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Winning UW team builds canoes from concrete

A team from UW is getting ready to compete in a national concrete canoe event.
Two UW engineering students float in a concrete canoe.

A team from the University of Washington is getting ready to compete in a national event that requires thousands of hours of preparation, practice, and planning. It's almost like a sport, but they are engineering students, trying to find inventive ways to design a canoe made mostly from concrete.

“It really teaches us how to apply what we learn in the classroom to a real-world project,” said Adam Rakla, a UW senior in civil engineering who is the concrete canoe team project manager.

They take their canoe to competitions, where judges rank them against teams from other schools. The UW team has done quite well in recent years, winning the Pacific Northwest competition, and then going to nationals six times, including this year. They head to San Diego in June.

This year's canoe has steel cables running through the concrete to strengthen it. The new 520 floating bridge uses a similar design on a much bigger scale.

“We get inspiration from the things we see around us like bridges or other things that use concrete,” said Michelle Horio, the team’s project engineer.

It takes a significant commitment of students’ time to plan, design, and construct a champion canoe.

“Over spring break a lot of people are off on vacation, and every day we have like 7 to 10 people here working 8 hours, 10 hours a day,” Rakla said. “Some people describe it as a full-time job on top of school.”

Students say the canoe competitions, which are sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers, get more popular each year, attracting teams from other countries, who bring fresh ideas and an innovative edge.

They say they have to continually challenge themselves to imagine lighter, stronger methods of building boats, using concepts that might someday go into a building or bridge.

Learn more about the UW concrete canoe team here. The team is raising funds here.

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