The recent mention of Mr. Roberts sent me back to his site to see what new rants he may have added. I see he has finally added a section on real-world failures of wood-strip boats. Long ago on this board George claimed that the 'standard' lay-ups were extremely unsafe, and I asked him a couple times for even a single instance of wood kayak failures leading to a serious predicament for its paddler. Funny that the only instance he has come up with is a collision between Nick and Eric that resulted in a puncture.

George added that in the year 2000, 7-10 woodstrip canoes and kayaks were punctured (or worse.) I find this data of little value. George's main example is of 2 of a group of 3 woodstrip canoes hitting the same rock and being destroyed. As far as I know George has never built a wood-strip canoe. His hobby is building and paddling kayaks, as is the hobby of most of us here on this board. We want to know how many of those 7-10 punctures involved kayaks, because there are a heck of a lot more barely-submerged objects in rivers that canoes paddle on than the bigger water that most of us kayak on. Puncture a canoe in a river and assuming you have your required PFD on, even if you can't swim, you will drift to shore. Having your canoe 'holed' is a great inconvenience, of course, but not the life-threatening predicament George says all of us are facing when we push off in our standard-layup kayaks. Also, I have known many a Grumman aluminum canoe to get holed, so saying that a few wood ones have been holed does not necessarily make wood canoes less safe than other kinds of canoes.

I still need data to show that I have a greater risk of being injured/stranded/swamped/sunk/swept-out-to-sea in my standard-layup wood kayak as compared to an off-the-shelf fiberglass kayak. Until then, I don't believe that my kayak is the death-trap George claims it is.

Dean