RPI Concrete Canoe
The Little Canoe that Could!
A day by day account of our adventures at the 2015 Concrete Canoe Competition
As you probably already know, the 2015 ASCE Concrete Canoe Competition was held at West Point Military Academy. So first, a HUGE thank you to WestPoint for putting on a great event! Now, for the competition!
Day 1:
We left RPI at 7 am on Thursday, canoe loaded, tee-shirts picked up and ready to head out. Once we arrived at our hotel, we opened the U-Haul and discovered two massive cracks on either side of our precious canoe. Since the competition had yet to start, we had to do something, so we ran to Home Depot and got what Travis calls "stronger then concrete concrete stuff" along with a small syringe to reach into the cracks. We raced back to patch the cracks and added a coat of sealant. Then we headed to the Military Academy where we had to show all of our ID's and they nearly confiscated our cupcakes (the guard was hungry). Once we arrived we waited our turn to unload our canoe, which took 8-10 people because it weighed close to 600 pounds! We brought it in and set up our display which included a presentation board, samples of the materials used, and our canoe. After scoping out the competition we headed back to the hotel for some much needed rest.
Day 2:
We woke up bright and early to get to the competition before canoe judging happened. After we watched the judges quietly and meticulously inspect our canoe, we headed over to the presentation room. We waited our turn to present and watched the others teams to see what we may have forgotten and what we should have added. When our came time we presented well, evoked some laughs from the judges and the audience, but we went over our 5 minute time limit. Afterwards we went to watch the Steel Bridge competitions which are an exciting display engineering masterpieces. We also participated in a mystery event around campus, which shall remain a mystery... We then loaded our canoe up again to take it to the lake for the 6am launch. In the process of pushing it into the truck, however, it cracked again in the same spots as before only this time it broke all the way through with only the chicken wire holding it together. Heart broken, we were determined to preserve. We again made the trek to Home Depot to get the "stronger than concrete concrete stuff". We spent a couple hours putting our canoe back together and then took another team’s practice canoe out on the lake to test the water and take a much needed break.
Day 3:
For the last day we arose at 5:30 and made the drive to the lake to move the canoe to the beach. Once the canoe was set, we all took turns bringing our canoes into the water to do the swamp test. The swamp test requires the canoe to float completely filled with water plus two 25 pound sand bags. Unfortunately us and another team (the two first teams) did not pass this on the first go around. Because the added sand bags is a new rule, we did not know what the next steps would be since our canoe came up with just water, the sand bags were the only things holding it under. The judges informed us that we cannot race unless we pass this test, so we filled the front a back with foam duct-taped into place and started filling our canoe up again. This time, it passed. We then rowed "The Trojan Horse" around to the start line but decided to beach the canoe on the land while we waited for the judges to get settled. As we rowed toward the bank, we started to shift in the canoe to get out and as we began to crawl out SNAP! The canoe broke in half again... We were almost ready to give up, but we had come so far and were so close! So we used duct-tape to create a tension beam around the top of the canoe to keep the canoe in compression and hold the crack together. Two of us piled back into the canoe and stratigically sat with one person on the crack and one close behind to keep the crack together. With this formation we rowed all six of our races! And even though at times we had to bail water to keep us afloat, we still managed to finish the day without sinking our canoe, even with 4 people rowing!
Results:
We were able to see our design paper and presentation scores as well as our display scores, but we are still waiting to hear our overall placement and how we did in the races. We did very well in the paper in presentation averaging 88 points out of 100 for both, but we recieved a 15 point deduction for going over the time limit in our presentations, as well as a 25 point deduction for use of the foam and duct-tape in the races. We are all incredibly proud of our accomplishments and are eager to point out that we raced all our races with a duct-taped canoe and still did not sink! Engineering at it's finest!
