I'm back from two weeks on the Texas Gulf Coast. I got to think a lot.
I want to build a decked boat that can hold four distinct payloads:
1) me alone
2) a fly fishing load with one passenger way up front and one way behind.
3) an Oregon-style plug pulling load with two passengers side by side immediately in front of the rower.
4) a payload I hope to never row, but I want the boat to be capable of it: Five humans in the boat. One rowing and four taking a ride. The Briggs does that with two side-by-side seating areas way up front and way back behind, where each such seating area amounts to an enormous vessel to fill with water each time the rowing gets serious. I saw a Briggs Grand Canyon video on Facebook last month that showed that payload hitting a big drop. The muscular 60 year old veteran rower suddenly got his Briggs sideways and then strained like holy hell to get parallel with the current again. He made it but it isn't easy when so much of weight is that far from the middle, with the two seating areas suddenly holding several hundred pounds of extra, sloshing back-and-forth weight.
Deep seating wells can be eliminated. An extra-wide boat will more than make up for a slightly higher than normal payload.
I'll make more of a sit-on-top kayak arrangement so there are no 70 gallon seating wells to fill with water. And those four passengers will be seated as two rows of two side-by-side, right in front of the rower. Why? That arrangement crams the bulk of the weight closer to the middle of the boat, right over the boat's center of gravity. It makes a huge rowing difference.
But all those positions require the ability to shift the seating positions forward or back a bit, to accommodate today's payload. Are we fly fishing the Yellowstone valley, pulling plugs in Yankee Jim Canyon or running the Grand Canyon?
I have a picture of it in my mind's eye now. There will be a slightly T-shaped cutout in the middle center of the deck. A modular seating panel will bolt down over the T-shaped hole, over a fat foam gasket, so the weight can be adjusted forward or backward as needed.
Oarlock towers and an adjustable foot-brace for the rower will travel forward and back with the seating positions. I want to have my cake and eat it too.