Sinead FitzGibbon and her husband, Dennis Loebs, put two production models of NEXT Boatworks’ 19-and-a-half-foot-long coastal rowers into Sag Harbor waters off Havens Beach on Saturday for their maiden voyage.
The sleek carbon racers, wide in the beam and pointed at each end, were designed by Loebs, who has, in his wife’s words, “been messing around in boats all his life,” and Ben Booth, “a backyard boatbuilder and rowing coach” from Dartmouth, Mass.
When the Loebs and Booth met a half-dozen years ago, they decided that significant improvements could be made to the World Rower CIX class, 10 of which they had imported from Sweden.
To begin with, said Loebs, “they were heavy, they required perfect conditions, they weren’t stable, they were leaky. . . .”
“I can attest to that,” said FitzGibbon, who has been a world coastal rowing championship finalist. “The one I rowed when Spencer Schneider tried to swim from Montauk to Block Island in the fall of 2017 began to sink when Spencer decided, a little more than halfway through, that he’d had enough of the cold water.” Loebs, who was alongside piloting a former Maine lobster boat, “rescued both of us,” she said, with a smile.
It took Loebs and Booth, co-founders of NEXT Boatworks, six years to come up with a design that pleased them and FitzGibbon, who serves as an adviser. The 19-and-a-half-foot, 52-pound coastal rowers, which, because of their stability are senior-friendly, are being manufactured in Bristol, R.I.
“At the moment, we’re putting out one every two weeks,” Loebs said. “In a month or two it will be one a week, and eventually several a week. We’ve been at this for two years. Each time we get a little more efficient.”
There are “five full-time employees and a couple of part-timers, and myself. I’m beyond full-time. It’s bootstrap money at the moment, but we’re hoping there’ll be investors. We’ve got 18 customers waiting. . . . They cost $7,900, but not for long.”
“Eventually,” said Loebs, “we’ll switch from carbon to plastic hulls, plastic like what those kayaks on the rack down there are made of. They’ll be a lot cheaper then.”
At Havens Beach on Saturday, Dana Bradshaw, a lifelong rower from Southampton, happened upon the launch. As she watched the hydrodynamic craft skim along, she proclaimed that they were indeed “beautiful.”
“Did you notice,” Bradshaw said, as FitzGibbon and Loebs feathered their carbon oars in slightly choppy water off the beach, “they’re self-baling in the front so the wakes that come along, as they inevitably do, roll out.”
“Rowing is a discipline,” Bradshaw said. “You have to be dedicated. It’s all in the details, how you feather the blade, how you sit . . . it works every muscle in your body.”
While she had rowed single sculls for years after college, often at dawn on the Connetquot River, “they can’t be taken out every time. These,” Bradshaw said, “look as if they’d be great for people who are older. They’re nice transitional boats from sculling. I think it’s wonderful what they’re doing.”
“I row all year in this,” said FitzGibbon as she pointed out the plastic bearings on which the sliding seat rolls. “There’s no metal to corrode and sand isn’t trapped as it used to be in the old ones.”
FitzGibbon and a friend from Idaho, Dayna Deuter, a fellow finalist in the 2019 world rowing championships in Hong Kong, are to row down the Maine coast in NEXT Boatworks coastal rowers in August. “She’s a survivalist. When I called her the other day, she was wrapping her house in chicken wire to repel wildfire embers,” FitzGibbon said. “Here we have ticks.”
“These boats you can take out anytime in any conditions,” Loebs said. “That’s what’s so attractive about them. These don’t require a glassy surface. . . . Ben and I, when we imported those boats six years ago, agreed that there must be a better way. It only took us six years, but we’ve made a better mouse trap. Ben rows one of these off a reef off the coast of Massachusetts in head-high waves. They can handle anything.”
