5/18/19 5/18/19

Eye candy

5/10/19 5/10/19

MURSU Nearly Complete!

Primed and ready for paint. We used a 2 part barrier coat for the base layer. It'll offer greater protection to the wood hull over time since we know it'll be beached on rocks and gravel lots during it's lifetime.

5 coats of paint later and MURSU is showing his true colors!

Bow hatch cover with watertight gasket and straps installed.

Sliding seat rigging installed and ready to row. We took some of the parts from the Poseidon sliding seat setup we have in NORPPA and modified it so the tracks are wider. We chose to widen the tracks for two reasons. First we wanted additional gear storage under our seats and this allows bigger dry bags to stow under us. Secondly we wanted to be able to sit in the bottom of the boat during longer break periods. There isn't a lot of room but getting off that small sliding seat occasionally during a 8-10 hr rowing day is a nice option!

5/8/19 5/8/19

Oars in the Making

Dameon has made two new sets of oars for our R2AK adventure. Here are some shots of the process, from our friend and fellow rower Wes Reddick's shop (which he generously allowed us to use. Thanks Wes.)

The looms were made of laminated spruce. Here are the many layers glued up and clamped.

This is a better view of the blades which are made of 2 layers of plywood and a thin piece of spruce that extends out from the loom.

I wanted solid wood handles so I scarfed cherry into the ends. Here they are all varnished.

2 new sets of oars ready to row all the way to Alaska!

4/28/19 4/28/19

MURSU update

Mursu is ready for work to begin!

The day MURSU came home we had 59 days until the R2AK start gun went off. We not only want to finish the boat but also have a few sea trials to work out the bugs before we headed off for Washington. We'd been thinking of this boat for a long time so you bet we were eager to finish it off and get it launched, we got to work immediately.

A special thanks to Dan Miller at Belmont Boat Works for generously providing us with shop space to work in. Without the indoor, heated space Dan provided us it's difficult to imagine how this would have come together.

First I tackled decking the fore and aft compartments. To try and minimize adding weight we choose to use dacron. Dacron is an amazing material that is used for sails and to sheath airplane wings. When heated it stretches tight and can be waterproofed by painting it. Pretty cool stuff.

Dacron fabric glued on and stretched over the decking frames.

The value of these additional compartments can't be understated. We've rowed a lot of miles in wet,windy conditions and bailed many buckets of water during these rows. The boat is just under 22' long, these compartments will cover 9' of the interior and shed rain water and allow some of the water from waves breaking over the bow to wash over instead of just filling up the boat. They are a very welcome addition!

Next post will be be about the oars I've built to go with MURSU....

-Dameon

4/21/19 4/21/19

It's a BOY!! The making of MURSU

(Yeah, boats are normally female, but MURSU is...different)

As we started to seriously consider participating in the Race to Alaska we knew we needed a boat specifically designed for longer, expedition style rowing. The boat we have primarily rowed for the past few years is a Savo 650D designed by Ruud van Veelen. These boats are mainly raced on large lakes in Finland. After completing our 260 mile row along the coast of Maine in 2018 we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted out of a boat to feel comfortable taking it safely on a 750 mile row up the coast of British Columbia.

NORRPA loaded up for thru-rowing the Maine Island Trail.

We love the boat we row. Her name is NORPPA. She's fast and light and everything one wants in a boat designed for racing, and racing was what she did for many years. As Leigh and I started doing longer rows that required overnight stays, this meant bringing camping gear and additional supplies. We found NORPPA handled this additional payload and performed very well under various conditions we found ourselves rowing in. Need to go out in 3-4' whitecaps or 6-8' swells, no problem. So what if we could take NORPPA's sleek, fast, lightweight design and incorporate all the things from our expedition boat wish-list into it......

Enter Walter Baron of Old Wharf Dory, the man who built NORPPA. We began talking with Walter last fall and told him we wanted a custom built Savo to row in the Race to Alaska. Turns out he's a bit of a R2AK tracker junkie himself so he was immediately interested. So what additional features did we want our Savo to have?

The biggest feature was the addition of watertight compartments in the bow and stern. These will provide flotation if the boat capsizes. They also create some super handy dry storage and shed rainwater rather than it just pooling in the boat.
Additional frames in the hull for extra strength.
The gunnels were made of white oak instead of pine.
The inside passage where the R2AK takes place is rather notorious for logs and other floating debris, stuff that is unfriendly to row boats 6mm thick! So to protect the boat and ourselves from strikes we had the stem made of epoxy and kevlar instead of pine and the inside of the bow planks fiberglassed.

Walter began construction in February and on April 5th I picked up MURSU and brought him home. What is Mursu you ask? Norppa is Finnish for "ringed seal" so we thought of this new boat as a beefed-up, heavier version of the original. So we named the new boat Mursu which is Finnish for walrus.

Here are some pics of Walter's handiwork.

Savo mold.
Photo courtesy of Walter Baron.

This last photo is how MURSU looked when Walter's part was done and we brought it home. We decided early on we'd like to finish off the boat, this means decking the compartments, making hatch covers, varnishing the interior, painting the exterior and installing the sliding seat system. Oh, and we thought we'd like to make 2 new sets of oars for the trip...more on that later.

That gets us to April 5th. I'll put up another post later this week to show the work we've completed on MURSU since then.

-Dameon