Here are our results from the competition. Nothing has been published yet as to how the other teams placed in these categories.

Men's 200 meter: 1st place
Women's 200 meter: 1st place
Coed 200 meter: 1st place
Men's 400 meter: 1st place
Women's 400 meter: Did not place
Coed 400 meter: 1st place
Construction: 1st place
Innovation: 1st place
Overall Winner: 1st place!

It was a great pleasure to take part in this competition. We owe a big thank you to ASCE and ACI for sponsoring the trip and their amazing support and generosity.

Now that I’m back home, I have a lot of catching up to do on school-related stuff.  However, I will be working on a wrap up post that should be up some time in the next few days. I'll also add pictures to previous posts and tie up a bunch of loose ends.

When we arrived at the races, large “START” and “FINISH” banners marked a thin canal in the middle of the University of Twente campus. The width of the sprint course was about 30 feet. Judging from that, the competitors were going to need good control of the canoe or people were going to run into the walls, and perhaps even each other! Assuming that everyone’s paddling skills were going to be similar to our regional and national competitions, the day was sure to be full of concrete canoe carnage.

The starting location of the race was under a bridge. It was so low we had to duck and could not really paddle. Halfway through the course there was another bridge which presented a bit of an overhead obstacle. A low wall on the right side of the course led to a large field and a taller wall on the left was bordered by a walkway along the entire length of the course.

Very few people were around when we first arrived at the race site, but soon, participants and spectators began pouring in. By the time the races started, the course was lined with spectators and 20 canoes that were ready to go!

The race was based on elimination. In the first round, everyone competed with three boats in the canal at a time. The winner moved on to the quarter finals. There was a half final and a final race. There were also men’s, women's, and coed categories.

Teams in the Netherlands build their canoes in anywhere from 20 to 100 hours each. The rules governing their construction are two pages long. This is different than the American competition which involves thousands of hours of preparation and is governed by a 70+ page rule book. The competition felt very similar to a regional competition in the U.S. There were teams of all levels, but most would have been solid contenders in our Great Lakes Regional Conference. We were given a real run for our money in the men’s sprint races and could have been beaten if the race had been a bit different.

In our first race, we came out from under the bridge slightly behind the other boats. The team on the far side from us veered left, pushing the boat in the center toward us on the far left. We were hit on the right side and pushed toward the wall. After putting the breaks on momentarily, we were able to pull to the right, behind the other teams, and pass them.

Most of the remaining races were similar. Our canoe sustained a large amount of aesthetic damage, but structurally, it faired beautifully. After a brutal t-bone in one of the coed races, we were sure the side would be cracked from top to bottom. However, we found that the damage was mostly aesthetic. Crack propagation was not visible, and the only concrete that broke off was a piece that was placed on for aesthetic purposes. The side of the boat appeared to have flexed four inches or more from the impact!

The men’s 200 meter final was a true battle. As the day wore on the races became more and more physically enduring. By the time the men’s sprint came around we had forgotten about avoiding collisions and were having a really good time just battling it out. The canal was quite shallow and the canoes’ wakes were quite large. When one canoe runs next to another or just behind, the wake coming off the other boat tends to turn the canoe toward the other. When this happens, one boat has to slow down in order not to hit the other. In a 200 meter sprint race, slowing down and letting up isn’t an option like it is in a long-distance marathon race. From the start we pulled just ahead of a team from the University of Twente. Their wake had already pulled us toward them and our wake turned them into us. Side by side, the paddlers in control had no way to steer the boats apart. This continued all the way to the finish with both boats’ broad sides scraping and grinding away! We came away victorious, with a lot of scratched concrete and some yellow paint from the other canoe.

With the sprint races complete, the competition moved to another area where an oval 400 meter course was set up. The turns here allowed us to use our long hours of practice to our advantage. The 400 meter races went until almost 6:30 p.m., at which point we were all exhausted but thrilled to have gotten so far.

After the races, awards were distributed to the teams. The University of Wisconsin-Madison came away with an award for best construction for our design report and general canoe construction, and also best innovation for our use of lightweight environmentally sound concrete to achieve great stiffness and strength. In the races, we took first in all but the women's endurance, which we did not place in. The overall first place award came our way and we couldn’t be happier.

We woke up this morning to a wonderful breakfast, but outside, the weather was not so great. It was drizzling lightly when we arrived at the University of Twente campus and we crossed our fingers that it would let up soon. When we arrived, we found that our canoe had been dropped off by the shipping company. When we saw it, we couldn’t believe our eyes; the shipping company had painted and stenciled our team’s name and logo on the box! Anxiously, we rushed to get the top off and discovered that the canoe received no structural damages from the shipping. Everything was intact and ready for the races.

From there, we moved the canoe from its crate and placed it at the location where the judging would take place. Once it was in place, we made our way to a reception and toured the campus with a graduate student from the school. After touring the campus, the judging was set to begin.

The jury of judges looked over all the canoes as they were weighed and measured. We had a nice talk with the judges and some of the other teams. Here in the Netherlands, concrete canoe is something they do for several weeks in the summer. Their rules are two pages long and they build a few boats each year. The boats were all painted and looked pretty sharp.

From the judging area, we went to a barbecue for dinner and came back afterward for the night’s activities. The sponsors had some kind words for everyone and the organizers spoke briefly. Then, all the participating teams placed their boats in the water and paraded around the pond to show them off. After the banquet, we hung out at a bar on campus and listened to a local band play. We stayed for a short while and decided it would be best to leave and get rest for the races.

I am currently waiting for the final three team members to arrive at a train station in the Schiphol airport near Amsterdam. Since my last post, Ivy Harmon and I met up with four other team members: Alex Rexrode, Ann Thielmann, Kelly Greuel and Nicole Brostowitz. Ivy and I have been here for a week and a half now. The other four plan to stay for a week, and arrived on Sunday morning. We met them for dinner on Sunday evening and on Monday, went on a boat tour together. On Tuesday they toured the Science Museum while we checked out some Dutch art and the Van Gogh museum.

On Wednesday morning our friends rented a car and headed for Germany to visit their relatives. Ivy and I went to a local street market and saw a museum of cultural heritage. Very interesting stuff. Amsterdam has some fantastic museums!

So we are now ready to head to Enschede (pronounced enskeday) to prepare for the competition. I am definitely nervous because I have no idea what to expect. The language barrier worried me a bit prior to coming to The Netherlands, but having been here a while, it has been quite easy to work around.

It will be very interesting to see how our canoe compares to the canoes here. Our rules are dramatically different compared to the Beton Kanu Challenge rules—a two-page report is required while our report for the U.S. competition was nearly 70! The race course and race type is also quite different. In the U.S. competition, it’s essential to have a canoe that turns better than it goes straight. However, the Beton Kanu Challenge has straight sprints and no slalom, making our canoe less than ideal. The mix requirements are also different enough to allow substantially lighter and thinner laminations, resulting in better strength and a bit of a competitive advantage. The length requirements are very similar although our canoe is .4 feet too long according to their rules. Let’s hope they overlook that minor detail!

I’m definitely excited to see what is waiting for us at competition. As soon as we find our travel companions we will be boarding a train to Enschede. I’ll have an update about the first day of the competition on Friday evening.

From Amsterdam, we caught a train to Delft, which is located in the southern part of South Holland. I’ve been wondering why Holland and The Netherlands tend to be used synonymously, so here’s what I’ve found: Amsterdam is located in North Holland, and Delft and Rotterdam are in South Holland. South of that is Zeeland. Each is one of the more than 10 provinces in The Netherlands. So now you know. Not all Dutch people are from Holland. For more info look here.

Delft is a gorgeous town. We stayed in a nice hotel on a canal downtown. We also wandered the town for a while, checked out a really old church and climbed the bell tower. The tower was over 300 feet high and had a great view (see the picture below). Delft is pretty expensive and full of tourists, so we saw a few sights and decided to move on.

Wednesday morning, we left our hotel around 8 a.m., rented bikes and headed down to Delft Hydraulics where we met up with Jos Dijkman, a flood management engineer. Jos was very welcoming and gave us a presentation on Dutch flood protection. Since the Katrina disaster, American Congressional delegates have been visiting Delft Hydraulics to learn about the stellar protections designed for The Netherlands. The presentation we got in Jos’ office was an abbreviated version of the same one. Very interesting stuff!

Jos also showed us some software programs they use. One was able to model flood inundation time and depth within a given dike ring or area, the other was a public relations tool which I’ll explain in more detail next.

A problem facing the Netherlands is that all the flood protection had been designed around a short record of flooding. New information governed that flood peaks should be reduced. Rather than raise the dikes along the whole river, a new approach was recommended to make the river wide and deeper in certain places to reduce flood peaks everywhere. Delft Hydraulics identified several hundred possible projects to accomplish these goals and proposed 30 or so to complete the project. Anyone who thought a given part of the project was a bad idea could use this software to try combinations of all the possible projects.

The public relations tool was set up for the public who wanted to voice their opinion on any of the over 700 possible partial projects. The program was placed on a CD and was available to anyone, free of charge. It included 3-D renderings of the before and after of the hundreds of possible project portions and a simple interface to switch them on and off. When you made changes, a simple graph of flood peak levels over the entire Rhine delta* would change, showing if you were under the target. The peak had to be below a certain line every where. There is more information here.

*The Rhine Delta includes basically all of the Netherlands in a historical perspective. There is more information here.

After the presentation, Jos gave us a tour of some of the facilities at Delft Hydraulics. Really amazing stuff. Most things that used to be tested in the physical facilities are now being analyzed with computer simulations. However, they still have to do a lot of physical modeling of wave interactions with silts and sands, and this is mostly what we observed being worked on.

After our tour in Delft, we visited the Maeslant Barrier. This Barrier was HUGE! It was 22 meters tall from top to bottom, and if stood on end, it would be taller than the Eiffel Tower. The huge ball joint at the inland side is 10 meters across. It resides in large dry docks and when flooded, causes the barrier to float. Once floating, the gates are rotated together to close the shipping lane. Once closed, they are sunk to the bottom by filling them with water. This barrier, because of the high value of what it protects, was designed to protect against the 3,000-4,000 year event. With a failure probability of something like 1 in 10,000 years. Really amazing stuff.

With all our stuff loaded on bikes, we headed south into Zeeland Wednesday afternoon and in the evening we made our way to the town of Ouddorp, where we stayed in a pleasant little hotel overnight. The next morning we were off on a long day of biking across much of the Delta-Works, a series of dams and barriers built after catastrophic flooding in the area in the 50s. The most impressive was the Oosterschelde Barrier which covers about three kilometers of tidal channel. It is normally open and allows over two-thirds of the usual tidal volume. There are more than 60 piers, each weighing an impressive 18,000 tons! This thing was huge and took nearly a half hour to bike across.

After crossing the Oosterschelde Barrier, we biked straight into the wind, riding on top of a coastal dike where we went about 10 kilometers per hour into a 40+ kilometer per hour wind. No fun at all. We finally found our way behind the barrier and out of the wind. Needless to say, we were able to make much better time once we were out of the wind. About 30 kilometers later, we had traveled through several smaller towns, two big towns and rode a ferry (see picture below) across a shipping lane to a town called Breskins.

In Breskins, we lost our bike route and found a shortcut instead. This was a great thing after spending such a long time on an uncomfortable bike seat. From Breskins it was about 40 kilometers to Brugge, a bustling tourist town in Northern Belgium.

Our first night in Brugge featured one of the most fun and delicious meals we’ve had yet. The restaurant was called Bao Bab, an African restaurant run by an eccentric Belgian man who loved giving his patrons a hard time. The cook was his wife and she made some of the most exquisite and tasty meals I’ve ever had. After such a long bike ride, this dinner was a real life saver! We finished around 10:45 p.m. and got back to the hotel, where we passed out in a matter of minutes, completely exhausted from the long journey.

The next morning we woke up to what seemed to be the standard continental breakfast here: bread, butter, chocolate syrup, honey, preserves, ham, gouda cheese and summer sausage. The cold cuts were sliced thin and placed on bread with spread. A wide selection of cereal, milk and juice finished off the buffet. A ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast with plenty of butter is actually really good!

Brugge was beautiful, scenic and had a lot of interesting museums. We climbed a church tower, and were a foot away from the bells at the 10 a.m. chime; very LOUD bells I might add. The diesel cars on the cobblestone streets were extremely LOUD as well! Also, buses sped by six inches from your shoulder on a two-foot wide sidewalk. It was quite scary! I guess in a way, I’m glad to be away from Brugge, but at the same time if it weren’t for the few downsides, I really would have liked to explore more of the city.

So here we are on a train going what feels like 100 miles an hour on our way to return the bikes to where we rented them in Delft.

I’ve been typing a mile a minute... slower than our train is going, but fast enough that this has gotten REALLY long. My apologies. We are meeting up with more members of our canoe team tomorrow morning and will be in Amsterdam for three more days.

For our first day in Amsterdam, we wandered around looking at the sights and enjoying the cool, sunny weather. The amazingly small cars and plethora of bikers is in stark contrast to what we are used to in the states. It’s been a very interesting experience so far.

The next update may be a few days; we are heading to Delft and the Delta-Works tomorrow and will be back in Amsterdam toward the end of the week.

The team’s preparations are almost complete for our trip to the Netherlands, where we will be competing in the 30th Annual Dutch Concrete Canoe Challenge--also known as the Beton Kanu Challenge. The University of Wisconsin–Madison team was awarded this trip for winning the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2007 National Concrete Canoe Competition. Through countless hours of volunteer work done by our more than 25 team members, we secured UW-Madison’s fifth consecutive national championship and the opportunity to compete internationally. Since the USA Nationals, we have reviewed and submitted our technical design paper, and maintained our paddling form and conditioning.

With the support of the American Concrete Institute (ACI) and ASCE, our canoe was crated and shipped to Europe. ACI and ASCE also assisted our team by providing flights to and from Europe, as well as food and lodging during the competition. Eight people from the UW-Madison team will participate in the Beton Kanu Challenge. Two of us are arriving on August 26th, and we’ll be touring sights around Amsterdam, Delft and possibly part of Belgium . Four more team members will arrive on August 30th and the final two team members will be arriving September 4, at which point we will head to Enschede, where the competition will be held.

We are all thrilled to be given such an amazing opportunity to represent the USA and to experience a different part of the world. I am especially excited to see some of the flood protection constructed over the past several centuries in the Netherlands, and our planned visits to Delft Hydraulics (http://www.wldelft.nl/) and the Delta works (http://www.deltawerken.com/). The lab in Delft is going to be a great opportunity to learn more about some of the latest research in the field of sediment transport, fluid mechanics and water wave theory. Seeing the structures of the Delta works, some of which are built to withstand 4,000-10,000 year storm events, will be an amazing experience.