Kevlar Canoe
Canoe Types
About Different Types of Canoes
Being a discriminate canoe consumer is tough because the marketplace is flooded with a great variety of products. There are red canoes and blue canoes, used canoes and new canoes, wood canoes and tinny canoes, quick canoes and slow canoes, and boats that don't deserve the name canoe.
Choosing a canoe would be easy if the least expensive items were the worst quality and the most expensive the best; unfortunately, this is not the case. There are as many products of differing quality and construction as there are products of varying design and shape, and one cannot depend on the retailer to make the right decision every time.
There are retail "salers" lurking out there in retail land who will sell you the most expensive item - whether you need it or not - sometimes through some whacko sales pitch, but more often through consumer ignorance - buyers who have not seriously considered what type of canoe they would like to own.
At one time, the only canoe available was made of wood and bark. Demand for canoes eventually saw the bark being replaced by canvas which canoe builders stretched over the traditional frame of wooden ribs (usually cedar), and planks.
Wood/canvas canoes reigned supreme until the end of World War Two, when the technicians in the now-quiet Grumman Aircraft Company turned their aluminum airplane fabricating talents to canoe building. The advent of the aluminum canoe marked the beginning of a revolution in the construction of canoes which continued with various incarnations of the fiberglass canoe, the plastic canoe and now Kevlar canoes and canoes made from other exotic, space age fibers such as graphite, carbon and Royalex.
