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.

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.

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