Making An Eight Into An Octuple (Coxswain Beware!)

I received an excellent question from Rob the other day, about sculling in an eight. He asked:

I’ve always wondered how to rig an eight for sculling. Do you use two sets of quad riggers or the sweep riggers w/sculling oarlocks? What rigging numbers would one use as a starting point?

Let me address the rigging number part first.

Numbers

Most folks rig an octuple for fun and practice (and not for profit!). I’ve only seen them raced once, and it was certainly entertaining.

I’ll assume that you want to be as effective as possible with your numbers, so you are going to need to experiment. [If you are just making the octuple for one practice I would not be overly concerned about getting the best numbers, just within a workable range.]

I would start with the numbers that you would use for a quad. An octuple will be a fast boat, maybe faster than the quad with the same level of rowers, so that should be a good place to start. Then if it looks like the rowers might be rigged too light (legs slamming down on the drive, for example) you might want to increase the leverage. Do this be either reducing the span slightly or lengthening the oars.

Do it gradually and keep looking. If you are really into finding speed, play with the numbers while checking the speed.

Riggers

This is the interesting part, since very few (none that I know) coaches and Riggers actually have set aside riggers for an octuple. They usually have to take other sculling riggers and use them. The main difficulty with this will lie in finding riggers that actually fit the boat correctly. And the problem area will be the plates where the riggers attach to the gunwale.

Boats usually have a flare to the gunwale, an angle the the gunwale rotates away from the centerline of the boat (see the drawing). The make of the shell will determine the angle, and it varies quite a bit.

And to add to this issue, riggers are made to fit to this angle. So  . . . your eight might have an angle to it, and the riggers that you are stealing (er . . . borrowing) from a quad to use will also have an angle to them. All this will impact your lateral pitch, and really your height.

My best advice is to throw one rigger on and give it a measure to see if it will fit. Check the height first, and adjust it around to see if you can get what you need. Then check the lateral pitch. You can probably get a quick idea if this is going to work for you.

One Word Of Warning

Just keep in mind when making an octuple that you will now have 8 scullers in one place. Give the coxswain combat pay (and probably disconnect the voice system!).

Anyone have suggestions for Rob?