Here’s an interesting human-powered vehicle. Christened the RoadBoat — a cute play on names, since it’s powered by four “rowers”, but travels on the road — it was designed and built to set a record for a trans-Canada ride back in 2001.

We intend to establish a Guinness World Record for traveling from Halifax to Vancouver using only the human power found in a rowing stroke (plus the mechanical advantage of gearing, of course … )

Apparently things went awry early on, and the team decided to bag it. One of the rowers, Kevin Thompson, had this to say about the attempt:

After traveling through the province of Nova Scotia it was determined that the record would not be broken due to lack of averaging an adequate speed to complete in record time. Subsequent to the first day mishap which resulted in a minor accident, the RoadBoat was unable to achieve the necessary average speed, safely, to complete the crossing and it was therefore decided to end the journey early.

Funny they don’t mention anything about that first-day accident on the RoadBoat 2001 rowingacrosscanada.com website. The failure probably stings a little still. The current site, www.rowingacrosscanada.com, is still active, and it looks like a second attempt may be in the works, but there are no details at all. Makes me curious what kind of monstrosity they’ll build for that!

I stumbled across this looking for info on vehicles that are propelled by a rowing motion. While a bit extreme, this thing is kinda cool. There are also a few photos of the building process here. Not much detail, but it looks to be built from all aluminum tubing. And to support four rowers and a stoker/steerer, it’d have to be pretty beefy.