Let me touch upon the folly of prototyping a boat at some remove from water.
Aside from the Leeds-Liverpool canal ~ built to enable the woollen mills of Yorkshire to transport their wares across the British Empire ~ the nearest stretch of water is located at a reservoir that, ironically, was also created in order to keep the nearest canal topped up: raising and lowering barges through locks, the reason they needed a constant supply. Carr Mill Dam however is administered by the local powerboating club, and we're all familiar with how, when it comes to jealously guarding the train-set, the young are no match for the old.
Had I lived in the Florida Everglades with water at the end of the garden, as so many of that blessed people do, then this may well have come to fruition. Nonetheless it is a fact that any number of projects are felled by a single hurdle: remember the 'Pond Racers' slated for Reno?
The value of even a handful of tests however is immeasurable, the chief test-pilot at the time of the introduction of Boeing’s 707 suggesting a single flight-test was equivalent to a thousand speculations prior. I had stood on this same boat prior to fitting the (15HP) outboard, and it was decidedly unstable from the get-go in that a third of its buoyancy lay in the keel, which was happier floating flat than suspended. Years on, it is no accident that the prototype features an open keel.
Secondly, and accounting for my apparent obsession to locate the centre of thrust with that of gravity, the offset of the thrust-line ~ exacerbated by the fact that this was a long-legged motor ~ meant that every application of power led to an extreme pitch-up, as you might expect. This might have been ameliorated once the craft was on the plane, but that appeared to be beyond reach; the fact this only occasionally happens to conventional vee-hulls is accounted for by the considerable weight of the front end, which was absent (as it ought to be) in that seen here.
What did for the inaugural test however was the crew who had craned the craft into the dock ~ considering it an ideal pursuit during an extended tea-break ~ decided it was better towing the boat into more open water. This proved calamitous, as the keel area meant that towing would never likely be an option unless that area was reduced considerably by cut-outs in its profile, for instance.
For the thing about a tow-line as distinct from any means of power fitted to the boat is that the vector continues straight even should the boat diverge. In turn this would present a sizeable surface below the waterline that wants to tip over, which is inclined to take the boat with it. Subsequently, the combination of an outboard and inventor needing to be dried out ~ beside the burden of disappointed expectation ~ was enough to convince me to throw in the saturated towel right there.
The primary lesson to learn however is not to expect anything in particular from any one test and expect it to fail instead, so as to be happily surprised if it should not. Combined with what I learned from building and testing sizeable aerial drones, this resistance to failure and a working knowledge of materials is likely to prove a better guarantor of success altogether.
In retrospect I doubt the commercial viability of what was outlined on paper in the form of the patent publication. At the time both aero-engines and outboards were all-or-nothing viz. large, heavy, expensive. The current (!) availability of electrical motors along with the means to power and control them is literally a game-changer, whether on the road or in the air. It has yet to produce the same revolution upon water, although that is set to change and sooner than you might expect... the flood of investment into Regent’s Seaglider a case in point.
Most of the money is as yet on means of transport for numbers of passengers who are prepared to pay the price. Consider this, however: the number of aerial drones now exceeds that of all the aircraft ever to have been produced. And all of that with barely a sniff of investment capital, the costs having been borne throughout by individual inventors and the subsequent cash-flow from sales.
So.. any takers?
