Celtic Longboats
Simon Montague
Ewoud Dronkert
> Any threads to Celtic Longboats here.
There is now. What are Celtic Longboats?
Bill Graham
"Ewoud Dronkert" <nos...@invalid.info> wrote in message
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Simon Montague
them. There is a Welsh League with boats primarily from Cardiganshire &
pembrokeshire, but is now becoming popular in N Wales with boats in
Porthmadog, pwllheli & Anglesy.
For the uninitiated the Celtic Longboat is a 4 person coxed rowing boat used
for racing, training and recreation. Racing this type of boat has a long and
interesting history on the West Wales coast. Since the 1970's local villages
have put up teams to compete for what has often been relatively large cash
prizes.
The whole thing started in 1978 when Tom Sutton, working on Ramsey Island,
finds the remnants of an Irish Curragh (wooden frame, tarred-skinned rowing
boat) washed up. With friends Des Harries and Robin Pratt, he decided to
re-skin the boat and enter it in the local Solva Traditional Boat Rowing
Race, for prize money of about £200 - and came second. They thought that if
they made the same shape in fibreglass it would be even faster. Des, the
carpenter, carved a plug out of a solid piece of timber, to similar
dimensions, and cast a mould from which they made the first Pembrokeshire
Longboat.
1979 - they entered the Solva race again and won easily but were told not to
come back as fibreglass boats were not wanted in this race. By this time
interest in the new boat was growing - they made a couple more for locals
and held races around Ramsey Island. From this developed the Pembrokeshire
Longboat League. And the rest as they say is history.
In 1996 there was a desperate shortage of new boats and Sportlot were
approached for a grant. This was agreed and several companies were
approached to submit proposals to design and build a new boat. The brief was
simple, the boat should be 2' longer than the best of the existing boats,
lighter, quicker and at least as sea worthy. These boats race around the
potentially treacherous coastline of West Wales and even race across the
Irish Sea. The Dale Sailing design fitted the bill in every respect. Their
design was chosen in 1999 and to date 18 boats have been built.
The new boats have caused a resurgence of interest in racing as now
everybody will be able to compete on level terms in the new one design
Celtic Longboat.
Principal dimensions (4 person, fixed seat, coxed rowing boat)
Length - 24' 6",
Beam - 4' 11"
Weight - 137kg
Construction GRP
Ewoud Dronkert <nos...@invalid.info> wrote in message
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Michael Sullivan
>
> Bit of info below from Dale Sailing http://www.dale-sailing.co.uk/ who make
> them. There is a Welsh League with boats primarily from Cardiganshire &
> pembrokeshire, but is now becoming popular in N Wales with boats in
> Porthmadog, pwllheli & Anglesy.
I don't get it. The "Celtic Longboat' is roughly
based on the dimensions of a historic currach, and
with modern materials seems to be a superior boat to
the historic boats that are raced, so that the
design is being propogated to other areas.
Is this considered an optimimum seaworthy
rowboat design?
Is this an inexpensive design that anybody can
pop out and go race in these races?
If it's not historic, and it's not optimum,
then why?
It's curious how these sorts of things get started.
Mike
Simon2
My sole experience of rowing has been in a wooden boat, a coxed four man
yawl, based on a turn of the century design (and that would be the last
century, as opposed to the most recent turn). The governing body for the
sport known as Traditional Coastal Rowing here in Ireland, the Irish Coastal
Rowing Federation have introduced a ruling whereby next years All Ireland
Coastal Rowing Regatta will be open only to a new one-design Glass Fibre
boat, to replace all the diverse types of traditional wooden four person
coxed rowing boats that have previously competed in this event.
So instead of there being a typical traditional Kerry 24ft. "longboat",
Cork 21ft racing yawl, a shorter East coast skiff, etc, we will be all
rowing one boat type designed and manufactured by one individual boat
designer in glass fibre. It is inevitable that this boat will be used in
local interclub regattas and so abolish the link with tradition associated
with boatbuilders in a given area building a wooden boat in the traditional
style. The sport is very much community based, including age groups from 10
to guess how old I am nows, and the coastal communities and villages have a
long link with the sport and pride in the tradition of racing these
traditional craft, and the boatbuilders who made them.
The supposed basis for the introduction of the one design fibre-glass
boat would be that some indigenous boat designs are faster than others, so
in the name of fairness in sport this new design was agreed on at committee
level.
A typical committee decision, based on a red herring, that the decline
in numbers in some clubs was due to the All Ireland being competitively
unfair and therefore discouraging aspiring rowers from joining clubs in the
first place. The fact is that clubs with supposedly faster boats suffered
similar decline in membership over the same period.
Sadly it would seem at this point that with this one decision to
introduce this totally irrelevant glass fibre boat and thus homogenise the
diverse cultures associated with differing designs, the legacy will be one
boatbuilders gain and the loss of the wooden boatbuilding tradition, however
insignificant it may have been financially to the boatbuilders involved.
To imagine that the rowing of a one-design fibreglass boat is in some way
an evolution from rowing traditionally built wooden boats I think possibly
missed the point, (and the boat) by around a hundred years.
In the sailing world, there is a happy recent tradition of mass
producing identical sailing boats to facilitate categorisation of different
classes of craft. This is all very commendable, but when the basis of the
tradition of coastal rowing is the link the boats and the sport have with
the coastal communities involved then this new boat is irrelevant in the
extreme. The design proposed resembles the Celtic Longboat in generic form,
but it is not the design that is the problem, it is the concept and flawed
reasoning behind its introduction.
P.S. The boat will cost clubs around 8,000 Irish punts :).....
Martin Tuomey
"Michael Sullivan" <gc....@forsythe.stanford.edu> wrote in message
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