Engineering Memory of the Month

Can you canoe concretely?

Engineering students do some pretty funny things. Among them is building canoes out of concrete, just to see if they can. Then they race them. These two tales pretty much cover the gamut of glory and shame in Stanford’s concrete canoeing past.

Perhaps Stanford never was more proud than when its concrete canoe dazzled the competition at the second annual West Coast Ferro-Cement Canoe Race down at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1973. On that fateful day 35 years ago, Stanford fielded a 180-pound canoe that not only won, but also performed so well that other teams complained to the organizing committee that it didn’t comply with the contest rules. The committee deemed that it did.

The canoe was built by applying a sheet of plastic over a wooden frame as a mold, which was then covered with half-inch wire reinforcing mesh and mortar. The mortar was reinforced with glass fibers and after three days of curing, the concrete was given a polymer coating. This was serious business to make a concrete canoe so sporty (Fresno State’s canoe weighed four times as much).

Shown is the triumphant 1973 team (l. to r.): Greg Peterson, Jock Holland, Randy Boelsems, and Bob Frank.

By 1980, however, concrete canoe studies at Stanford were clearly, er, foundering. Alumnus Jim Hartley offers this recollection of an outing on Lake Lagunita:

"As a senior, our ASCE (civil engineering) student group was not the most organized, and the few of us who felt enough school spirit to try to build a concrete canoe for the Spring races were big on enthusiasm, but not on skill or training. Our group had no one with any experience in concrete, or structures, much less marine design. We built it nonetheless, and launched it proudly for the intercollegiate challenge. As students, our vaguely tear-dropped shape bulk came in a dismal seventh (of 8—the eighth place boat sank). But the crowning embarrassment was when our sponsor, G. Wayne Clough, who in 1980 was the senior geotechnical professor in the [department]—and is now the president of Georgia Tech), led the faculty group of four into the canoe and promptly discovered that not only was it more maneuverable, but was faster, if the boat was just turned around and floated backward."

Late-breaking canoe news...

Alumnus Jack Lin (BS 1996 & MS 1997 CEE) adds: "I must point out that the concrete canoe enjoyed a revival in the mid '90s. After a year of experiments in 1995, the Stanford team in 1996 almost took the regional competition, which was held at Lake Lag. It was a close contest that came down to the last race, and we lost by less than one second to the team that eventually placed second nationally. 1997 was a year of promises until the boat was accidentally broken and sunken during a practice run the evening before the competition."

We are interested in your nostalgic photos and the stories they tell. If you’d like to share them with the Stanford Engineering community, e-mail them to David Orenstein , manager, Communications and P.R.