It helps to have more than one person suggesting what a canoe might be--- the seller told me I was the second person to say it was a Thompson. I think it also helped to be enthusiastic about Thompsons in general and his canoe in particular. This doesn't always work-- there's still a canoe on eBay that comes up again and again and the listing always says there's a number on the canoe, and I've asked more than once what the number is (canoe looks Penn Yanish to me). This is one that appears to have met with a hungry shark or large submerged object at some time in the past, and magically avoided Andre's solution for such things.
