Aero's maiden voyage under oars

Jeremy Harris's remarkable non-wooden skiff Aero went out under oars for the first time on Sunday, on the River Hamble. Also present were Chris Waite with his remarkable all-wood skiff Octavia and myself, with my remarkable Chippendale Sprite Snarleyow, which is mainly wood but a with bits of SS here and there.

Aero proved to be a bit tippy but with reassuring amounts of secondary buoyancy, and incredibly light. So much so that Jeremy complained that when he hit patches of algae (it's that time of year) the boat would come to a dead halt instantly. This is partly due to the sharp angle of the bow which digs in to the water like an axe.
The outriggers are made of carbon fibre on a foam mould originally intended for a leaf spring in an aircraft undercarriage (Jeremy's other obsession is planes). A pair of John Murray's GA swivels are slid into sockets in the ends. The outriggers seemed very stiff.
The oars are aluminium tubes with carbon fibre blades, not a very happy arrangement but necesary to win the bet to create a boat with no wood at all. Jeremy had weighted the handles to help with the balance but this meant the blades overall were quite heavy compared with my traditional Macons. They were also far too short (also, possibly, the outriggers 'wings' were not long enough).
The short blades meant that Jeremy struggled to push the boat along at the speed she is clearly capable of, but with a few tweeks to the rig, she will fly.
The next step is to install a front-facing rowing device.
Jeremy has built a high-tech version of the cranked oars that used to be used in duck punts, which looks like rowing as designed by rocket scientists. The cranks have a 20 per cent leverage and folding the handles out brings the blades in for convenient stowage. It will be very interesting to see how the design pans out.

The Boat Design Process

A select group from the Home Built Boat Rally gathered on the River Hamble today to play with the latest iterations of their boats. In my case, this meant looking rather despondently at the blisters in the paint job on Snarleyow and making a Firm Resolve to do a full refit in the next week or so.

Paul Hadley's Illusion, an evolving microcruiser based loosely on Matt Leyden's Elusion, got under way for the first time under sail, I believe, and scootered along nicely despite her lack of waterline length. Paul has also devised a method of mounting the light board on the transom for trailering, in which one of the bolts passes through both transom and rudder, thus making absolutely sure that it can't fall off on the motorway.

Afterwards, Chris Waite and Graham Neil repaired to Graham's garage boatshed to discuss his new build, Katie Beardie, a sailing canoe designed by Chris. Followers of Graham's entertaining and informative blog will know that that the shape is now generally correct after a non-approved builder modification, but Graham still felt the shape was not absolutely right.

They examined the hull from all angles like the judges in a Fat Pig Contest, and there was much sucking of teeth. Eventually, Chris decided that the V of the bottom had to be pulled in a little, and the curve of the bottom board was a little too full, so Graham will have to unstitch the hull, take a bit off both sides and stitch it all back up again, poor chap.

But the hull shape looks promising and it will be interesting to see how it performs.

This 'still life' was arranged on the Jolly Sailor's pontoon. It reminds me of an old Goon Show gag:

Henry Crun: "Neddy, you will have to go to Brazil. You can use the company bicycle."

Neddy Seagoon: "But Brazil's overseas!"

Henry Crun: "Well, you'll have to get it waterproofed then." 

Home Built Boats on the Hamble

Saturday's amble up the Hamble was also attended by members of the Home Built Boat Rally, including Phil Oxborrow in a not-home-built-but-who-cares kayak, Paul Hadley in his ongoing project Illusion and Graham Neil in his lovely Coot, a Wolstenholme-designed dinghy.
The wind had died away completely when we all left the Jolly Sailor so Graham was faced with the prospect of rowing all the way back to Swanwick (300 yards). "Not in front of all these rowers!" he cried as he left, so of course I instantly pressed the video button on my camera.
I think he rows rather well, actually.
Paul is trialling electric power for Illusion.
But I missed the most interesting experiment of the day. Chris Waite is developing a forward-facing, pedal-powered over-the-transom sculling system. The forward-facing element is not yet in place, but the sculling mechanism is working as shown in Graham's video on his always entertaining blog Port-na-Storm.

Rowing the Clovelly Scull

Paul Zink brought the prototype Clovelly Scull to the Hamble river today to show what it can do. And what it can do is impressive: it is fast, stable and reassuringly buoyant. An ideal boat for offshore rowing, in fact, though the conditions were not challenging as you can see from the pictures. Glassy smooth, in fact.
The wide, mussel-shell shape and tall vertical stem combine to create a hull of real character. The broad beam creates a lot of initial stability, so there is none of that uneasy wobbly feeling you get in a racing shell, but the double ended shape creates very little wake and she is easy to push along at five or six knots.
But the feature that intrigues all scullers is the sliding rigger. The seat is fixed and the rigger slides in channels at the bottom of the boat, so instead of sliding your whole body up and down, you simply move your feet.
This has several big advantages, the main one being that your weight stays at the centre of gravity of the boat and the pitching movement of sliding seat boats is eliminated. I can watch the stern of my Sprite shifting up and down markedly as I row, but the Clovelly Scull's canoe stern moves hardly at all.
The rigger itself is very high tech, a carbon fibre wing that is stiff and light. The rigger can be easily removed and carried in the boot of the car, making the boat considerably lighter and much handier for lifting onto the roof rack.
Another novel feature of the boat is a bipod mast for a front-view mirror and a GPS. I have always been a bit sceptical about mirrors. People recommend them all the time, but until today I had never seen anybody actually using one.
The mirror on the Clovelly Scull is slightly concave to give a wider field of view, and the mast positions in right in your line of sight. It is strangely addictive - at one point I suddenly realised that for the last few minutes I had been looking in the mirror all the time, not just giving it an occasional glance. It is really useful for spotting upcoming posts that would otherwise pose a signficant on-your-back-with-legs-waving-in-the-air risk, but it is difficult to judge distances so you still need to look round.
It is also dead interesting to watch the speed on the GPS, even if it is just telling you how idle you have been.
The hull creaked slightly as power was applied, possibly due to flexing of the GRP hull against the GRP deck. Not a problem really. The boat has a skeg that can be retracted by pulling a cord. It did not seem to make all that much difference to tracking but it might be more effective in choppier seas.
Ruth Wake of Langstone Cutters, an experienced sculler, took the boat out and came back enthusing about its speed and stability ("I nearly caught a crab and was surprised how easy it was to recover" she said) and muttering something about wanting a pink version.

Max Taylor, who has only rowed fixed seat boats, also took it out and took to it like a natural. He also came back with glowing reports.
The first boats are under construction at Rossiter Yachts in Christchurch, who make most of the boats that are being rowed across various oceans right now and also produce a coastal four. Prices have yet to be fixed.