The Redfish Blackback is a striking custom model with a luxury price tag. The shaft is a hollow laminate of black maple, and the blades are maple with ash insets and edging. Complex construction details abound in the hollow shaft, the well-faired joint between shaft and blade, and the mirror-image matched grain pattern of the blades.

Both blades and shaft are epoxy laminated with a tightly woven fiberglass cloth and finished with a cross-linked clear coat. The Blackback’s blades are the thinnest of the paddles tested. Strips of carbon fiber run along the front and back of the shaft and down the centers of each blade face. When I bent the paddle against the floor, the shaft appeared quite stiff, while the blades flexed noticeably. In the water the flexibility of the blades wasn’t noticeable; the Blackback had a strong plant. The strip of carbon fiber appeared to be made up of two pieces butted together, instead of a single continuous piece. (The paddle tested was a test model. Normally the carbon fiber is continuous .) The finish had few very small areas of resin starvation. Otherwise, the finish quality was superb. The cloth weave was very well filled, and there were very few pinholes or surface particles.

Forward strokes with the Blackback have a racy feel. The paddle’s light weight encourages a high shaft angle, and its broad blades plant solidly in the water. It was easy to make a quiet entry with very little splash or ventilation. The lower edge of the blade is well shaped to clear the gunwale, despite the large blades and short overall length. I didn’t detect any flutter. When I was fresh, I enjoyed starting hard and sprinting up to my best speed, then stopping to do it again. However, after a couple of hours of paddling while going upwind, I wished for a blade size with a little less bite, to spread the effort out over more strokes.

Sweep strokes felt stable, but steering in wind felt a bit less positive than I expected, perhaps due to the 220 cm length. A 230 cm paddle might have been better for steering. Although the thick elliptical shaft felt comfortable, the paddle was much too slippery for my grip to feel really secure. A light sanding of the grip area would provide a less slippery surface.

The Blackback performed braces and rolls very well. While the blade angle was fairly critical in sweep rolls, the large oval shaft made it easy to control. In a sculling brace the paddle remained on the surface. This paddle offered strong support in a C-to-C roll.

This is a custom paddle, so the purchaser can request almost any feature. I would ask only for a slightly smaller blade and a tackier varnish.

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