UNIVERSITY EVENT Canoe race: Sink or win

PORTAGE LAKES, Ohio (AP) -- They came from all over to race their concrete canoes.
The University of Akron was hosting a regional student conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the marquee event was the concrete canoe race.
Student engineers from eight schools in the United States and Canada, as well as their supporters, were out on Turkeyfoot Lake over the weekend.
The contest gives students a chance to see engineering principles at work. The concrete canoe illustrates the rule that even extremely heavy objects float, as long as they displace more than their weight in water.
Each university had mix design, paddling, hull design and construction teams.
Bragging rights
A team can win the overall award without doing well on the lake, but for engineering students, the race brings special bragging rights.
"We had both boats poured before Christmas Day," said Akron freshman Sarah Gentner, a member of the mix design and testing team. "We were really on top of things because we hosted this year."
The stone boats looked like any other canoe, but ranged in weight from 130 to more than 200 pounds. A typical fiberglass or aluminum model weighs about a third of that.
The goal is to build a lighter, faster canoe, Gentner said.
Call it home-field, or rather, home-lake advantage. Akron won every race, for the first time in 15 years.
Rowers competed in slalom, distance and sprint races, fighting their way through wind and currents to the farthest buoy placed 1,600 feet from shore. Park rangers and scuba divers watched from a motor boat.
Teams in the female slalom completed the course in times ranging from about six minutes to more than 16 minutes.