[HN Gopher] In southern France, unique boats revive a lost way o... ___________________________________________________________________ In southern France, unique boats revive a lost way of life Author : lermontov Score : 43 points Date : 2022-01-27 05:20 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com) | trhway wrote: | If you're in Mexico City - ancient canals of the Floating Gardens | | https://slightnorth.com/xochimilco-boat-guide-mexico-city/ | Someone wrote: | FTA: _a traditional lightweight wooden fishing boat called a nego | chin--Provencal for "drown the dog," a reference to its | inherently unstable low and flat-bottomed shape_ | | Looking at those pictures, I don't see how these things are | _inherently_ unstable. I can believe they won't feel stable when | standing upright in them, and falling out of such a boat is easy, | but with such a flat bottom, how can they capsize when left alone | in the water? It more or less looks like an oversized stand-up | paddling boat. | WJW wrote: | Capsizing when left alone in the water is not the usual measure | of ship (in)stability, rather we typically use the magnitude of | the righting moment when the ship gets out of vertical. Shallow | flat-bottomed ships are quite unstable from a ship stability | perspective, because of their relatively high center of gravity | and their resulting short KG distance (see also | https://www.marineinsight.com/naval-architecture/ship- | stabil...). | | When a flat-bottomed ship gets out of balance, the righting | moment is fairly small compared to either a deeper boat with | ballast or a boat with a keel. Both of those ships are much | more stable than nego chin boats or indeed standup paddle | boards. Whether someone is standing on top of them to manually | keep them upright is not relevant to whether the boat itself is | stable or not. | alx__ wrote: | Yeah has the same idea as a stand-up paddle board. There's a | learning curve but once you understand the balance it becomes | something you don't think about | reddog wrote: | The images of the boat in this article are disappointing but it | appears to be very similar to the pirogues that are common in S | Louisiana Cajun country. Makes sense. | | http://www.unclejohns.com/boat/default.htm | marvin wrote: | My Provencal partner with an interest in etymology, thinks that | nego chin, "dog-drowner" refers to the kind of ugly box one would | use when euthanizing a dog, rather than hinting that a dog might | drown if it took a ride in the boat. We just assumed that this | black humor was too dark for an upbeat American article on | traditional craftmanship :) | | Not absolutely certain on this, though, but I thought it was an | interesting commentary on southern French humor and sentiment. | d--b wrote: | I live very close, I had no idea these had disappeared and | reappeared, they're really part of the town now. Kind of like | punting in oxford. | | One thing that's not mentioned here is that the river is really | shallow (like 1 foot deep in many places). So you often have to | walk the boat. And the boats have to go below bridges that are | also really low, so whoever is in the boat needs to completely | lie down to go under the bridges. It is somewhat scary. | sayrer wrote: | Oh interesting! I lived nearby as a child and I remember these | boats, but I didn't know they had been revived. | | In case anyone visits, this is upstream: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontaine_de_Vaucluse_(spring) | pbk wrote: | If you had asked me how big the HN audience is in l'Isle sur | la Sorgue I would not have guessed more than 0 :-) A very | special place indeed. | d--b wrote: | Yes, they have races in l'Isle sur la Sorgues now, and | there's always a few of them crossing the town. Much less | popular than kayaks and canoe (cause totally impossible to | handle), but they're the only ones that can go below the | bridges. | [deleted] | IvanaSays wrote: | Beautiful! | zwieback wrote: | From the same site: Spreewald near Berlin, where they use similar | boats to ride along the shallow canals: | https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/spreewald ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-28 23:01 UTC)