Unstable ? who are you calling unstable ?

Title photograph – CLC Skerry courtesy of Daryl Foster.

It’s now a cold and damp October, i’m spending a good portion of my day working as hard as I cab in the garden as it needs a lot of attention after 4 years of neglect. I’m also getting ready practically and mentally for my winter project which I intend to be the rebuild and modification of another CLC boat – this time a nicely built Skerry. In dirty talk what I am doing is a whole load of risk management as I know that the Skerry isn’t a high stability craft and I am nothing like as strong, agile and capable as I once was. The nearest craft and relevant experience I have in my past is the open (Canadian) canoe which has the same kind of problems in big open water – for reference please go and take a look at an old blog piece of mine in which I focused on the Lake Timiskaming canoe tragedy here : https://dirtywetdog.co.uk/2017/11/30/the-dark-side/……I also have the Lyme bay kayaking incident and the capsize of the RoRo ferry Herald of Free Enterprise in mind so……..

In the days when I was learning to canoe in whitewater I regularly fell out of the boat or had one roll over in a wave, then, later on, I became a canoe coach and was expected to teach other people how to recover boats that had capsized and also teach them how to perform a self recovery – basically how to get back in a boat from deep water. This was a feature of any canoe course I worked on or attended during my own development as a coach ; many of those courses were run in winter on a very small and very cold lake in north Wales so there was some pressure to get back in the boat as quickly as possible.

Iv’e spent a lot of time working out the problems and potential modifications on the CLC Skerry that I intend to be my main bushcraft and sailing/rowing boat and one of those problems is the boat’s stability, or lack thereof,once it’s capsized. I was watching any video about CLC Skerry’s that I could and in one that I came across it’s owner was trying to do capsize and recovery drills except that as soon as he almost recovered on one side the boat immediately went into a capsize on the opposite side ; I never saw a successful recovery and wondered whether that had serious implications for me and my new boat. At second, third and fourth watch I noticed that what seemed to be happening was a large free surface effect – for those of you that remember that may have been the effect that capsized the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987.

The open canoes that I used to take on expedition, my example is something like a 16′ Prospector type is usually around 90cm (36 “) wide whereas the CLC Skerry is 1.37m (54”) wide and therefore should have greater form stability but nothing like as much sailing stability as my short and wide CLC Passagemaker – they use the same rig and I suspect that the Skerry is a better rowing boat due to it’s shape.

I can’t find that video so maybe it’s been withdrawn after the fail but I did find a video of a similar Dory shape vessel being capsized and recovered. It’s helmsman was successful and used what I would think of as a canoe re entry technique but once again it was close to a fail due to the high volume of water in the boat which had a definite free surface effect on the boat’s stability – I note that the helmsman/owner didn’t attempt to reduce the volume, by bailing out, before going straight for the re entry technique and the result of that is that the boat almost did the same kind of thing ie rolled the opposite way and was only saved by some careful balancing. Whether that technique would have worked with the same boat but in rough water I doubt.

I happen to think, at this stage, that as I am modifying the Skerry anyway, it would be best at the same time to increase the boat’s buoyancy with a closed foredeck and aft deck and then add some additional buoyancy in it’s cockpit section – I am thinking about lashing in one of my self inflating mats either side to double as seats. My proposed stability and buoyancy changes are much like what we used to do with whitewater and expedition canoes and is largely what I also did with my working/instructor boat : I lashed in long buoyancy bags fore and aft which worked for me because I mostly paddled in a high kneel position but with the boat turned about face – essentially paddling the boat back to front from the usual bow paddlers position except reversed.

Dory capsize and recovery video. Although not a Skerry it’s a very similar shape.