: Any advice or design info you have would be excellent. Thanks.

QajaqUSA has a good tutorial on making a Greenland paddle here: http://www.qajaqusa.org/QK/makegreen2.pdf
CNC'ing it would probably be overkill (I can knock one out with a block plane and a bandsaw in an evening and I am a slow worker) but it wouldn't be a bad exercise to rough it out on the machine and remove the tool steps with a plane and spokeshave. You would get a nice mix of technology and traditional techniques.

Aleut paddles could be done too http://www.kayakforum.com/cgi-bin/Building/indexh.cgi/noframes/read/184849 (there is a range of designs but that's what mine looks like)
The nice thing is the blade is offset and flat so you would only have to CNC the top side, then finish rounding the handle on the bottom by hand.

Either would be pretty easy to model, I use Rhino3D so it would just be a matter of drawing the cross sections and lofting the shape.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out.