had an awesome, thrilling experience.
n a particular race, (the Lumber River 40 miler) we were in our Comp Cruiser which is a ultra-light racing canoe with a knife like bow.
She is the bow paddler and her foot brace is a specially made brace that has a vertical piece of fairly hard , but slightly pliable foam that nests nto the point of the bow, and then has a adjustable aluminum tube sticking back withe the foot plate attached to it.
The river was very low, and there were lots of logs that required getting out and pulling the boat over, but there were also some that were just a inch or two below the water's surface which from previous experinece we could usually get up a head of steam and glide over.
On one particular one that we were trying our "head of steam method", it didn't work and as we hit the log, at about 6 plus miles per hour, we thunked to a jolting stop. We both got out and pulled the boat over the log and continued on.
We noticed that we had a fair amount of water in the boat, but just attributed it to the fact that we were constantly jumping in and out of the boat.
At the finish, we pulled the boat up onto the shore, and when we turned it around so the bow was on the sloping down part, there came the water gushing out of a two inch long by about a half ince wide hole hole in the front bow just below the water line.
Her bracing was evidently just firm enough to keep the hole sealed while we were under way.
