Small Boat Design

[Charlie43]

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If you dig into the professional literature on rowing for the purpose of racing, you'll find they admit that not much improvement in hydrodynamic efficiency can be obtained. What works well is already known. That, I'd argue, is especially true of rowboats meant for working. 5,000 years of informal field testing has produced a wide variety of very efficient hulls that can't be much improved. So, the question for a causal rower wanting a rowboat or her or himself is merely this:

 "How much are you willing to pay in cost and building complexity to obtain a few more fractional knots of hull speed  and/or ease of effort?"

If you're rowing a displacement hull and putting 81" inches on the waterline, then your theoretical hull speed --due to the hydrodynamics of wave-making-- is a respectable 4 MPH, or faster than a brisk walk. Unless you're oar-cruising and trying to knock out 20 to 30 miles a day, 4 MPH will get you anywhere on a lake or bay that a casual rower needs to get to and back.  

But here's the Catch-22. When a Salt Bay Skiff is lightly loaded, the hull isn't moving THROUGH the water, but ACROSS  the top of it as does a standup paddle board. That's why a single, light-weight rower, such as me or Senate, finds a SB to be a fast, stable, nimble, and fun boat to row. We move across the water with ease, and with plenty of leg room. But put a second person in the boat, especially a pair of average-sized, average-weight adults, and  the SB becomes crowded and a pig to row. You're no longer skimming across the surface of the water. You're sunk down in it, and you're trying to plow your way through it, meeting all kinds of skin friction and sheer physical resistance as the hull tries to move water out of its way.

Here's a real life example, drawn from a fishing trip done at Lake Britton in a Salt Bay Skiff I owned at the time. Put yourself in the fwd rowing seat, your adult son in the mid seat, and his two --at the time-- small daughters in the stern seat, and now you don't have "a boat".  You've got "a barge" that's a pig to move through the water. But a barge was what the four of us needed, and it served its purpose to move us a hundred yards from the launch point to  the opposite shore line where we could start working structure and maybe pick up some bass, which is what did happen, with Annie catching the biggest of the day on fly she had tied herself earlier in the day at camp. But don't anyone ever try to tell me that the Salt Bay Skiff is a good "multi-person rowboat". It ain't, nor can it ever be. Nor, would I claim, does the SBS make a very good, two-person sailboat, for being its too small to accommodate any but the smallest of second persons in the boat.

But there is one happy difference between an over-loaded, over-crowded rowboat and an equally abused and misused sailboat of the same size and length. Now it's the wind that's doing the work for you, not your own arms legs, and trunk.  

My takeaway? If you know nothing about boats, the Salt Bay Skiff isn't a bad place to begin learning about how to build and use one. But it isn't likely the boat you'll  want to keep except for some hopefully happy memories. Your real boat, your serious boat, is still in the future, dancing lightly on the horizon of possibilities.