The Grumman Sportboat, a 15-foot, 112-pound car-top boat, was also popular. They were built as conventional canoes and as square-sterns, in standard-weight and lightweight models. Grummans have always been built in a few basic models: 17-footers, 15-footers and 13-footers. His outfitting business provides customers with 17-foot, 68-pound “livery lightweights.” Just this past spring, Wold ordered 32 more Grummans. “Best canoe made,” said Minnesota canoe outfitter Cliff Wold Sr., who has been using Grummans every year for 37 years. Last year, he said, only about 3,000 Grummans were sold.īut there will be Grummans in use and on canoe racks for decades to come. “There are a lot more slices of the pie,” Harvey said. But in the past 10 to 15 years, the canoe market has been fragmented among canoes made of many other materials - polyethylene, Fiberglas, Kevlar, Royalex and Royalight. The aluminum canoe market boomed in the 1970s when young Americans took to the woods. Grummans were first made in 1945 by the Grumman Corp., which had built aluminum aircraft for the military in World War II. In its heyday, tens of thousands of Grummans were sold each year, according to Greg Harvey, the company’s sales manager. The canoe maker reportedly had not been profitable for the past few years. The Grumman Corp., now owned by the Outboard Marine Corp (makers of Johnson and Evinrude outboards among other marine products), has decided to clos Grumman. The last Grumman aluminum canoe was built June 27 in a plant in Marathon, N.Y. The era of the nation’s most durable canoes appears to be over.

Grumman canoe sticker