Today is National Canoe Day. 10 things you didn’t know about canoes:
A canoe is defined as a lightweight narrow Water vessel, usually pointed at both ends, propelled by one or more paddlers facing the direction of travel and using paddles.
The word canoe is said by some to be derived from the african word kenu which means “dugout”. Others claim the word is of Arawak origin.
The earliest known canoe artifact was found in the Netherlands. It is called the Pesse Canoe and was carbon dated to between 8040 and 7510 BC.
The sport of canoeing first appeared in the Paris Olympic Games in 1924. The sport’s Paralympic debut was at Rio in 2016.
The average speed of a canoe is 3 mph.
From 1935 to 1986 the Canadian silver dollar depicted a canoe with the Northern Lights in the background.
The Canadian Slavey and Chipewyan peoples believe that when a person dies, their soul boards a stone canoe which is paddled slowly across a large lake. An evil soul will sink and be lost in the watery depths, but a good soul makes it across to the other side.
The Māori people arrived in New Zealand from Polynesia in canoes. They arrived in several waves and which canoe one’s ancestors arrived in is important for tribal identity.
In the early 1900s there were canoes especially made for courting couples. They were lined with mahogany and equipped with phonographs, rugs, and a chair for the woman. Making use of such a vessel was sometimes referred to as “canoedling”.
A slight bend in the paddle is a design feature in sporting canoes. This is thanks to Eugene Jensen, a Minneapolis-based marathon canoer, won the 450-mile Bemidji-to-Minneapolis endurance test four times in the 1970s. He noticed, during one race, that a slight bend in the shaft of the paddle improved his speed.
New!!!
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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