"Frazer in his Hou 14"

Flood Rescue Canoeing Hero!

"Press the button and wait for the green man?"

"The Tweet from North Yoks Police"

Frazer was spotted on Police CCTV and they tweeted a picture of him so we got in touch with him to find out his story, and this is his amazing tale…….

What an eventful December!

I was at home when I got a notification on my phone, telling me that certain areas of the country have been issued a red weather warning for flooding. So I thought about the idea of taking my Hou Canoe to the flooded areas to help rescue people, as I’m a qualified community first responder with LIVES (Lincolnshire Integrated Voluntary Emergency Service).

"Night paddling"

The next day I drove to York, I’ve never seen it flood as bad as it had. Once I found an ideal location to launch my canoe, I got kitted up and set out to see if I could find anyone to help.

The first person I helped was a gentleman who was stranded by a shop, he required being taken from one side of the flooded area, over to his house. Then as I was paddling past a house a gentleman shouted me over. He informed me that he didn’t have any food at his house, so I took him from his house, over to a part of the city that still had shops open. Once he had got a few essentials, I took him back to his house. At one point I even had a dog in my canoe!

A lady shouted me over to her house, she informed me that her daughters dog needed to be taken for a walk, as it was unable to go to the toilet in the house. That was the first time that I had ever had an animal in my canoe. It felt surreal paddling down roads, next to cars with only their roof showing. You couldn’t see where the river was, because the water was higher than the barriers/ fencing. In total that day I’d say I helped about 15 people.

I have kept in contact with one gentleman I helped called Nick. He required being transported from his apartment so that he could reach his cherished motorbike, before the flood water engulfed it.

I’ve taken my canoe on many adventures, but this one will be hard to beat, as it’s not very often, that you can paddle around a major city’s streets!

Thanks to all the people at Hou Canoes, for making such a versatile canoe!
Frazer Grainger

Check out Frazers video of his adventure on YouTube,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHawAF04umg

Hou Canoes; Crash Test Program.

Well sitting here in the office on a soggy Tuesday we have decided to add a Crash Test Program to what we offer. Why?

Hou put that there?? 

Well, from time to time, as you will know we all have the odd moment where sanity unwittingly leaves our minds and the result is that you have crashed your boat. This could be folding it round a rock on a particularly lumpy bit of river, it could be dropping it off the roof of the car because you thought you had a hold of it but the evidence is against you!

At times we have all done it, or better still, witnessed some one else do it! My particular favorite was a friend with a brand new Land Rover Discovery, it had the roof rails that ran from front to back. They ran up hill though due to the step in the roof on the Mk1 Discovery. Sadly he had not noticed this was a potential issue. The canoe was loaded and then he went to get the straps, only to see from a distance his boat perform an upside down seal launch off the front end of the roof rack and head straight for the tarmac making a large dent in the car bonnet on is way down. I am still unsure if the un named culprit was more concerned about his bonnet (which was a right off) or the fact his end deck had split in two, and the hull of his boat was damaged underneath that!

So for these 'unexpected moments' we would like to offer our Hou Canoes Crash Test Program. Simply put, if you crash your boat then drop us a line, tell us what happened, send us some pics and we will contact you directly to help sort it out at a preferential rate.

Hou Canoes,

The caring canoe company……………

What’s the story??

New material released by Hou Canoes……

Now that you can’t make Royalex canoes anymore, have we reached a canoe apocalypse?? What will people buy if there is no Royalex?? The end is nigh!!! Or maybe not! Read on to see how we have saved the day at Hou!

As a canoe manufacturer Hou was well aware that this situation was in bound, we thought, ‘best crack on and see what could be done’, so here is the story.

The starting point;

Royalex was lighter than traditional plastics and three layer plastics, it was fairly tough too, and if the worst came to the worst you could repair it with resins, almost anywhere. The only down side was it wasn’t quite as stiff as we would have liked in a perfect world.

What exactly do we want?;

So we want a material that is stiff, lightweight, tough, wear resistant and simply repairable if needed. Oh, and it mustn’t cost the earth!! Not much of a tall order then!? Well that’s the brief, lets go find it.

Boffins;

It was just after this point that I got lost to a world of very very techy people who wear white coats and talk in languages that paddlers don’t understand! Yes, there are people out there that fit certain stereotypes, but what I have learnt is that they are very very very clever! So after countless months of testing, mixed with many months of explaining the real world to the men in white coats who don’t understand the real world, we began to formulate what the experts say is the most up to date, highly developed three-layer material ever used in the production of canoes.

The material we were using in its original form had the right properties, but each property simply needed to be improved to attempt to replace Royalex, a simple job then!!??

Result;

What we have now achieved is a significant weight reduction, increased wear properties, increased stiffness and still maintained the ability to repair a boat on the river bank with nothing more than a blow torch and a knife. But how??

Without going completely into ‘white coat speak’ it works kind of like this. Looking at your boat material down to an Atomic level (yes the white coat men can do this), what we needed was a highly tunable ability to affect the stiffness, wear property and weight of the material whilst it is being Rotary molded, this works down at a Nano level giving us the ability to control the characteristics of the material while it is actually in production. Equally as important is the ability to dial back these adjustments if required, so the Inversion ability was also added to the mix.

The story of how we got here is important, its what makes your Hou Canoe as good as it is, the key elements of this new material development are highlighted in bold above, the project code name was born early from these attributes and has stayed with us all the way through, so that’s the name we have given to our new material,

Atomic

Rotary

Nano

Inversion

…….for three layer molding.

Or for short we call it A.R.N.I.3.

Why?

Because nothing and now one is harder than ARNI3!!

We are very proud of our ARNI3, its been an emotional journey, what is even more impressive is that we are still able to produce these boats and not charge a premium for them, ARNI3 is always there for you, as standard.

“Probably the toughest, lightest, stiffest and hardest wearing 3 layer available.”

Thanks for reading,

The Hou Crew.