Flooding hull - why only Avon?

[Tim M]

Does Avon have a patent on the flooding hull concept?

[whisper]

Originally Posted by Tim M

Does Avon have a patent on the flooding hull concept?

I am 99% sure they do

[gotchiguy]

Originally Posted by Tim M

Does Avon have a patent on the flooding hull concept?

Doubt it, Osprey used it too if I remember correctly on some of the XR racing boats in the 80s/90s

[ShinyShoe]

Patent would surely have expired by now?

[Mextli]

Zodiac holds the Patent of the Flooding Hull system nowadays.

[Dry Run]

We have a Marlin 23 here at the dry stack that has a flooding hull, but only at the front 40%. It works the same way as an SR in that it floods at rest but empties when going forward.

[dougcrock]

my first Marlin 640 had a flooding hull it worked vey well and at rest rib was extremely stable even in heavy seas you had to take off marginally slower before hitting the throttle no probs with water ski ing etc was very disapointed the Marlin 28 didnt have it

[Peter_C]

It is all about the wake for wakeboarding, and if you want a BIG wake you need ballast, a lot of ballast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYhawR_IU-E

Innovation comes again from Mike Murphy. The Insta-Fill ballast solution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ85CEc2Sw

Okay, okay, not what you were talking about, but as you can see many boat manufacturers use in hull ballast systems these days. Some just serve a different purpose.

[Seabird]

Water ballast is quite common and dates back 200 years or more. Avon never had an patent on it and it was originally used on the first 4.5m way back in the late 60s.

There is some confusion as to who developed the first RIB, wikipedia puts down to Flatacraft but this was an abortion and the first true RIB as we describe them today came from the Isle of Wight, the designers name was George Marvin, but it was this boat that Avon used as the first and subsequent Sea Riders.

Originaly the Sea Rider was marketed to the leisure market with little success, as it was neither one thing or another. It couldn't be rolled up for easy transport as an inflatable, it was very unstable as dive platform and it was too small to have as a trailer boat, with all the messing around and towing speed restrictions and inconvenience.

Attention was focused on the dive boat market and they were made light enough to be able to put on a roof rack of a car, this also gave them quite a good performance on small engines (20 - 30hp) which were easily carried in the boot of the car.

To overcome the stability problem they decided to use a flooding keel so that when at rest the boat would sink into the water and rest on the collars. This was a good solution and the boat started to find a market. The flooding keel was used on the 4.5m and the 5.4m Sea Riders.

The real breakthroughs came from when Avon got the Royal Navy to put them on board ships and more importantly the North Sea oil and gas industry. The Navy used them as run arounds until the introduction of the Halamtic 22 when these boats were taken more seriously, and the oil industry pushed things much further by developing them into serious all weather rescue boats, and you have to look at companies such as Delta in the UK and Norsafe in Norway and to a limted degree the RNLI in the UK as the pioneers of the go anywhere anytime RIB