Sliding seat for cruising rowboats

Sliding seats are a big problem for cruising boats, because they take up all the middle of the boat and get in the way when you want to for camp, cook or just laze around. Worse than a centreboard.
Rick Thompson in the San Francisco Bay area has built one of the most interesting rowing/sailing boat designs around, John Welsford's Walkabout. Now he has added an ingenious sliding seat mechanism that runs on the side flotation tanks, leaving the centre well free for other purposes, such as sleep. Rick describes it in the very excellent John Welsford forum thus:

I'm pretty happy with it so far. I know JW is not so keen on sliding seats, and I understand that it probably burns more energy and doesn't do anything to change the hull speed limit on this type of boat.

For me, it is a big help to be able to use leg muscles as well as arms and back. Next will be some type of hold-down so the seat can be used fixed as well.
It's really hot here in inland California now, hope others are having good
boating or building weather.
Rick

I have to say I rather agree with John Welsford about sliding seats on long-distance boats. When you are racing over relatively short distances, you need to transmit all the power you can possibly generate into the oars. It is a sprint, so it's anaerobic.
Over longer distances, it is physically impossible to row anaerobically - the power you can produce is limited by the amount of air you can pump through your lungs. And you can produce this power just as efficiently on a fixed thwart as a sliding seat.
If you use a fixed seat, you get the other advantages of better control over the oars in choppy conditions and a more robust and simpler setup. But with the sliding seat, Rick will be able to make a lot of money by challenging fixed seat Walkabout owners to a race to "that buoy and back". Go, Rick!

Fishtail sculling device at HBBR

Paul Smithson, builder of the Welsford Walkabout that I sailed in at Cobnor a few weeks ago, loves sailing gadgets and has come up with an extremely novel sculling device which got its first trial at the Home Built Boat Rally meet at Cotswold Water Park over the weekend.
It works by waggling a plate like a fishtail. Power is provided by a lever mounted amidships and connected by a rod to the stern, so the sculler can sit facing forwards.
As a furniture designer and maker, Paul has incredibly high standards of workmanship and the prototype is a gleaming marvel of engineering, the complete opposite of the lashup I would have produced 'just to see if the idea works'.
The first trials showed definite forward progress but the device has the drawback that it can't steer the boat, so direction has to be set with an oar. It is also not as fast as a good pair of traditional blades. It will be very interesting to see how the device develops.

Rowing a Walkabout

What a great day rowing, starting with a brisk row down Chichester Harbour with Langstone Cutters in the Clayton Skiff Gladys. Here she is being brought in from her buoy behind a Teifi skiff.

Back at the Dinghy Cruising Association meet at Cobnor, I joined Tony Waller in his Shearwater faering to pop across the channel to the Harbour Office so he could get a licence for a few days on these fabulous waters. £3.50. What a bargain.
On the way back, we succeeded in breaking his new leeboard and the pushpull tiller broke off. So we had to return under sail controlled (a bit) by oars. Luckily the wind was light or we would have scratched a lot of paintwork.

Finally, I got to go out in a brand new Walkabout, built by Paul Smithson to the design by John Welsford, albeit heavily modified to make it more of a sailing boat than the original rowing/sailing hull. He added an extra strake to build the hull up, removed the decks and the mizzen, and the side flotation tanks.
The carbon fibre mast and balanced lug drive her along nicely, and she rows well too with a pair of 9ft 6in oars from Collars.