: The best answer I can give is another question:
: How many people have experienced a structural failure of their cedar strip
: kayaks while in use?

I have. However, I'm not sure what would have survived this abuse. I was shooting some class 1 rapids in a cedar strip canoe. Towards the bottom, after it was too late I saw what I thought was a stick just slightly breaking the surface. I thought "Oh well, I'll just glance off it. It turned out to be a pipe that someone chucked off a bridge and it was firmly lodged in the bottom pointing up stream. It punched a hole in the side, spun me around and proceded to punch another hole in the other side from the inside. Boy I didn't know what hit me.

The good news is that it only took a couple of evenings to fix it ... after everything had dried out. That's the good thing about cedar strip, almost anything is fixable. I have a friend who builds cedar strip canoes for a living and when he saw my holes he said "awe that's nothin', I've had canoes handed to me in two pieces and I've fixed them". :-)

BTW: this was a fairly light-weight layup. 6oz outside, 6oz inside.