We’ve all been there: we painstakingly put together the PERFECT roll, tight, clean lines and finely ground weed. But, just after you step outside with your friends, light up your joint, and enjoy the high, your join starts burning unevenly. Your joint has burnt on one side while the other side is left untouched. This terrible phenomenon, also known as “canoeing” or as “running,” is par for the course for every weed enthusiast and even for the most seasoned joint roller. Frustrating, wasteful and a complete downer, a canoeing joint can ruin a fun sesh dispensary.
This can happen for any mix of reasons: maybe the day is windy and blowing the cherry off-kilter, maybe airflow is uneven, perhaps your joint is rolled too tightly, or maybe your joint just wasn’t lit correctly in the first place. Whatever the reason may be, you don’t have to live with this problem any longer. Our team pulled together our favourite ways to avoid a canoeing joint and are excited to share them with you.
Perfecting The Roll
A frustrating annoyance, a canoeing joint can upset the fine balance of a fun smoke sesh. The joint can burn faster and can waste your high-end bud – and can challenge your joint-rolling skills in a social setting. If you’re looking to prevent your joint from canoeing, or “running,” the first step is to brush up on joint rolling. There are a myriad of resources online teaching you how to roll joints, and here is one of our favourite videos on rolling the perfect joint.
Rolling the perfect joint is a finely-tuned skill that may take years to perfect. Practice is the name of the game, but to get there faster, make sure to follow the next tips:
Avoid rolling uneven joints that are half loose and half tightly packed – keeping tightness and consistency throughout the entire joint. This will help airflow and aid in keeping the joint to burn evenly, avoiding potential canoeing. Just keep in mind that tightness has its limits: a too-tight joint can also cause problems, making it hard for air to pull through.
Using Properly Cured Cannabis
After you’ve perfected the ideal role, let’s move on to learning how to make sure that your weed burns properly.
Using cannabis that has been correctly cured and dried can make all the difference! A smooth, easy burn comes from flower that has been through the proper steps to cure and dry it to perfection. The best-cured weed is neither too wet (which can cause it to pack way too tight to smoke well) nor too dry (which can make it burn way too quickly). The best way to tell is if your weed is cured properly is if it smells heavily of terpenes versus of plant matter. It should be the right amount of dry, but still sticky and pull apart easily and from the stem with little-to-no crumbling.
Grinding Your Bud
Now that you have the perfectly cured flower, time to find the perfect grind. The key component to a smooth burn is by making sure that whatever you’re burning is of even consistency. While you may think you can achieve this with just your hands, sadly you can’t. Investing in a weed grinder can change your game 10-fold. No matter how well you can break the weed apart with your fingers, you’ll never get the finely ground cannabis that a grinder provides. While the consistency will never be 100% perfect, but the grinder can help you get as close to perfect as possible.
Light It Up
How you light your joint matters! If your roll is the most perfect to ever exist on this planet if you don’t light your joint right, you can risk experiencing canoeing. When sparking your joints, aim to burn it evenly and light it all the way around the entire joint.
To easily make sure it’s lit, lightly blow on the lit end of the joint and if you see a circle of embers glow, you got it. If you don’t see that circle, relight the areas that aren’t lit. Depending on the weather, this can be challenging. Try and seek out an enclosed area, light up and go on your merry way.
A Little Moisture Goes A Long Way
If your joint is already in the process of canoeing, it can be a little tough to stop it in its tracks. Bur don’t despair! It can be stopped. By doing a quick “lick down,” “baptizing” of the joint, or simply wetting the side of the joint that is canoeing, you can stop the canoeing in its tracks. This can help the paper burn slower on the side that it’s canoeing on. Ultimately, by doing this the dry side will have a chance to burn down and meet up with the wet side before it dries. This can help bring a more even burn and pull you out of canoeing purgatory. This is your last go-to method since it uses a lot of cannabis up in the process depending on the size of the canoe.
A session should be fun and a good time and a canoeing joint can make things tougher. Trying out our foolproof tips can help you avoid a social mishap and help you hone in on your joint rolling skills in the process.
Additionally, it’s been noted that although automatic joint rollers are a great tool to help roll that perfect joint, it can also increase the likelihood of a canoe occurring.
Go forth and enjoy!