It occured to me to look up the reduced size/scale boat I saw passing through the IWA - Sarni - on the Jim Shead boat listing, taken from BW registrations, and there it is - 18' long, 4' beam, 8hp engine - but curiously of all, buolders are listed as being Adelaide Dock, I assume the one in Southall, now reverted back to a BW maintainance yard, was pricvately run. This gives her a little kinship with Tortoise, as the overplating done on her for Jim & Mary when they first bought her was the last job down at Adelaide Dock before they closed. I'm still intrigued though - a boat of 4' beam would be big enough to sleep in, but how stable would she be? Embarrassingly my post of a few days ago was at the top of a google search, but I did unearth this page - so generally used as a butty (boat towed by another). Interestingly the boat she was alongside - Random - isn't the one listed as on that page, but anything's possible.
Anyway, my obviously underused imagination wanders back to the idea of a pedal powered boat with accommodation - a self-propelled tent, basically. It would probably be a very long way from a scale canal boat (after all, someone once said canal boats have all the streamlining of a brick in the water) , but the scientist in me wonders how the pedal/prop drive would compare to oars on a canoe - the canoe of course would present a lot less motion resistance. It probably wouldn't take much to add an electric/solar drive as an alternative... other idle thoughts would be how it would stand up to sharing locks - or indeed the wash from speeding hire boats ;-) (or could it be made light enough to carry round)...
random further reading:
http://www.swallowboats.co.uk/content/view/94/104/
http://www.geocities.com/flotillian/boat_selection.html
http://www.nauticraft.com/
http://microship.com/
http://www.expedition360.com/reference/pedal_boat.htm
http://www.designwizardry.com/pedalboatrace/index2004.shtml
Time to put daft ideas on hold, but perhaps only until I work out my carbon footprint for this year's trip...
Work and play at Cropredy
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I'm glad to report that Herbie is still afloat - well you never know these
days with all the weather we're having; there's a 40-odd mph wind outside
as ...
1 week ago
1 comment:
We can't sleep aboard our 17 foot pedal-powered boat (Winsome from Swallow Boats) but we have done over 600 miles in her and recently did an overnight camping trip on the Thames where we carried all the gear in the boat (she has large buoyancy chambers fore and aft) and camped on an island at Hurley lock.
We can happily pedal at 4-5mph for 15-20 miles. She will go at 7mph but that's a bit too much like hard work for us!
You can read about our "cruises" here: http://winsomeboat.blogspot.com/
The boat will be at the Green Boat Show in Norfolk Sept 21st if you fancy a go. http://www.broadsgreenboatshow.co.uk/
Alison
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