Hi Steve, I’d be happy to help you upload a photo if you’d like to do that. Just let me know.

One thing a friend showed me is the use of locks in trailering. For many boats you will find that there will be a set of oarlock sockets just aft of your after tie down. If you insert oarlocks there and run the tie down through them it helps with fore and aft positioning and aids in dealing with chafe.

Variants on the lanyard and round lock system apparently were common in the livery era where the lanyards kept the oars on their leathers, kept the oars aboard, and kept the locks with the oars. Sometimes the lanyard was tied or spliced tightly around the loom down near the blade.

There was material experimentation. The boat is built using high grade exterior waterproof construction plywood, not marine plywood, and over the years there has been some checking. Most people don’t realize this as John used a piece of cedar for the sheerstrake so you don’t see the ply end grain. It was built before glued lap became a thing and might be able to be made a bit lighter as the fastenings were kind of belt and braces, glued laps and clench nails. There was no real effort made to make it as light as possible.

The GREEN MACHINE was set up to row in one direction as a single, the other as a double so the seat for single rowing could be folded to get it out of the way as you couldn’t get your feet under it when rowing double or carrying a passenger. The third seat for single rowing was put amidships and you pulled from the bow oarlocks.

Boats with these skeg-like stems are extremely sensitive to trim, griping badly if even lightly bow down. Many builders decide the boat is going to be rowed only in one direction and relive the bow stem, and trim the boat accordingly as she is a little bow high when rowed as a single from the stern seat or needs weight in the stern rowed as a single from the bow seat. Some shift the aft seat forward a frame which then means that some stern weight is needed if rowed as a double. Some have added a shallow skeg in the stern.

The boat’s development is interwoven with the Adirondack Guideboat, where one of the problems to solve was how to make artificial natural crook frames. John solved this with glued laminations. His long article details this but because of the double ended shape there were only three shapes needed from which several pairs of frames could be resawn.

Borrowed also from western Adirondack guideboats was the slight rake in the stems, making planking easier than using a plumb stem and the dramatic flare in the topsides. Both are of considerable help in keeping water out of the boat when pulling into a head sea.

John was a bit conservative in oar lengths. The recommended 7’6″ oars work in both rowing positions but the forward position with 48″ between locks can take 8′ oars. Andy Steever in his “Oars for Pleasure Rowing” (available on the Internet Archive) details the oars designed for the boat. They have teflon leathers and are squared inboard of the locks. They have been counterweighted with lead strips, to balance with the weight of your hand. The longer ones took three times the amount of lead.

I became the tester for the boat, taking it out into Fisher Island Sound where there were predictable whitecaps over a bar out from Ram Island. I got her surfing pretty good but the flare kept the bow up surfing. That summer I took her to the Blackburn and won my class. That set off a building spree of race optimized boats.

Viktor, you are always welcome for another test on the little lake in the wild southwest of Germany 🙂