It’s that time – you are planning your new boat park for 2019 and you find out: you cannot fit any more boats into the boathouse. Is there a long term strategy you can follow to improve the situation to get more boat in the boat house without rebuilding?
1 – Do an audit of all your boats and storage areas.
Stage 1 is to compact the horizontal displacement of each stack of rowing boats. This is achieved using sliding arm boat racks.
In this way you can have less space between racks and so find space for maybe 1 more vertical rack of 4 – 6 boats.
2. Move to removable riggers on boats.
When you buy new boats choose the designs with removable riggers so that on every horizontal rack you can get 2 or 3 boats instead of one. This was very successful for Leichart Rowing Club in Sydney Australia. In addition, at this stage, you need Wing rigger storage brackekbecause every rigger must also be stored separately from the boat.
On a rack which has a 4- or 4x boat you can now fit two boats.
On a rack which currently has a 2x or 2- you can fit 3 boats in the space of 1.
3. Further space saving with replacing oar racks
Best would be with the Space Saver verticalhanging racks for sculling oars and for rowing oars. These can go into the space between the vertical racks along with the wing rigger storage (this space is usually wasted).
4. In the very long term, plan to redevelop your building
Plus the upstairs club rooms so that the ground floor storage can use 10 rack high storage. Then a mechanical stacker will be useful to allow safe access to the highest racks. It can stack up to 10 boats high.
Your rowing coach will be able to advise about buying boats and which ones can be replaced year by year. You can than gradually switch to removable riggers. The club can set the priority whether this is first the small boats or the large boats.
