MRB Blog

2021-04-01-0424

Long and Skinny or Long and Wide?

Should a white water dory carry its passengers in the middle? Or out a the ends like a Briggs?

I want the weight in the middle of the boat rather than out at the ends. For a lot of reasons.

In a high rocker boat passengers out at the ends are high up rather than low down. That makes the boat unnecessarily tippy.
Weight in the middle is more side to side stable and easier and quicker to turn.

Traditional Oregon dory builders know this. They have always put the payload as two or even three passengers across on a front seat relatively far back from the downstream end of the boat. That's how they perform best.

Two rogue traditions changed that: fly fishing and the Grand Canyon. For fly fishing you have to separate the two passengers. The boats become less maneuverable but that's the price you have to pay. The Grand Canyon is an odd story. Martin Litton paid Keith Steele to make a decked boat big enough to take four passengers. The Susy Two. Keith wasn't into it. He chopped in 15x48 boat in half and stretched it out to 19 feet long instead of scaling it up proportionately, so it was a long skinny boat with passengers at both ends.

He didn't want to build any more so Martin Litton got Jerry Briggs to do much the same. Not many Grand Canyon runners have ever tried to change anyhing. They build long skinny boats that are annoyingly side to side tippy. If a 19' foot boat had been scaled up proportionately, from the original Keith Steele boat, it would have been 60" inches wide not 48.

If it had been scaled up proportionately it could have carried all four passengers in the middle instead of the the ends. Which is how Oregon dories are supposed to work.

 

2021-02-07-1301

MRBoats Rapalica

Make a fifteen minute crank bait. Bait rod heavy or fly rod light. As you like it.

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2021-01-30-0611

High Tech Design Process

Mock up a few seats with buckets, coolers and milk crates. Sit there. Work the oars. Close your eyes and imagine were everything goes.

Think a hundred times. Cut once or twice. Cut a third or fourth time if you have to. There is no mistake that cannot be fixed. Some mistakes can be a bit expensive. But they're still fixable. All of them.

2021-01-27-1312

Decking!

How do you deck a big white water dory? Most builders build a deck 4 to 6" inches down from the gunwale.

I'm going to build it so the deck spans from the top of one side panel over to the top of the other. The gunwale is an inwale only and invisible at that because it will be below the deck. I'll put long low U-shaped grab rails all the way around the edges so tuff can't roll off the boat. But water will. The top of most boats become a 100 gallon scoop that takes up too long to drain in adrenalin situations. A flush deck will drain almost instantly. I want to keep the passenger seating area as small as possible too. I'm hoping there is no need to build those so they can collect another 200 gallons of water for each big wave.

Beyond that everything next is up in the air. Not even squarely in my head just yet. I'm winging this one. From the water up.

The decking will all be removable. So among other things I can remodel everything as time goes by. To start I want three side-by-side passenger slots slightly forward of the middle, with the rower behind that. There will be no fourth passenger. Not unless I build an alternate deck. But that's doable because all of this will bolt down over a thick foam gasket. Permanent nothing is a design goal here. Everything removable, fixable and changeable. Including side panels and gunwales. Older (move down)
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