Design
The canoe (or just 'boat') used in casual whitewater canoeing is different from those used in whitewater racing. Traditionally, canoes were made of tree bark, sewn with tree roots and sealed with resin. Early whitewater boats were made of wood followed by aluminum and later fiberglass or kevlar, followed by more exotic composite materials including spectra, vectran and carbon fiber. The various composite materials are still preferred for racing due to the light weight, but most modern recreational whitewater boats are typically rotomoulded from a tough plastic or molded from a plastic laminate called Royalex which is an ABS plastic that is slightly flexible and very durable, if easily scratched but repairable using either plastic welding or a variety of patch bonding techniques. Boats can range in size from barely long enough to hold the paddler (around 6 ft (1.8 m) long), up to 12 ft (3.7 m) or longer for solo boats and typically 14-16ft for tandem boats.
Read more about this topic: Whitewater Canoeing
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)