The reason is if a person looks you can find good used canoes all day under $800.

I have paddled an Aurora and loved it! A bit heavy for portaging but doable. Like you said, Kevlar is much nicer to portage but I never stressed about banging up the Aurora!

Weight depends on size. 16-17 ft canoe is 60-75 lbs. Hull design will affect speed for sure, that is a good point. Weight will also affect speed. Weight will also significantly affect speed of movement over portages.

@@jodimiddendorf my 16 ft boat is 58 lbs. my dads massive 16 foot camper is the same weight.

I’m not denying the weight of your specific boats.

My pleasure!

I hope you enjoy it!

Thank you! Everything I could find on the internet said ROYALEX was shut down due to small amounts of production need. But that didn’t seem right due to T-FORMEX quickly taking the place of ROYALEX….

"When Royalex was developed more than 40 years ago under prior ownership, we've been told it was intended for a broad range of markets. However, the canoe industry is the only market where it ultimately gained acceptance," PolyOne spokesman Kyle Rose said in an email. Company officials at PolyOne, which is North America's largest compounder and one of the region's largest resin distributors, decided to end Royalex production for a couple reasons, according to Rose. "Royalex is a low volume, unprofitable product that was in a steady decline in demand well prior to our purchase of Spartech last year," he said. "We have not identified upside or growth opportunities for Royalex that would make it viable as a continuing product line." PolyOne explored a potential sale of assets of the Royalex line, but has not found any "viable options to date," Rose added. "Other canoe materials do exist for manufacturers and buyers as alternatives to those made from Royalex," he also said.

Got anything to back that up, or is this just speculation? Everything I've seen/heard was due to low sales volume and limited marketability of such a product for other uses.

@@DeepBarney That was what the guys that put on the World's largest paddlesports show told me to my face in Sept 2013 when it was first announced. I was told the land the factory was on was polluted and when the new company bought it they chose to close it down rather than make the investment to clean it up. One way to spin that is to say sales were not high enough for the new buyer to justify spending $100's of thousands or even Millions to clean the land. The term "EPA Superfund" was mentioned in that conversation.

@@WisconsinEric Demise Of 'Royalex' Material Has Caused Stir In Canoeing World 'Paddling Evangelist' Says Builders Are Seeking Replacements For Discontinued Composite By Cheyenne Lentz Air Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2015, 2:40pm Every August, Darren Bush, owner of Madison's Rutabaga Paddlesports heads to the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market in Salt Lake City, Utah to get a glimpse of what’s new in outdoor sports gear. But this year, Bush said, the buzz among retailers was less about some new innovation than about the disappearance of an old mainstay. "One of the big stories in the canoeing world is the demise of a material called Royalex," he said. "The company that made it went out of business." Originally developed by the Uniroyal tire company four decades ago, Bush said the "bomb-proof, whitewater-friendly material" was an industry favorite. However, there was a catch. "It’s a very toxic material to produce. So it created what’s called a 'superfund site,'" he said. "They couldn’t shut it down because of environmental laws. They had to keep running. As long as they kept running they didn't have to clean it up." Eventually though, explained Bush, it made more financial sense to pay cleanup costs than to keep production going. "The labor force that made it was very skilled. It was very small, maybe six or eight people that made it. And canoeing was 90 percent of the market for it," he said. "So they just decided to mothball it." Bush said that many retailers, himself included, bought up as many Royalex boats as they could when they heard the news. "Everybody panicked because that's what people do sometimes when there's change," said Bush. But he cautioned that the situation isn't really that dire for paddling enthusiasts. "The truth is, there's lots of other things out there that can replace it," he said. "There are people working on different composite constructions and new materials to try and replace that sort of flexible durability … of Royalex."