Row, row, row your boat

By Jack Kintner

Rowing is an almost perfect combination of exercise and solitude. It offers as much hard work as you want against the deceptively heavy resistance of water along with the beauty of the form-follows-function equipment, not to mention the pristine quality of the places where one goes to do such a thing.

Rowing on open, flat water lets you dream and go and breathe and get into it in ways not available to the cyclist or the gym rat. Beyond the obvious, the seductive draw of rowing has to do with another combination, that of high tech meeting high touch.

The primordial satisfaction of prying yourself about with a paddle or an oar while floating on water, where you are constantly in touch with it and it with you, is an ancient activity with which people have explored everything from narrow backwaters inches deep to oceans thousands of miles wide.

This is made significantly more efficient and effective by high-tech innovations, such as 10-foot oars that can be lifted with a finger, or computer numerical controlled (CNC) design in which the parts of a boat are not only identical from hull to hull but are also identical to the designer’s drawings. How much effort are you putting out? With pressure-sensitive oarlocks a coxswain can tell who on his four or eight-man shell is rowing light. Apply some plastic polymer liquid solutions with an eye-dropper to the submerged leading edges of the hull and you add a couple of knots to a four or eight-man racing hull’s top speed.

Ron Mueller, owner and operator of Wayland Marine in Bellingham and a man responsible for getting a lot of people out on the water at a reasonable price, started out paddling high performance whitewater kayaks in Colorado. Time and circumstance brought him and his business to Fairhaven. A gifted tinkerer, Mueller refined his designs over the years and now sells five variations on his open wooden Merry Wherry design, available as stitch and glue kits, plus three other fiberglass hulls ready to row that vary in length from 16 to 19 feet and in price from $1450 to $4295 for a two-man expedition model Sea Ranger II. Kits are produced to close tolerances with CNC, making them easy to build, and one even includes a balanced lug sail on an unstayed mast to take advantage of the wind on long trips.

“It’s a happy boat,” said Portland rower Susan Kintner, who bought a fiberglass Echo from Mueller two years ago. “It’s well made, light in weight and low maintenance,” she said. At just under 50 pounds it’s lighter than most canoes that long (18 feet) but she still takes advantage of her helpful husband (“I’m the dockboy,” he says) for launch and retrieval.

Kintner rowed in college and then came back to it later in life while looking for mid-life exercise. She mastered the technique of being a balanced part of an eight-man crew, something that’s a lot more like dancing than pulling with brute strength, as the fastest boats are the ones working in balance.

“You bring the blade back at a 10 to 15-degree angle, and it’s ok if it kind of skips on the water a little,” she said, “but it’s easier to get hurt than you’d think.” Kintner suffered a lower back injury and was beached for some months.

“I’m like many of his customers, a boomer who rowed in college who loved it so much that I want to continue now,” she said. “I row on a reservoir and love how close I can get to the wildlife. Last summer I watched adult ospreys teach their fledges how to fly!”

Much of Mueller’s design variations come from his own rowing experiences. In a 95 mile open water race from Gabriola Island to Port Townsend, in which participants had the choice of sailing or rowing, “we thought why would someone even think about trying to race a sailboat in September in the Gulf Islands and the San Juans? There’s no wind!”

So Mueller and his partner decided to just row, and for that he designed and built a longer and beamier modification of his Merry Wherry he calls the Merry Sea, a 22-foot two-man boat with a 41-inch beam. The kit boat features decking fore and aft for heavier seas, and indeed on the first day of the race they were able to punch through three-foot seas without any problems and stay dry. The kit retails for just under $3,000.

The next year Mueller modified his boat again by adding an unstayed mast that stows protruding forward like a bowsprit. It carries an easily handled balanced lug rig, which is a roughly square sail that hangs from a horizontal lug, or spar (i.e. pole), which is itself hoisted up and down the mast. Part of the spar is forward of the mast, making the mast and lug together look something like the lower case letter “t.” It’s called a balanced rig as the pole balances on the mast against the force of the wind.

Balanced lugs provide plenty of power for such a light boat and have what’s known as a low center of effort, important because the rowboats do not have keels to restrain them from tipping, and the higher up the mast the sail’s “effort” or power is centered, the more easily a gust will heel (tip) it.

Sails work well in small boats because so much relative power is available, and when combined with an easily driven hull like Meuller’s design the sail can be smaller and therefore more easily handled, important for dealing with another hazard in small sailboats, which is untangling gear that becomes jammed up the mast. Lug rigs have no boom or track on the mast to run the sail up and down, so there’s nothing to jam. It’s a simple and effective design.

Ironically, Mueller’s race the following year involved only about ten miles of sailing in the now 100-mile course, but still, if on an expedition there’s always that one day where a sail comes in very handy, and Mueller’s design let you take along a rig that’s both easily stowed out of the way but also sails well, instead of trading one of the qualities off for the other.

Mueller offers a complimentary rowing introduction at a lagoon in Fairhaven that’s close to his shop. For more information, see his website at www.merrywherry.com, or call 800/700-8059.