Watch HDToday. Louis Lalanne, known as Loulou, entered the world of canoeing quite by chance, through Gilles Maitere. Gilles had a science, an art. He had been introduced to canoeing by old Tahitians. For him the canoe was a way of life, an art and a cult. At first Loulou didn't really understand. The canoeist holds an ancestral oar, the canoe was used to immigrate. At the time when Europeans were still using sextants, Polynesian navigators were reading nature. They navigated by the stars, the positioning of the moon and reading the winds and currents. The chop of the sea and the position of the clouds.