Dolphin Address 16
June 26th 2006
Willem accompanied me to Gleninah. The pier wall runs in, sheltering a shallow slipway, continued by a sandy stretch easing down. The water was crystal clear with masses of very young sand eels and a few of these nasty lamp shade jellyfish. If need be I can carry the whole boat by myself, but Willem helped me to get it down to the water. I instructed him on the Nikon and the Everio capture and got into my wetsuit. First check was if I could get out in time before drowning. No bother at all. I sat in again and pushed myself out.
Then I let the mono kick in. You might have a burst of bad laughter. I did move, but hardly at pedestrian speed. Instead of sinking myself into the grim ridicule of tourist idiocy I kept on pumping, trying out different ways to counter the reacting up and down movement of the boat to the pushing and heaving of the mono.
I found that, having gained some speed it became easier to keep it up, but that was all the good news. So I got to troubleshooting. Ideally one of us should have been pumping inside the boat, while the other would have filmed the way the mono pushed away the water underneath(finally got the new Everio underwater housing in!). I could not hang outside the boat to look underneath as it would capsize.
Photo: Willem Verhulst
So I had to make do with mainly abstract thinking. Of course I looked underneath from under water myself, pushing and heaving the lever, but as I could not be inside at the same time it was also conjecture. When I sit in by my weight the boat hangs a bit backward. This alters the cutting angle of the mono into an upward tilt and therefore it is far less effective. So I am going to add a length of plywood to the back of the frame, making it longer and wider. On the picture you can see the blue of the wrapper of a 5 litre water bottle strung on top of the extremes of the frame wing. That I want to extend, hanging two 2 litre Coke bottles under the extremes on either side, more if need be. This would level the boat position effectively. I'm thinking to make the coke bottles swivel able, with a rudder attached, so they do not only make me float level, but are simultaneously effective in steering.
The mono I attached is the oldest and weakest that I have. I got rather tired from the pumping itself, not so much from the actual resistance. The lever does an excellent power job. So I'm going to construct an entirely new wing for under the boat that is much larger and allows a limited tilt to the hinged leading edge. Under the proper, level, angle it would be much more effective in push-off power and once it gets going it will be easier to keep feeding power, like it is with swimming the WW+mono. Between the extremes of the frame wing I want to stretch a sheet of rubber so the upstroke will squeeze backwards the cushion created between it and the bottom of the boat and the underside of the rubber sheet.
I’m not there by a long stretch, but I’m on my way.
Jan Ploeg, WWR&DC, Fanore June 26th 2006
print version