: Here's a nice MS-Excel spreadsheet for figuring out paddle lengths given your
: anthropometric measurements, boat size, and paddling style:
: http://www.geocities.com/shawnkayak/paddle/paddlelength.xls

This is great, this is lovely, can it get any better than this! Somebody has harnessed the best engineering minds to the task! And sure enough, they come up with the scientific formula that puts us all out of our misery...

They must have run the data on that test group thru some curve-fitting software, if I read the comment on the spreadsheet correctly. But how many paddlers were there in the group - and how do we know that they all had found the ideal stick for their kind of paddling? Could've been all bozos...

But enough of this, This is a gem! I'll print it out, I'll frame it, and I'll hang it out on our club-house wall, where everybody can worship it!

The fruits of science must be shared!

p.s. Shawn, in the profiles section you've posted a photo of yourself (?) in a kayak you've made (?), with a paddle of your making (?) across the spray skirt. Did you use this formulae to calculate the length? Looks kind of like you didn't quite trust this science, or did you..?