Edward Estabrook and his friends will have to wait until next spring to make sailing history.
They want to set a world record by crossing the Georgia Strait, the body of water that separates British Columbia’s lower mainland from Vancouver Island, in a home-made hot tub boat.
But bad weather is forcing them to postpone their hot tub adventure, Estabrook said.
You see the whole point of building the hot tub boat in the first place was to do away with the usual discomforts of sailing, he said.
“I spend a lot of time sailing in Vancouver year around and it’s often cold and rainy,” Estabrook said. “Often, we’ll get a bunch of people with a bunch of boats and we’d sail over to one of the islands and once we arrive, everybody squeezes into somebody else’s boat and it’s cold.”
ListenEstabrook said these cold outings have always forced him to think of creative ways to keep warm.
A few years ago he built a floating pig roast that fits into a dingy.
“It basically allows us to have a pig roast wherever we sail and the first weekend we did that, it rained the entire time and it was a bit wet and people got cold,” Estabrook said.
Hot tub Eureka!
Then next summer, while enjoying a rainy weekend on Shuswap Lake in the B.C. interior that involved an extended stay in a hot tub, Estabrook had his own Eureka moment.
“I had this epiphany, if we could get a hot tub to join us while we are sailing, we could be warm no matter what the weather was doing,” Estabrook said.
So Estabrook and his friends Marco Bieri, Artem Bylinskii and Piotr Forysinski decided to build their own hot tub boat.
Someone donated a broken hot tub that they fixed and mounted on a pair of pontoons for white water rafting, they designed their own heating system, and even got a car stereo, speakers and a disco ball.
The friends launched their creation during Vancouver’s Celebration of Light fireworks festival in 2013.
Estabrook says the hot tub boat meets Coast Guard safety standards and has now sailed more than a dozen times.
But they have discovered that their hot tub boat has a slight design flaw: when it hits big waves the hot water splashes out leaving them cold once again, Estabrook said.
So to complete their record-breaking journey in full comfort they have to have ideal weather conditions plenty of daylight to make the crossing safely. And that means waiting until next spring, Estabrook said.
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