Souris River Canoes

Kevlar Canoes

All Kevlar canoes are not created equal.

Kevlar is a synthetic woven fabric famous for its toughness and durability. It is best known for its applications within the aerospace industry and its bullet-stopping characteristics in police and military protective vests.

Kevlar is surprisingly light-weight compared to fiberglass and several other similar fabrics. What most people don’t realize is that the toughness of a canoe made with Kevlar depends critically on the type of resin used in the hull construction.

Virtually all other manufacturers use polyester or vinylester-based resins. Souris River Canoes uses epoxy, by far the strongest of all resins, in all of our canoe hulls.

Epoxy is more expensive than the other two, but the real reason so few manufacturers use it is that it is very temperamental and difficult to work with. It requires more time and care to produce an epoxy hull but the result is truly worth the effort. Souris River Canoes builds a Kevlar/epoxy canoe that, pound for pound, is the toughest Kevlar canoe on the market today.

Flexible Rib System

Souris River Canoes spent several years experimenting with various ways to stiffen the bottom of our canoe hulls. Conventional wisdom suggested a highly rigid structure as demanded by most elite canoe racers. Under their paddling conditions this was an important feature.

We wisely decided we would not build canoes for racing, but preferred addressing the needs of the canoe tripping and recreational paddling community.

As this type of paddling often encounters submerged rocks and logs, a rigid canoe bottom is no longer an advantage, quite the contrary as a matter of fact. A bottom with no give to it tends to crack or puncture when bridged or impacted. The obvious solution to this problem was to construct a hull that had just enough flex to eliminate the above hazards yet still be stiff enough to prevent unwanted flexing under even the most severe wave action one might encounter in flat water paddling.

Souris River Canoes has evolved a flexible rib system that has revolutionized the design of wilderness tripping canoes.

To the great surprise of the critics who steadfastly held to their racing design concepts of canoe hull construction, the flexible rib system has been a huge success. The frequency of crack or puncture repair to the bottom of Souris River Canoes is but a fraction of what you will find on the market’s rigid bottom designs. Our Flexible Rib System isn’t by any means indestructible, but it’s about as good as it gets!

Duralite

Our search for a less expensive alternative to our Kevlar hulls resulted in a laminate which we call Duralite*. This fabric is a hybrid mix of some very strong, resilient fibre strands.

Although less costly, Duralite provides near-Kevlar performance. In fact, a Souris River Canoe made of Duralite is stronger than many of our competitors’ canoes made of Kevlar!

Duralite creates a hull that is admittedly a little heavier than Kevlar. Other than that, paddlers will find little or no difference between the two products’ performance on the water. With hundreds of Duralite canoes in outfitter service, there is no doubt about its performance.

More Souris River Canoe Technical Details

Fabric and Colour

Trim Options

Warranty