Canoe Anatomy

I thought I knew what a canoe was and then as I started reading some of these regulations these weird words like bow or bow however you pronounce that word and a gun whale started popping up so I did a little anatomy. So the bow is interesting the stern is the back and then the one that got me interested in the anatomy of a canoe was the word gun whales which were installed for safety on concrete canoes. It also adds reinforcement and kind of ties the structure together because if you think about it it's basically an oval like a pointy oval and that kind of holds the structure togetherlike structurally there's something that the gun whale does.