Over sixty skiffs and counting

The Isle of Luing community launched skiff number sixty last weekend and the Selkies were there to salute her, with their new flag floating in the gentle breeze. 

The row down from Balvicar was a light paddle of three and a half miles down tide with a following zephyr.  

The only hazard the Belnahua, who has right of way.

The Gill of Melfort came by road to the ferry and missed the lovely trip down, but had a nice row across the Sound.

One of our surviving fellow creatures, who has so far escaped the fish farm's rifles. 

Rowing is back in strength it seems.

Rules - What are they for? What is their status?

Rules - What are they for? What is their status? 

I’m sure that most of us just want to go rowing, but there are some sad people who think about dry and dusty things like the rules. Later this year when we go to the Skiffieworlds there will probably be quite a few who are not just sad but a little upset as well, because we are likely to see modifications in construction that we discussed during our own build but rejected as outwith the spirit of Scottish Coastal Rowing.

The viral growth of the fleet has taken everyone by surprise and it’s clear that the measurement rules would have been much more tightly drawn had this been anticipated. As a result SCRA has commissioned a full review of the rules with a view to bringing in amendments for discussion at a future AGM. I am a member of the group charged with considering the existing rules, gathering views and offering advice.

All of us on the group are wearing two hats, because we are also involved in our own clubs and want to win races. Now that we at Seil are on the water and gaining our own experience we should be thinking about the issues surrounding the rules, so that we can adopt a position at any future SCRA meetings where amendments are discussed. I’m posting about some of the issues, in the hope that it will stimulate thought and perhaps a bit of discussion through comments.

I suggest that it’s possible to identify a number of quite distinct reasons why we need rules for boats in a class. I can think of four, safety, strength, speed and spirit. There may be a fifth that spoils the alliteration, cost, but with the kit-built skiffs I suspect it’s less important than we think, as the big items are all fixed.

I won’t waste time describing why the first three are important. By spirit I mean the range of emotional factors that have come together in the last three years or so surrounding the St Ayles skiffs and their communities. It’s a mixture of nostalgia reflecting the history of the boat type and shape plus the unique elements that make them attractive and in time will become a tradition.

Traditions all start somewhere, usually for good reasons which get lost as time passes. All sports have them for a variety of reasons, good and bad. Good reasons tend to reinforce the sense of belonging to a community, bad ones lead to exclusivity (c.f. certain bowling and golf clubs). We’ve all come across this, probably without actually acknowledging that in a sport one can do things for no obvious practical reason.

In our rules group I have argued that we should be aware of the importance of spirit and not shy away from promoting it as a value. It’s actually the only reason why any of us would take to the water in an attractive, slightly old-fashioned looking wooden boat with oars hanging off wooden thole pins and a flag pole on the front. Otherwise we’d be scooting about on sliding seats in carbon fibre contraptions and probably wearing designer lycra.

As we all know, the concept of the St Ayles skiff was developed at the Anstruther Fisheries Museum to commemorate certain traditions and perhaps revive them. In no particular order the historical antecedents were:

Scandinavian, ultimately Viking, boat shapes.

Historical Scottish fishing practice.

Recreational and competitive rowing in our east coast towns, particularly among the miners.

Traditional styles of rowing with long oars, kabes or thole pins.

The rules as presently expressed do refer to the spirit of the St Ayles skiffs, but there is a lack of detail, also an apparent reluctance to be open about the importance of this. As a result particular provisions designed to entrench the spirit have been justified on the other grounds, safety, strength speed and cost.

In the group I have argued that we should have the courage to acknowledge that rules making a boat strong may have nothing to do with safety, rules about speed may have nothing to do with either of those and rules about spirit absolutely nothing to do with any of the others.

Some of the issues are fairly clear. For example as we learned during the build adding rocker by reducing the keel at the ends is not allowed. Others are less so. Here are some of them.

Rowlocks.

The rule requiring these to be of wood has been justified on cost grounds, but metal crutches are demonstrably cheaper and longer lasting that wooden pins or kabes. Also some clubs have made clever wooden imitations of carbon fibre racing fittings, enabling oars to be feathered.

Feathering oars.

As a consequence of clever woodwork feathering has become possible and seems to be within the current rules. We have to think about whether or not this is the style of rowing the clubs (and we personally) want to see.

Should feathering oars be banned? On balance my personal view is, yes, they should be. I would argue that the traditional system with kabes or pins is central to the experience and much easier for inexperienced rowers to master. My views might change after a lot of hard upwind work though.

Spoon blades/choppers

Spoons are disallowed, ostensibly on cost grounds. That justification doesn’t stand up, because it’s cheap and easy to laminate curved blades using the same procedure as we did with the stems. It seems truly a question of spirit.

Materials

The existing rules allow a number of specified traditional materials apart from wood – “Brass, Silicon Bronze, Stainless Steel, Gunmetal” and go on to say “The only synthetic material permitted in the boat construction is the glue which should be of Marine Quality, and will usually be Epoxy resin or a Polyurethane glue”.

I think everyone has problems with the letter of this. Our polypropylene strips are illegal, but most skiffs have something similar, as bronze ones cost about £300. One recent skiff is said to have stainless steel thole pins, done with no intention to gain an advantage.

Footrests are not shown in the plans, but are necessary for rowing efficiently. A discussion is ongoing about the extent to which they may incorporate metal adjusting/strengthening strips.

Rudders

Alec Jordan’s original view was that the design should be completely open, to allow ideas to develop. During our build we discussed how it would be better for the pintles to be in a vertical line to the water and how this could be done with an outrigger. We decided not to do this and to keep the leading edge following the aft stem. Given the lack of a rule banning outriggers it will be interesting to see what people turn up at Ullapool with.

Selkie's very legal rudder

Later this year clubs will be asked to comment on these issues and if they want to entrench some basic principles which would purely be intended to preserve the spirit of inclusive community participation and the obvious good things that are causing this project to grow so quickly. It will be interesting to see what each regards as important to the experience of being involved with the St Ayles skiffs. We should be thinking about our own contribution to this. I await our own discussion with interest.

This post was written originally for www.seilskiff.org.uk and is reposted here for general interest.

  

John Gardner's Quincy Skiff

The late John Gardner of Mystic Seaport was apparently unable to pursue a teaching career on graduating from Columbia because of his political views, but formal education's loss was a great boon to the wooden boat community. Very few people combine practical ability with good writing skills, but his books on building classic small boats are so clear and inspirational that each chapter seems to cry out "please build me".

So I found myself while building the Swampscott dory in Volume one devouring the other chapters and wondering which would shout the loudest. In the event the modified Quincy skiff won out and became my next project. At the start of the chapter on her the Guru writes that she

“should row well, but build easily and cheaply. This is not a racing shell, obviously, nor is it intended for the open sea. This simple skiff should do well on lakes, large rivers, and sheltered waters along the coast.”

There were aspects of the construction that seemed particularly intriguing. She has an almost flat bottom formed from four softwood planks spliced together, two per side, to form chine logs that will be cross-planked over later.

Once cut to shape, the logs are set upside down on horses positioned at a convenient height, then suitably bevelled, and the transom and stem are added. Next the enormous plywood sides, over eighteen feet long and each needing two scarfs, are tortured into shape.

The book didn't actually say how difficult it would be to do that last bit, nor did it point out that a dry fit usually goes rather better than the real thing. I did this build single-handed and could have done with a helper to control the plywood sides, sticky and slimy with glue, as they slithered around on the temporary building moulds. Bringing the sides together was a real struggle, as I had decided to add both at once, in order to balance out the inevitable stresses on the jig. For a while this caused me a real panic, until I decided to screw battens to the plywood sides to get a proper grip on them. The battens could then be subjected to a lot of force with Spanish windlasses.

Fortunately I wasn't using a fast-hardening glue, and I eventually managed to close the gaping spaces at the bow at the expense of a lot of cursing and badly blistered and glued hands. After this planking the bottom and adding the seats was pretty simple.

The result was a stylish and very unusual rowing boat. The only problem was that we don't live on a lake or large river, nor is our coast all that sheltered. Perhaps I had skipped over that first paragraph in my eagerness to get building. With her flat bottom and long slab sides this skiff is no boat for a cross wind of any strength, or a seaway. In a calm she's a delight to row and my wife still recalls the trip we had one very crisp and sunny New Year's day, travelling effortlessly over four miles down our loch and back.

Because calm days don't happen often in our part of the world the skiff passed fairly soon into the hands of friends who did live beside a sheltered loch, whose sons got great use out of her. They are now grown men and the family have moved on, but the skiff is still on the lochside, more than twenty years later and reasonably serviceable, although some of her bottom cross-planks have been replaced from time to time.

Update on 2 November 2011

Dave Gentry has kindly allowed me to share some photos he took of this Quincy skiff doing good service in the catering trade. He has a fascinating collection of designs on his own website, here:- http://www.GentryCustomBoats.com