David Burdett on Transport
The next job that connected me to the Island was a friend of mine who’d I’d worked with in the North Sea doing work on sea bed pipelines from a …[inaudible]… Support Vessel. He lived on the Island and he said, “We’re setting up a Ferry Company, are you interested?” I said, “Yes.” That was … it wasn’t a start, it was Cowes Express.
A group of business people had bought a couple of Norwegian build side-wall hovercraft. A side-wall hovercraft is a catamaran, in other words it’s got two hulls and a platform across the two and what the Norwegians had done was put a rubber skirt across the front of the open space between the hulls and another at the back and if you pumped air into that space between the hulls you can lift, partially lift the vessel out of the water. This reduces the resistance to movement, so for the same engine size you can go a lot faster.