in a direction in the water, and it follows the direction it goes, because the water's pretty thick. And if you do it right, it lifts you up or pushes you down. So I have been doing with paddles thinner with, well, first of all, I made a whole bunch of paddles with Western Red Cedar.

But I started thinking they were made thinner. I actually called my friends who I'd given them to and said, hey, give me my paddles back. And I re-carved a dozen paddles, because I'm thinking they can really be thinner without upsetting the structural strength of the paddles.

Most paddles are much stronger than really what you need. So that kept going, getting thinner. Then when COVID came along and Western Red Cedar became more difficult to access.

And at the same time, I was thinking other people say, “Hey, I'd like to make a paddle.”

And I say, “Well, Western Red Cedar.”

And they say, “Well, where do I get that?”

And that's a problem. Only a high quality specialty lumberyard, which we have one in Rhode Island called Liberty Cedar, they handle this stuff. But most people don't.

So I started looking around at that time at other woods. You know, the front of Home Depot, all the planks in a pile. Dig through the planks looking for a good one.

[DUBSIDE]
Hey, all the way to the bottom.

[MIKE]
All the way to the bottom, or until the employee says, “Could you get out of here? You're making a mess.”

So I did carve a dozen of these cheap paddles.

And I tried fir. I tried everything that would be available essentially in the state of Rhode Island there, which did not include, like Don Beal uses cottonwood. I have no idea where you get cottonwood.

I could not get any stick of spruce either. So I went through the things. And so the paddles are getting thinner.

At that similar at the same time, the people at Liberty Cedar suggested the Alaskan Yellow Cedar. Somebody had made some canoe paddles out of this stuff. So I tried that.

And I made a couple out of two by fours. Now, Alaskan Yellow Cedar is very heavy, like a two by four. 

[DUBSIDE]
So heavier than Western Red Cedar?

[MIKE]
Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're all sort of basing it on the weight and structural integrity of Western Red Cedar. And so a two by four of Alaskan Yellow weighs seven pounds.

And you carve it down and you end up with a paddle of two pounds. You've carved off five pounds of this very heavy, dense wood.

And it's sort of like this is not worth the effort. And at that time, I also said, hey, why don't I just go with a one by four? Save it.

And of course, the band saw you do a rough cut anyways. And so after COVID, the Western Red never really came back in the market. By the way, the Western Red, the axis that I had in Rhode Island would cost $80 for a two by four of Western Red, which was double.

It used to be about four.

[DUBSIDE]
Didn't they like going to Home Depot and getting the cheapest two by four you can find. It was like $10 or $5. And what kind of wood is that?

[MIKE]
That's just a pine. It may be fir, it may be hemlock. 

[DUBSIDE]
Which is really not useful for making a paddle at all.

[MIKE]
Yes, it is. I made six of them for a good… And I made six of them to see how difficult it would be.

You know, it's like you make one and it goes great. And you say, oh, you tell everybody, hey, I made a great paddle out of it. But that's really not true.

That was like an off, one off. You start doing more and more and you find out that how the characteristic works. And it boils down to that.

Yeah, if you want to do that and you find a clean piece, lucky you if you find it.

[DUBSIDE]
So clean, meaning no knots.

[MIKE]
No knots, not twisted and dry. And dry too.

Because I've carved a paddle and let it dry and it dries crooked.

[DUBSIDE]
So you buy it and it's still got enough moisture in it to be. It's not dripping wet, but it's just moist.

And then you carve a paddle and then it dries further and the whole thing just warps.

[MIKE]
The whole thing's warped. So your construction cedar is not dried as much as your furniture cedar or just wood in general.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[MIKE]
So at that time, I was finding out that the thinner I can make the paddle, the thinner and thinner. The problem is when you make it thinner and thinner, it gets weaker and more flex. So there's a limit any wood can go thin. 

I discovered then at the back of either Lowe's or Home Depot or the big box lumber yards that there's a wood called their select pine. And you look at the label and it says made in New Zealand.

And it was clean. And of course it's stacked vertical so I could look through them very well.

And I said, well, try it. I tried it and I found out that structurally and making a paddle of it is very similar to the Alaskan Yellow.

So I started making paddles on that and I still made it the Alaskan ones. It ended up that a blank or a piece of wood from Home Depot or Lowe's was only a one by four by eight was only $15.

So you can really screw it up on your own, only out, you know, a burger and a, you know, fries with a large drink. 
The Alaskan Yellow still, if you can find it, okay, it's going to cost you $35 to $30 to $35 for a one by four by eight. The problem is most yards don't have it.

So I was looking for a wood that anybody could find the wood and anybody could try it. The difficulty with either the Alaskan or the New Zealand pine, okay, is that it's very difficult to plane. And I carve all the paddles with little hand planes.

It snags very easy. One reason the Western Red has been so popular is that it's easy to carve and the grain is soft enough and it's brittle. That's, that's why it's easy.

It's not a tough grain. You can carve it and not have to worry about which way the grain is going. You just carve it.

But when you get a tougher wood and the grain snags, it peels like a banana peel and then you can't carve it from the left to the right. You got to carve to the right to the left. And then the problem comes on one side of the paddle.

You want to go to the left to the right and the right and the left and it just gets to be difficult. So technically it's a good wood to work with, but it's a difficult wood. So you just, I just accept that fact because the whole question is you want a real thin paddle.

The reason how I get a thin paddle is I'll bend it on, I'll hold it and I'll push it on the floor and I'll bend it. And I certainly don't want it to bend too much. And so how thin it goes is how much it bends.

I have, I have an allowable amount of bend that I feel is acceptable. And whatever that is, that ends up as how thick that paddle is. And of course you want to get light, not super light, but you want to get down to a pound and pound and usually come out to about a pound and you know, 12 ounces, you know, something like that.

A two pound paddle is, I say a two pound paddle is, eh, that's a, that's a little, you can do better on that. Sometimes you have to thin it and it gets a little flexible to get it down. But hey, some paddles you make are what I call swamp paddles where you can cruise in the swamp.

You don't worry about waves, you're just cruising. You want a nice lightweight paddle. A western red, if you find one is a nice one or a very flexible one out of say New Zealand pine.

But if you're going out rock gardening, you want a different paddle. It's like a lot of times you have tools, you know, one tool for this, one tool for that. So that's how it ends up and works.

[DUBSIDE] 
Now, can you tell me, you said you use a one by four.

[MIKE]
Yes. 

[DUBSIDE]
But that thickness, I mean, that's a little bit thinner than typical often. 

[MIKE]
Right.

[DUBSIDE]
So you're laminating to get a little bit thicker.

[MIKE]
The lamination, the darker or any color wood you put on the loom to make it a little thicker.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah. So the loom would be thicker than a one by four would that.

[MIKE]
The loom is thicker. And yeah, even after carving the transition from that bump on the loom down, it's not a good angle. It becomes and watching people here using planes and stuff.

I've always been in my dad's workshop in the basement. You learn to do this, you learn to, you know, it gives you a hammer and you hammer away until you learn to be a hammer. So by the time you're seven years old, you can use a hammer.

Most people don't have that. And so when they grab a tool, it's like they just don't have this… they don't know how to even hold it.

It's almost like when you try to teach somebody a forward stroke, it's like trying to get them to get that forward cant to it. It's like, oh, it just doesn't quite work right.

And they can't get the feel. And when they look at it, they don't quite understand what they're doing because they… you got to wrap your mind around some object. The first time I learned computer programming way back in 1963. It was a change, complete change in the engineering field.

This was like people may remember in the audience…

[DUBSIDE]
You’re talking about punch cards, 1963

[MIKE]
Punch cards. Yeah. Fortran on punch cards.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah. Fortran. 

[MIKE]
The first time you write a program is supposed to do something like sorts, you know, a bunch of numbers.

It's the concept of writing a program was, is foreign. It was difficult until my roommate, who had already done it, you know, after an evening or two of, you know, giving me, you know, this and that, you finally grasp it. You finally grasp it.

You get the idea of how it works. And it's easy. Well, a program is easy.

It's like a language. If you know the language, it's easy. If you don't, it's hard.

But paddling, I'm seeing people have the same problem. It's like, it's like you just don't know quite what to do because you don't, you don't understand the environment. And the Greenland paddle, I see so many people don't understand that it flies in the water.

It's, you know, there's, there's, there's water going over it from the front edge to the back edge. With a spoon paddle, it’s built to split the water and goes off both edges. A complete different philosophy. 

And until people get their mind around the fact that it's a hydrofoil, you got to move it back and forth in the water to get any lift. Once you get the lift, you can get a lot of lift.

It can lift the whole sailboat if you do it right and fast. Okay. And also in the paddles I make, I make the blade, I bring the blade all the way towards the loom as much as I can without narrowing it down so that your hand can still grasp on the blade and the loom properly.

But you got a lot of blade because it's the blade that counts. And then of course the shape is very squarish, no curvature because it's too much of a fuss to plane and curves. I lay out a straight line and you plane it.

So, so I keep saying the paddle to me is like a hammer in your toolbox. You throw it in your toolbox, you may get a little nicked and beat up and everything, but as long as it will pound a nail effectively, it's a tool.

So take your paddle out. It's a tool. I don't treat the ends.

I don't put any bone on it. You know, we're not pushing our paddle against ice and we don't need that. If the edge okay?

So yeah, the whole thing is that I've got a paddle pattern now that works generically and it's simple to make if you avoid all the snagging and everything.

But it comes out a good paddle, which I think is probably the best that I've been able to go. I can't see anything more that I can do with a paddle.

I found the wood that anybody can use, the New Zealand pine. I found the wood that I think is best, which is the Alaskan Yellow. And then the pattern I've got is 88 by, you know, three inches wide or so.

If you want to make it shorter, cut off the ends.

So that's the story of how we got these paddles. And I keep making them and looking at them. It's every piece of wood is different.

Every piece of wood. So you're never going to get a commercial operation with wooden paddles. That's why there isn't one.

It's not, it's not a bit of the business model doesn't work. It doesn't work. A spoon paddle, you just get a tube in the middle and you, and you get some molded things in the back and you slap them together and you charge them a couple hundred dollars.

[DUBSIDE]
Well, at the times I've seen attempts to crank out wooden paddles with a CNC machine. It doesn't know that it's a special piece of wood with a unique grain. And it just doesn't work.

[MIKE]
It doesn't work. Yeah. So when you carve a paddle, it's sort of like you look at it and you plane it and you see what you can get.

And the more you make with them, it doesn't mean like—I’ve made 80 or so—it means if you've made two or three, and especially if you stick with one kind of wood, you start to feel, you know, so then when you go to the lumberyard or Home Depot's or Lowe's and go, you start to look at them. Of course you want a straight one.

And usually they're very clean as far as knots and things. Some of them you lift up and oh, it's a heavy one. Some you lift up and it's light one.

And some you can lay out on the floor and do a little bending. So after you made two or three, you find a nice piece of wood and you carve away. And you carve with very, very sharp planes.

It's got to be sharp.

[DUBSIDE]
So you were talking about how, you know, people learning how to do something initially, it can be difficult and you have to sort of figure out how it works. And I was thinking you were going to relate that to using a plane. You just pick up a plane you've never used before. It takes a while to get a handle on it.

[MIKE]
Yeah, people will hold it wrong. They'll push into it like they're shoveling snow. They won't let the weight of the plane cut easily.

The blade is a very subtle thing. So when you're cutting a real piece of hardwood, that blade is coming through the bottom in a very small amount, very small. And I look down the plane and I'm looking at a fine line to see how much is coming out.

So the tools I use are, I have a very good plane, a Lie-Nielsen, which is...

[DUBSIDE]
I know about Lie-Nielsen. Those are the best.

[MIKE]
It's $180 plane.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah, you can easily get a good plane for a third that price. But the Lie-Nielsen is there.

[MIKE]
It happened to be that Lowe's changed their brand. Home Depot's got a brand. The Lowe's brand, they picked up a brand called Jorgensen.

It's a yellow thing and they got three models. And it comes out that these planes are what they call low angle block planes. And it's about five inches long.

And I think it's like $40. And it's good enough to start. So people want to make their own paddles.

I say it's a fun game. And you can save a lot of time if you think about what you're doing. A lot of things on YouTube.

I don't understand how some of these people are making things on YouTube.

The paddles, they're really, you know, overkill, you might say. They're cutting big blanks with saber saws. Instead of going to a neighbor or down to the school and use the band saw, you just cut it right out quick.

[DUBSIDE]
So what's the difference with a saber saw? You're just not going to get a real straight line?

[MIKE]
No, it just takes forever.

[DUBSIDE]
It takes longer, yeah.

[MIKE]
Band saw, you just zip right to the end, and you can make a nice, clean line. So a saber saw, I don't know, I've never done one. My saber saw, if I try to cut this, it's an old Sears one for 50 years old, I don't know, it'd take a half hour or more.

You know, slowly, and this wood is hard. This is not pine, this is a hard wood. It's going to go through really slow.

With a good band saw, it used to be that I'd go over to a friend's house and take two or three blanks, four or five blanks, and we'd go in the basement and we'd shop and we'd cut out, I'd cut out blanks. But I can't do that now, so I bought my own band saw. An expensive one, if you're making one paddle, don't go out and buy a band saw.

[DUBSIDE]
All right. Now, I've been told, I've made paddles here and there, and started with semi-blanks or something, not a whole lot of paddles, but I'm kind of familiar with the concept. And I understand that it's possible to take a straight two by four, and a lot of time, we'd say like a draw knife, and get the basic shape, but it's going to take you quite a while, and you're easily going to take off too much if you're not handling the draw saw properly.

[MIKE]
A draw knife, the angle that you draw it on, you set the angle as you pull on it. So you've got to be really skillful and have used it before.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[MIKE]
A spoke shave takes off too little, and you've got a two-hand, you have to draw it. I can't draw it much, because I don't have a lot of room.

I have a flat table, and I clamp it down on the right-hand side, because I work from right to left, because I'm right-handed. I clamp it down, and because I'm only working with a one by four, it lays flat. Even when I carve one side and flip it over, it only flexes down a little bit.

So I just carve on a table, flat table. With a plane, it's like… a plane is very forgiving.It doesn't dig in, and it's easy to work. And to sharpen a draw knife is very difficult. You pull the blade out, and to reset the blade, to change the depth of the blade, it's not like a good plane where you just do a little knob, and you can change it.

And that's all it takes is a little tweak on the knob on a good plane to change that depth.

[DUBSIDE]
When you're starting with the rough blank after the bandsaw, with the block plane, after you've got the basic shape, do you readjust the block plane to take a finer cutoff, or the block plane is set the same all the way through?

[MIKE]
If you're lucky, you have several block planes. 

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah, okay.

[MIKE]
If not, yes.

[DUBSIDE]
The benefit of having several block planes is you set each one for a different blade. So you've got the fine, the medium, and the coarse. 

[MIKE]
A friend of mine, he had like, I don't know, five or six drills.

They were pretty much the same. And it's like, sure, how many drills? 

He says, “Hey, you know, I don't want to change the bit in the drill. I just grab a different drill.”

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah, all right, all right, yeah. 

[MIKE]
It’s one of those luxuries that people get too many of one thing, because they like to do it, so they end up buying it. It's like some people have too many autos, or cars, or boats, or paddles.

[DUBSIDE]
Or kayaks, yeah.

[MIKE]
It's like too many clothes. You get to pick the color of the same style, because you've got a closet full of clothes.

So that's how that works.

[DUBSIDE]
Now, some block planes have what they call the adjustable throat, like the knob on the front, and you can open the gap a little bit wider or shorter.

And some don't have that. What's the deal there?

[MIKE]
The purpose of that is to allow how much chip goes through.

It’s, if you put the blade down farther, because it's a tapered blade. A deeper cut, you're going to have to move the clearance out farther.

[DUBSIDE]
Open it a little wider.

[MIKE]
Yeah, open up the front. On some of the very smaller planes, that's fixed. On the Lie-Nielsen, their smaller brass one, it's really tight.

There's no adjustment whatsoever. And when you look at it, you say, boy, the blade is like a 32nd of an inch from the front.

[DUBSIDE]
So if you can't open that wider if it's fixed, and you go for a really deeper cut, is the problem that it'll just clog into the gap there, or what's the problem?

[MIKE]
Not really. I set the front clearance, and I never change it.

It works on all the, if you're putting the plane down that far, you're not going to be able to plane a piece of New Zealand pine. It's going to be so far that you can't take a chunk off.

[DUBSIDE]
You'll just bite way too much off.

[MIKE]
Yeah, way, way, way too much. Okay. We're talking such that, how much did the blade extend down below the bottom plate?

I don't know, a hundredth of an inch, you know, type of thing. Right. It's really quite small.

So when you shave off a shaving, if you've got a thin, it's almost transparent. You hold it up to the light, it's transparent.

[DUBSIDE]
The chip that comes out. It's like a piece of paper.

[MIKE]
Yeah. If you're cutting more, you're certainly not cutting anything besides Western red cedar. You're not cutting the Alaskan.

[DUBSIDE]
Okay.

[MIKE]
So all the woods I'm working with, these two hardwoods now. Yeah. You, the front, I essentially put it where it is. It looks good. It's got clearance. And then leave it there. 

The only other plane I use is the bench plane.

Now a bench plane's got a higher angle, but the advantage of a bench plane is that it's got a second blade sitting on top of the top blade, very close to the tip. What happens when you use a bench plane, you pull it across the wood and the chip goes up, and instead of peeling back up the blade at 25 degrees or so, it hits this little bump and it chips. It pops up.

So that means it doesn't, when you have a piece of wood that's going to snag. You, it can't get enough.

And there is the banana peel. You can't get under enough to get the banana. The banana peel breaks up and pops off.

So you end up with this smaller little chippy. You don't get a snag. You end up with a surface, not a real good surface, but it didn't snag.

So sometimes when I'm starting the paddle, I'll take, of course a block plane is, you know, it's like about 10 inches long and you got a big handle on the front.

[DUBSIDE]
A bench plane.

[MIKE]
A bench plane.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[MIKE]
It's what everybody thinks a plane is. You know, you take two hands and you plane.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[MIKE]
And sometimes what I do is I'll use that to get the rough stuff off, especially if the grain is ugly. I'll clean that off.

But then when I get to the point I've got to work at, this problem is I'm going to have to, you know, carve from the left to the right instead of my formal right to the left, because I'm right handed. I go right and I swing to the left and swing to the left. And by the way, after you make a paddle, I have a 20 gallon bag at the end that's suspended.

All the shavings go into that. You fill a bushel basket full of shavings. You wear down the blade, the tool steel on a plane.

You are using a plane that way more than any carpenter would ever use this plane. I mean, a bushel. Well, every paddle is put out a bushel of shavings.

So if I made 80 paddles, that's 80 bags.

[DUBSIDE]
So tell me this.To make one paddle, in the time you've made one paddle, would you be stopping to sharpen the blade on the plane?

[MIKE]
No.

[DUBSIDE]
One good sharpening would last more than a paddle.

[MIKE]
Yeah. Because it is tool steel.

And it is wood you're working with. I'll sharpen it maybe after two or three of the Alaskan thing. But there's a way you can look at the bottom and you can actually, if you look with a light… so you've got a sharp knife.

And of course, if you put it under a light, the sharp edge shouldn't glint because it's so fine that there's nothing to reflect from. But on a plane, you're running back and forth, you'll wear sort of the bottom of that edge. And if you look at it right, you'll see a little glint where the sharp blade is.

You shouldn't see any glint. If you see the glint, the blade essentially is worn off. You're cutting this way. So it gets flattish right here. Okay.

And that means the blade is getting dull. So then I'll do it. So at that point, I bring out a precision sharpening tool.

The brand is Veritas. That's the one I use. There's other ones.

But I find that works. And I use a diamond plate to sharpen it. And it'll take you 15, 20 minutes to go through the coarse plate to the medium plate to the thing.

[DUBSIDE]
And you use one of the little holders.

[MIKE]
That's the gizmo.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[MIKE]
Yeah, the Veritas one I got.

[DUBSIDE]
Like with a pocket knife kind of thing, your hand is holding the blade. But you don't have to do it with a plane blade. You're going to have a little holder that's going to stay.

[MIKE]
Absolutely. You're really dealing with a flat plate. 

[DUBSIDE]
It’s got a little roller on the bottom.

[MIKE]
It’s got a big roller on this one on the bottom. And it's very critical that you be very, very consistent. Otherwise, because you're taking off microns of tool steel.

[DUBSIDE]
So consistent with the angle you're talking about.

[MIKE]
Yeah, very, very consistent how you put it in. And the tool thing does pretty much allow you to do this. If you don't, then instead of sharpening the angle again, you sharpen the back.

It's one of these things. Like in anything, when you get precision, you really got to pay attention to what you're doing. And to carve the hard wood, you fortunately or unfortunately are going to have to take care.

And because of the snagging property, it's very hard. And then, of course, be very careful to get a paddle that flexes nicely and not bend in one spot.

[DUBSIDE]
So if you get the blade set in the adjustment on the plane, how deep it's taken to cut all set just right for how you want to do it. Or if you've got more than one plane, you've got each one set just how you like them. That setting, to sharpen it, you're going to lose that setting because you have to take the blade out of the plane.

[MIKE]
But the plane is locked into the adjustment screw. So you take it out on a good plane. And the Lie-Nielsen and the Jorgensen uses this.

And I assume that the patent for the Lie-Nielsen way they handle it ran out. And of course, then the Chinese…

[DUBSIDE]
So you don't lose the adjustment?

[MIKE]
No, you don't. And that's the advantage of that compared to the old… The traditional low angle block plane is the Stanley 60.5. So you talk to a carpenter, “Oh, have you got a Stanley 60.5?”
And it's like, "Oh, yeah.”

It's not an antique. It's a very good plane.

But the way that it's a lever you push, and it's sloppy. So to put the plane, and it's also got different notches. I don't know why.

So when you take it out and put it back in, it's sort of a fuss.

[DUBSIDE]
So you've lost the right adjustment.

[MIKE]
You've got to fiddle with it. So the thumbscrew, I don't know, call it the thumbscrew operation for the Lie-Nielsen or Jorgensen is easier to work with. And I think that's, so when the Jorgensen went to copy, they copied the Lie-Nielsen.

They didn't copy the latest Stanley or others. They looked around and said, who's, what patent can we work on? So if they chose it, there's got to be a reason.

Because, hey, this one…why choose to repeat a lousy version when we can make them a good one? So that's how that works.

[DUBSIDE]
So you make these paddles, and you come to these events and stuff, and you sell them, and you give them away. But you're not doing this as a business or trying to take orders and sell? How does that work?

[MIKE]
The joke is, they say, this is the best paddle you can't buy. 

[DUBSIDE]
So you don't sell them?

[MIKE]
I don't sell them, no. First of all, I don't even know how to price them. Because at the auctions here and the Hudson River one, the two retreats that I've gone to, they varied in price from high to low.

[DUBSIDE]
Depending on how much they'll fetch at the auction. It varies.

[MIKE]
Yes, so it varies on how much somebody wants the paddle, how much they expect it.

And of course, it's an auction to support the club. So I actually carry now, in the past couple of years, that I've figured out the nice paddles. My spare paddle is my giveaway paddle.

So if I'm out in the bay, and I find somebody's got a Greenland paddle, and I, you know, “Hey, oh, there's a Greenland paddle!” 

It's kind of rare, actually.

Yeah, all right. And I'll paddle with them, and they'll look at it, and I go, I'm thinking of my main, war club, war club, you know: “Hey, try my paddle.”

“Oh, okay.”

And they go, “Oh, this is so nice, I love it.”

“Well, let's paddle a while.”

So they paddle, go back to the beach, and they say, “Can I buy these paddles?”

I say, “No, no, no, keep that one, keep it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, keep it, keep it.”

And it's got to the point now that I gave a paddle to a person in the Rhode Island Canoe Association. They paddled with somebody up on the north shore in Boston.

He liked the paddle because they were on a 20-mile paddle, and his shoulder was getting sore, and he said, “Oh, wow.” 

So I gave him a paddle. He came down, I gave him a paddle.

And then he was paddling with a girl from the Appalachian Mountain Club in Worcester, and she liked it because she already had one made, but it wasn't like that one. I gave her one. She came down, she was going down to the coast, and I gave her one.

So I essentially give them away free. If I feel the person appreciates the Greenland paddle, wants to try it, and is recreationally serious about it, doesn't have to be a serious person, you're just like, hey, let's see, I'm going to try it. So I give them the paddle.

And meanwhile, I keep making these, you know, nice piece of wood. I think I made a paddle out of it.

[DUBSIDE]
The best paddle you can't buy.

[MIKE]
Yeah, the best paddle you can't buy.

[DUBSIDE]
And all you have is a little wood burning on there, you know, made by.

[MIKE]
. . Yeah, I have the standard “handcrafted by.”

And the reason was because it only cost $85 for the branding iron. If I had something fancy besides “handcrafted by,” and they allow you to put your name in, it was going to cost like $120. I said, what's the difference?

Handcrafted, you know, a specialty by. So I bought it for $85. But unfortunately, the plate wasn't perfectly flat.

Again, precision. In engineering, you know, things don't work sometimes because precision wasn't taken account of for it. So I actually took some emery and flattened out the branding iron.

It's just like, it's details. There's so many details that will affect things, but people don't even realize that it's not quite working because of some subtle thing. And in my engineering career, that was pretty much what was given to me to do.

The first time, my first job was working in the nuclear power plants in Groton, in the nuclear subs in the testing division, down there in the reactor stuff. And details count, there was on one sub, we couldn't figure why the water pressure through the cooling system wasn't up to stuff. And it took a couple shifts.

Everybody going on a train, they're looking at the plumbing for leaking and whatever. It's like, it just doesn't give it. They found out that they put the metering valve in backwards.

And it was a valve called a venturi valve. So the water only works properly in one direction. But from the other side, they soldered it in, brazed it in the wrong direction.

And it's one of these things that the obvious is not obvious until it becomes obvious. Once everybody said, oh, we're looking at everything, but the valve was in backwards. It's the same thing in paddles.

You say, why is everybody making these war clubs? It's because they see them that way. And they don't really quite understand what's going on.

But hey, they work. You could paddle with a two by four. So when I was a kid, we used to go in the St. Clair River, which is draining Lake Huron between Port Huron and Sarnia. There were some nooks and crannies along. The river runs four miles an hour. You don't swim in the river.

And in the winter, it used to be before it got warmer, ice pack would jam up in the lakes and it would all come down. And it would come into this little embankment the size of half of a football field or so. We would paddle the icebergs with two by fours.

It was sort of a sketchy deal. And I don't think our parents ever found out. If you fall in the water, it's going to be up to our neck, freezing water.

But hey, you're 15 years old. You can paddle with a two by four.

[DUBSIDE]
Well, that's been a very enlightening discussion. And I hope to see you again at these events for many years to come.

[MIKE]
I'll keep coming as long as I can here. And I appreciate the chance to explain to the audience why there are paddles out there that you can't buy, but they're very good.

[DUBSIDE]
All right. Well, thank you very much.

[MIKE]
Come to the retreats.

[DUBSIDE]
Maybe if you're lucky enough to get one.

[MIKE]
You'll find a good paddle that way. You get a chance to bid on them.

[DUBSIDE]
All right. Well, thanks, Michael, for being on the Dubcast with Dubside.

[MIKE]
Thank you.

[DUBSIDE]
And that is Mike Krabach, recorded at the Delmarva Paddlers Retreat in October of 2025. And as he said, he's from the Rhode Island area. So he often frequents the Delmarva Paddlers Retreat in Delaware or the Hudson River Greenland Festival in New York.

So if you're trying to get a hold of one of these best paddles you can't buy, go into one of those places and hoping that he might give you one is the way to do it. I don't want to build these up into mythical status. I'm not saying these are exponentially better than any other paddle I've ever used and are worth fighting to the life for.

It's just a good paddle. If you don't have one, doesn't matter. There's plenty of good paddles around.

Thank you for listening to the Dubcast with Dubside.