Flatwater canoes have had an interesting evolution over the decades. From wide general purpose craft which look like many modern racing canoes, to the sleek highly optimized craft seen today.

In The Beginning

Canoes were originally transport craft used by indigenous people’s in North America. Being particularly suited to the waterways of North America, unlike rowing boats that had become the norm in Europe. These canoes were large, wide, stable, and ideal for transporting cargo. The kneeling position allowed more power in the stroke, and allowed more deck space to be available for transporting cargo.

It's no surprise then that during the advent of organized canoe racing, racing craft resembled these boats, the design of which is seen in modern recreational canoes. Check out the 1936 Olympic Games, won by Canada’s Frank Amyot (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The canoes used at the 1936 Olympic Games resemble modern recreational canoes with round sides, and pointed bows and sterns. Paddling in the high kneel position allows a large amount of force to be applied to the stroke, allowing the boat to be propelled at high speeds and being optimal for racing.

The Delta

Of course with people racing canoes, this then prompts the development of faster canoes, capable of achieving higher speeds for less effort. Hydrodynamically, this is through maximizing the length of the canoe, while minimizing its width, and having straight sides. However this is constrained by rules, which for years required the canoe to be at most 520cm long, and at least 75cm wide. This need for speed within the confines of the rules created the Delta design, developed by Danish veneer boat manufacturer Struer. The Delta C1 (Figure 2), along with Cheeta C2 became the most popular racing canoe designs ever made, and its design was licensed to other manufacturers to make composite versions of these craft.

Figure 2: Left - A veneer Delta canoe in the Thousand Islands Boat Museum in Gannonoque, ON. The veneer Delta was the original made by Struer Kayaks in Denmark, and was the benchmark for a high performance boat for decades. Right - A younger, fitter, leaner, short haired version of me once paddled a composite Delta made by Britain's Kirton Kayaks.

It seemed that the Delta was the optimal shape of canoe. That is until someone decided to be clever.

Fake Width

In the mid to late 1990s, following a similar revolution in rowing boat and later kayak design. Canoe manufacturers started exploring how to make the boats narrower in the water, while not making them legally narrower. Legally the height at the widest point has to be no higher than the height at the front of the cockpit. This stops you just putting poles on the boat to make it the correct width.

But… that didn’t stop you putting poles and other structures on the front of the cockpit to give you the necessary height to make the boat artificially wide! With more deck height to spread the width of the boat out into, manufacturers could start putting their widest points on turrets or even just poles. This is best exemplified by Polish manufacturer Plastex, whose Starlight Ergo, and Starlight Futura (Figure 3) designs dominated the late 90s.

Figure 3: Left - The Starlight Ergo from Plastex, paddled by Canadian women was the first step in the evolution of narrower boats, which still retained the width restrictions, even though they were in practice considerably narrower in the water than the old Delta designs. This they achieved by raising the widest point of the boat far out of the water and raising the front deck so that the widest point was unnaturally wide, but high, and that the highest point on the front deck was unnaturally high. Right - By the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, this evolution had reached its logical conclusion, with the widest points now being made by spikes, as was the highest point on the front of the deck, as can be seen on the boats of Andreas Dittmer and Steve Giles. All boats in the 1000m C1 Olympic final of this year used this boat design.

No More Width Restrictions

With the sport now dominating by weird looking spikey boats (which honestly looked cool, even if people didn’t like it), the International Canoe Federation decided something had to be done, and so beginning with the 2001 season, the minimum widths for boats were abolished (Figure 4).

Now a boat only had to be as wide as to accommodate a paddler. How wide is a knee? I dunno, 20cm? As long as your knee could fit into it, you could make a boat that wide.

Figure 4: Andreas Dittmer (left) and Martin Doktor (right) were two canoeists whose careers started in the Delta era, spanned the spikey boats era of the late 90s, and finished in the post 2001 era of skinny boats. These skinny boats were especially narrow, being as narrow as 30 cm, and far narrower than the paddlers themselves were, and this is particularly evident in the face on view. This narrow position made them very easy to paddle, being a vast improvement in boat speed, and ease of control. Furthermore, by sitting low in the water they have excellent stability.

This was a revolution for the sport. Now boats looked both like how canoes should look, but also really cool and modern. They were also much faster, much easier to paddle, didn’t take up an awkward amount of space in canoe club boat sheds. They could also be used by smaller paddlers due to the greatly reduced width meaning a lower boat volume could accommodate smaller paddlers.

It also radically changed paddling technique. With the Delta design, the paddler had to account for the width of the boat for an efficient stroke path. The narrow boat meant the paddler to get their stroke path far closer to the centerline of the boat. Doubles crews too didn’t need to account for the weight of their paddlers when setting up their boats with offset paddlers, as paddlers didn’t need to be offset to position them in an optimal position. Paddlers could instead be distributed lengthways down the boats.

Overall, this was very cool for canoeing, there was just one problem...

Were Boats Too Narrow?

With the sudden rush to make the boats narrow a new problem emerged. These ultra-narrow boats often didn’t have a very large volume. A canoe usually has a weight range of paddler to run most effectively through the water. Kayaks have always had this issue, which is why there have always been kayaks for different sizes of paddler. Racing canoes being less popular as a sport, came to be dominated by one design of boat and never had this diversity in boat design. As the Delta style canoes were large and high volume, this led to many of the top canoeists of this new era, who’d grown up with the wider boats, being physically large athletes.

Because of this, the new ultra-narrow boats were in many case simply not big enough to hold these paddlers and be propelled effectively by them.

The solution was, boats now started being designed for bigger paddlers. But, don’t think there are only canoes for bigger paddlers, boat manufacturers now have boats for people of all sizes (Figure 5)! Portuguese manufacturer Nelo, whose designs now dominate modern canoe racing offers the same designs of canoe, available in volumes for all sizes of people!

Figure 5: Imre Pulai (left) was a legendarily large and exceptionally strong canoeist whose career began in the Delta era. Although his career was set back by the introduction of the narrow boats of the early 2000s, he had a resurgence and won a world championship in 2003, and European bronze medal in 2006. On the other hand, Nelo Kayaks make the Maxi C1 (right) which has a low volume and is especially suitable for children. The range of paddlers, and the range of boat sizes makes the sport far more accessible than it used to be.

So there we have it, that’s the story of how flatwater canoe racing went from being a sport for big people moving big boats, into a cool sport with cool equipment that’s available for all shapes and sizes!