Organisers
My Involvement
Martin Harvey
Current Event Organiser
I first entered the race in 1986 when it ran all the way from Arundel road bridge to Littlehampton.
I was a member of a youth club in Bognor Regis at the time, and having spectated for a couple of years, I then persuaded the leader of the club to enter a team. I started with a cast iron bath and built a basic rectangular wooden frame, into which I dropped the bath. Floatation was provided by two 8 foot long polystyrene pontoons, and a bows made from the corner cut off an old washing machine body.
This contraption was sea tested off Bognor Regis and proved surprisingly stable through the waves. It causes quite a stir on the beach when you turn up with a bath and row out to sea!
This bath was raced for 5 years from the Arundel and Ford starting points, until the race stopped. It was dusted off for the one off race in Littlehampton harbour, and despite the heavy conditions my friend Keith Millar and I managed a creditable third place. Out of 3! This bath still competes to this day albeit with a plastic bath in place of the cast iron one. This could be the oldest actively competing racing bath in the country!?
I next heard about the race taking place at The Black Rabbit in Arundel, and Keith and I decided to build a new boat to compete in the 2001 race. We started with a steel bath and got a bit carried away with steel angle iron, welding, expanding foam and glassfibre. We now had a boat that takes 4 people to lift.
We just dived in and built it without a single plan or drawing in sight, and aimed for a trimaran (triple hull) design. It was built upside down with a frame welded to the bath, and lumps of polystyrene and lots of expanding foam shaped and skinned in glassfibre.
Despite the beer fuelled construction (empty cans can fill gaps between foam blocks!) it looked awesome, and convincingly won its’ first race without any previous testing.
Sometime after that race I got a phone call from Don Ayling who was Mayor of Arundel at the time, informing me that Martin Earp the landlord was moving to Dorking, and there would be nobody at the pub to organise the race.
“You won it last year, you must know something about it. Will you organise it?” he said. I agreed, organised the 2000 event and have been doing it ever since.