May 15, 2004

AS WE all know, putting concrete in water isn’t a good idea unless you need to weigh down a body for disposal in a reservoir. But that’s enough about my hobby for now.

Today, my dear reader(s), I’ve found something stranger than tiller racing, odder than squirrel fishing and less appealing than my mum’s cooking. It’s the one and (hopefully) only... concrete canoe racing!

Although it sounds like a contradiction in terms, building boats out of concrete has been around since 1848, when some French bloke gave it a go and discovered he didn’t end up going for an impromptu swim. Fast-forward to the 1960s and American university engineering departments had taken up the challenge of building and competing in canoes made from concrete, and in 1988 the National Concrete Canoe Competition was born (asce.org/inside/nccc2004/history.cfm).

The point of these races has changed, from being simple first-past-the-post jobs to engineering challenges designed to test the students thoroughly. As I’ve got an arts degree and therefore am qualified to do bugger all, I don’t even pretend to understand how you go about making concrete float, let alone race it, but there you are. However, these guys do, and they’re deadly serious about it. Take Team UAH from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who’ve got one of the best records in the sport. UAH was “founded in 1961 in response to Dr. Wernher von Braun's request to establish a training facility for his fellow scientists”. As Dr von Braun is mainly famous for inventing the V-rockets, I’d have kept that one quiet, myself...

If you want to check out the official site for people who build these vessels, concretecanoe.org. There’s loads of information about how, why and where these things are built. If you feel like nicking a load of concrete from the local building site and giving this a shot yourself, there’s even a page full of instructions on how to do it. Unfortunately, as the site is designed more like a 12-year-old’s AOL homepage, it doesn’t take long for your brain to give up trying to decipher the pink-and-yellow text on a black background and fire your eyes through the monitor in an attempt to save humanity.