For the past couple years, we have been rowing NORPPA (the Finnish word for “ringed seal). She is 21’4″ long with a beam of 4’4” and weighs 110 pounds empty. You can build her yourself from a kit, though we didn’t build NORPPA. (If you’re looking for the kit, it’s a SAVO 650D designed by the company Puuvenepiste in Finland. Walter Baron of Old Wharf Dory builds them in the US.) Made of marine plywood and pine, NORPPA is beautiful to look at, easy to row, light, and fast. She handles coastal rowing conditions surprisingly well, considering she was designed for racing on the lakes of Finland. We really love this boat, perhaps most of all for her versatility. She is equally at home in open water rowing races or multi-day camping expeditions along the Maine coast. (Though without a rudder, she can be a bit squirrely in heading downwind in waves, and tends to weathervane in windy conditions, being a light boat with more hull out of the water than in.)
Pictured left/above: NORPPA, fully loaded & ready to set out to row the coast of Maine from border to border.
When we decided to do the Race to Alaska, we knew we would need a different boat. Why, you may ask, when we already have our beloved NORPPA? For all of NORPPA’s amazing qualities, there is one aspect of her design that’s not ideal for the expedition-type rows that we are increasingly drawn towards: if capsized, she floats with her gunwhales right at the waterline, and in that position is un-bailable. She’s never actually capsized, but we did flip her intentionally just to see what would happen….and had to swim her to shore to bail her out.
Pictured right: Being able to pick the boat up and carry it comes in handy all the time.
So, we commissioned Walter Baron of Old Wharf Dory to build us a new NORPPA. The new boat will have exactly the same Savo 650D hull as our current boat, same length and beam, but with several key modifications:
- extra ribs to strengthen the hull
- strengthened gunwhales made of white oak instead of pine
- pine stem replaced with laminated epoxy and kevlar
- fiberglass on the interior of the bow (for protection from collisions)
- open rails along the interior gunwhales (for both strength and convenience of lashing gear to the boat)
- a rudder
- and, most importantly: watertight bulkheads in the bow and stern so that the boat will float if she capsizes
The new boat will be a bigger, beefier version of NORPPA (the ringed seal), so we are naming him – yes, it’s a boy – MURSU (Finnish for “walrus”).
The birth and growth of our beloved MURSU!
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