Why You Should Have A Steamboat?

All complete and in her new home at Whangateau

“Best Presented Boat “at the Lake Rotoiti Wooden Boat Parade 2002 and 2003

I wrote this for the Mahurangi Cruising Club Annual 2002. I am sure as enthusiasts they

won’t mind my publishing it here.

STEAMING (Memoirs of an ardent steamer from way back.)

Steam enginitis is very catching… It’s awful; don’t go near it or you’re hooked So said Pete Culler, and he should know, he knew most things.

A successful steamboat has several key ingredients: A boiler to provide the steam, an engine to use it and a charlie to provide the money. Oh yes and a suitable vessel to simmer the ingredients in.

My first steamer Gypsy had a relatively long gestation period. I had a 12′ clinker dinghy with an inboard and bought some cylinder castings (now in the possession of friend Daniel Hicks) to make a twin cylinder engine. A friend who was an M& I surveyor at the time designed a suitable coal-fired boiler and supervised its construction, and we were away. At that stage, with the machining of the castings barely underweigh, a well known model engineer offered a very nice Stuart compound engine for sale and I duly purchased it. It just needed tidying and the addition of feed and air pumps.

The difficulty was that this engine was too big for the clinker dinghy. So Ralph Sewell sold me Billy Boy a 25′ clinker counter-sterned hull for which both my new engine and boiler were too small. Such are the problems that beset all enthusiasts and they result in rapidly filling up the available space around the said enthusiast’s house with moribund semi-complete projects. I eventually sold Billy Boy to lake Tarawera (she is now in Christchurch) because it was getting too complicated. A return to first principles was indicated.

So I sat down with Dave Jackson when he had his yard at Sulphur Beach and nutted out the sort of hull that might suit my boiler and engine. The trouble was that although you saw examples of ’em everywhere overseas, in 1987, there were no plans available for an 18′ steamboat. At that stage, Peter McCurdy kindly printed an article about the18′ clinker gig that had been repatriated from Adams Island. This looked to me to be a suitable hull for a steamer. So Dave set to and cold moulded a sturdy hull to retain a heavy power plant in situ and inure it from the likelihood of being dunked in the seawater.

The good ship Gypsy was the result. Gypsy seemed a nice dusky, sooty sort of name and was the name of a wartime command of a fellow whose career I had traced -it stuck in my memory like a lot of other useless facts do and important facts don’t.

So one bitchy day in early 1989 newly hatched Gypsy and I attended a Trad Small Craft sail in at Okahu Bay. I fired her up to show the assembled masses what it was all about and dipped her in the water to see where I should paint the waterline. Trouble is, she and I just backed off the trailer and had a great time steaming around for several hours. We took passengers, we tooted the whistle, we backed and filled all though the moored boats. Great stuff!

Everything went well and continued to do so. We trailed her up and down the country from Ngunguru to Lake Taupo and enjoyed ourselves; thoroughly infecting countless people with steam enginitis. One such sufferer was the late Alec Baxter in Whangarei who watched us closely and took lots of video footage when we were on the Ngunguru River in convoy with Percy Ginders’s steamer Romp. He designed and laid the keel of his own steamer very shortly after. Gypsy eventually passed into the hands of a new owner who had a boat builder put a dog box at the forward end of the cockpit in place of my canvas hood.

I had kept in contact with Alec Baxter and watched the progress on the lovely traditional boats he was building and particularly on his new little steamer.

He unfortunately fell ill and died before completing her and I made overtures to the family to buy her. They agreed and we sadly removed her from her birthplace and brought her to Auckland. Over the next few months, John Rea at Stillwater bored the hole for and fitted the stern tube, made a rudder and elegant patterns for the various castings and made some modifications to the engine beds to accommodate the engine I proposed to fit.

Over the next six months, I completed the engineering, fitting a new firetube boiler suitable for coal firing, a Bolton 3×4 single cylinder engine, Windermere steam kettle, feed water reserve tank, hotwell and the festoons of copper and steel pipework to connect the five components. Again, on launching, it all seemed to go quite well and has ever since: I guess the rule is if it looks alright, it probably is. Again, we have steamed her as far south as the Wanganui River for the steam festival in March and as far north as Whangarei and most points in between. I think she is just lovely.

Steamboats are fun. The key to it is to keep it simple. Good adequate boiler capacity is essential as is the need to keep the engine to a size that is appropriate. The propeller is going to be a lot bigger than for an ic engine: It will need diameter and blade area to give power and pitch to give speed because the engine revolutions will be low. Many people try to tweak things up a little to give more efficiency: Increase the boiler pressure, super heat the steam, go for oil firing, complex water tube boilers etc, but the bottom line is that the more efficient you try to make it, the less enjoyable it becomes. Take it to its extreme, you have a nuclear power plant with heaps of efficiency but little aesthetic appeal. It is better to fit a diesel engine if efficiency is desired.

For my part, I will have just as much fun on 40 kg of coal a day, a little lubricating oil and frequent cups of Oil Grey provided by the Windermere kettle. At least with coal firing you have lumps of coal to throw at the fizz boats that inevitably alter course to get a closer look and roar past at 14 knots. Usually well within stone’s throw…..

“ROMANY”

“Romany” was designed and built by Alec Baxter in his Whangarei boatyard in 1994.

She is a heavy, traditionally -built boat -a real mainlander: Typically Alec Baxter. She has easy lines, straight stem and wineglass transom stern with outboard rudder. Heaps of varnish and polished copper and brass.

Scantlings are typically heavy: Tallow wood keel, spotted gum ribs at 6″ centres and heavy kauri planking copper fastened, She scoots along very smartly with no fuss or bother. I have had her out in some very rough weather and she has acquitted herself very well.

The boiler -new in 1994- is a Stuart Turner designed coal -fired wet firebox vertical firetube boiler built by McKenzie and Ridley in Penrose Auckland. It is in NZ M&I survey for a working pressure of 100 psi.  Steam is raised in 30-45 minutes and she steams at 80 psi on about 20 kg of coal a day – much more if there are other steamboats about! There is always plenty of steam. She does hull speed readily and 6 kn is usual. There is a Penberthy injector, whistle with a good sound, Windermere kettle and 30 gal of reserve feedwater in a copper tank. The hotwell is copper. Copperwork is done by a real coppersmith and appropriate.

Engine is a Bolton design 3 x 4 single cylinder engine with crosshead driven air and feed pumps. A keel condenser is fitted to condense the exhaust steam. Stephenson reverse gear is fitted. Propeller shaft is 1″ stainless with thrust bearing and 18″ X 24″ propeller.

Romany won Best Presented Boat Award at the Lake Rotoiti  Wooden Boat Meeting 2002 and 2003. She is very good looking and a genuine head-turner.