One of my clients, the fellow who is ordering the oars shown in an earlier post from February, sent me a DVD of the canoe races held in Cross Lake, Mb.  The races are held as part of the Cross Lake Treaty & Indian Days and are formally called the Douglas Monias Sr. Memorial Canvas Canoe Marathon.

I've been told that the race is 30km/day for three days and that the crew need to change positions, bow & stern, at the 15km mark.  A good amount of prize money make the races hotly contested.

You can see that these converted freighter canoes are made much narrower than originally built, and that proper rowing requires an outrigger fitted for the oarlocks to be set far enough apart.

A few photos captured from the DVD.  I apologize for the image quality, but whatever camera was used produced a pretty coarse image.  I had to screen capture the images and then tweaked them to get a reasonable image.