It's probably the same feeling as 'running down the hill' for the first time in front of 80,000 people on a football Saturday. The canoes themselves are sleek, shining beauties kept under wraps by team members until actual competition. Doors to the lab are kept locked and enterprising television reporters shooed away without remorse. Only boats from previous years, scratched-up nags of their former racing years, are used for paddling practice. The home team tries to finagle information from friends at competing universities.
Rumors fly, but the canoes stay safe in heavily padded trailers or temperature-controlled labs.
Everyone stops to size her up. The team has run a Web site in the past, but photos of boats are always verboten. In the early years of the competition, students used sidewalk-variety concrete, but they produced the equivalent of floating bathtubs that hefted in at 400 lbs. The pale micro-bubbles, so light they float in the air like dust motes, wreaked havoc in the mixing process since determining proportions turned a complex engineering feat into something approaching alchemy. Led by Sheets, the team adjusted the mix for three long months until they judged it sound.