Two inventors from New York want to change the face of competition rowing. In today鈥檚 boats, two, four or eight crew members sit in line and pull their oars in unison, and as the rowers slide forward after each stroke they tend to jerk the boat backwards. This jerky motion of the hull through the water wastes energy, so in US patent application 2004/0175999 inventors Charles and Nancy Kunz have come up with the concept of 鈥減hase shift rowing鈥�, a technique they claim will make a new type of boat less jerky, and therefore faster.
Their boat will separate the rowers into two groups, one at the front and one at the back, with enough space between the groups to let one group row in opposite phase to the other without their oars clashing. The inventors say that smoothing out the jerks increases the boat鈥檚 efficiency by 4 per cent, so it travels faster. Can this really be a new, patentable idea? Maybe. Anu Duhdia, who runs the Physics of Rowing website at the University of Oxford, says he has never heard of such a boat.
