30ft Catamaran with wheels?

[Tomreade93]

Hi

Im hoping to open up a Charter business out of Calgary Bay on the Isle of Mull, Scotland.

My main problem is the bay is A. Very exposed and B. very Tidal (About 170m from a very low tide to a high tide)

So i was looking at Sealegs boats, these are 7.1m RIBS with 3 fold down wheels so you can drive onto beaches.

On this Idea would i be possible to design a 30ft Catamaran with 4 Fold down wheels like the sealegs boats?

has anyone elce got any ideas of getting people from the shore to the Vessel?

I would be doing short 2 hour or possibly 1 hours trips so what ever means of getting people on and off it needs to be fast as possible!

If anyone has ANY ideas of feed back it would be very appreciated ive been scratching my head for months thinking of a way of doing this.

[David_Old_Jersey]

Hovercraft?

[Tomreade93]

Originally Posted by David_Old_Jersey

Hovercraft?

Brilliant idea but sadly not for the job.

Being on the west cost i dont think it would handle the weather. and i would be doing fishing trips etc.

[cat man do]

Originally Posted by Tomreade93

My main problem is the bay is A. Very exposed and B. very Tidal (About 170m from a very low tide to a high tide)

Cant people walk the 170 metres?
Beach looks sandy, so not as if they will get covered in mud.
MAP


Failing that, how about getting permission to load and offload on the rock wall/jetty in the top part of bay?
Admittedly it looks to be in poor condition, but a repair of this may work out cheaper than trying to come up with a amphibious 30 ft cat.



Seeing as you will not be taking many out on a 30 footer, why not just buy the dinghy with sea legs and use that?

[Tomreade93]

Originally Posted by cat man do

Cant people walk the 170 metres?
Beach looks sandy, so not as if they will get covered in mud.
MAP

Failing that, how about getting permission to load and offload on the rock wall/jetty in the top part of bay?

they will have to walk down to the water yes, but once there how do I get them onto the boat without soaking them?

the reason I mentioned the distance is because that is the length from high tide to low tide roughly and show how shallow the bay is.

[Blue Stocking]

Tomreade93,

Welcome to the forum,
Should be interesting comments.

[Tomreade93]

The pier is 1km away form the beach car park. It is also Privately owned sadly.

The pier is in a rather bad condition, allso on a low tide you cannot get to it by boat from my memory.

https://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/...m/55665115.jpg
^^^had to use link as the forum did not like remote images? sorry new to this particular forum,

I originality wanted to use a Sealegs boat as a Dinghy but they are £60k for the most basic model!

[Tomreade93]

I will be taking 12 people out max.

The sealegs ad a dinghy is great but sadly they are £60k +

the Pier was apparantly built in a rush so was not built that well..

It would need ALLOT of repair ans im not sure what the owner would say about it. I will be contacting him soon tho. ( He lives in England somewhere in his "other Castle" )

[ohdrinkboy]

Something like this for the tours?

[klem]

I saw a setup for a ~30' boat designed to do the northwest passage that had 3 wheels. Two of the wheels were chain driven with enormous reduction ratios and 2 people would pedal to get the boat clear of the water/ice. To steer, they would pedal at different speeds. There is no reason why you couldn't do something like this or even replace the people with electric or hydraulic motors.

How much of an engineering/fabricating background do you have? If you are a competent mechanical engineer, you could design the legs pretty easily. Depending on how automatic you want everything to be, you could keep everything relatively simple. Keep in mind that this will be expensive to design and build, possibly more than that dinghy.

My biggest concern structurally would be whether the hull could be supported by so few points. Unless you put fancy suspension on, you will end up with situations where 1 point is carrying most of the load. With a cat designed from the ground up, this would be easy to factor in but might be a difficult retrofit.