A gondola is a type of boat that originated in Venice. It was a type of twin-oared boat but had to be altered so it could not squeeze through the canals. This made the asymmetry in design necessary, which also affected their engineering and control techniques.

No traveler in the world has not fallen victim to their charm: the magic of Venetian gondolas with their characteristic silhouette, which is instigated by the wind, walking between Venice’s small waterways – that’s really something you cannot forget.

The most common public transport in Venice is the gondola, and it is famous for being the oldest symbol of Venice. When it first started out, it was only used by wealthy people as a “horse-drawn carriage” in other cities.

Gondolas might not be as common as they once were but they make for an excellent tourist attraction. Riding one along the Grand Canal is a gondolier’s dream and many tourists enjoy that experience.

The world-famous Venetian cabs are the object of everyone’s admiration due to their charm and sinuous shapes. The appearance of gondolas in Venice, Italy has changed a lot over time. Originally developed centuries ago, the ancient version of “gondolas” was not the same as those we associate with Venice today. So, in the paintings from Venetian artists of the 15th-16th centuries, gondolas are depicted as shorter and wider and less elongated boats. They were also shown to be not asymmetrical.

The gondola is a historical means of transportation that also serves today to entertain many tourists. In the last years of Venice’s republic, there were about 10,000 gondolas.

Today, the 500 gondolas in Venice’s canals look almost identical to how they looked about 200 years ago and retain the same characteristics that tourists from back then would recognize too.

While it may seem like the symbols of Venice are built on a need-to-know basis, the truth is that these symbols are passed down through “squeri”. You’ll find many ship docks here. Once upon a time, gondola building sites were popular and many of these sites mirrored the importance of the business using the word “squara” which translates to team.

Until now, there are only 5 docks in Venice and they are located in different parts of the city. Interesting fact is that they still work without any project documentation – everything relies on personal experience. It’s for this reason that the job of nacelle designer requires a lengthy apprenticeship that can only be undertaken after the requisite exam has been passed.

Each boat takes a number of months to build and 500 hours of work, on average. To maintain the current fleet size, which is 500 boats, craftsmen must construct about 20-30 boats per year.

Historically, only men have traditionally been Gondoliers but in 2009 the first woman received her license. This is a difficult profession that requires endurance and great skill which is passed down from generation to generation.

The maximum occupancy of the gondola is six people – it should never carry more than this number.

However, even if the boat is empty, the gondolier has to apply the same amount of force in order to get from point A to point B. This is due to the boat’s design and not due to rowing.

The shape of the boat is asymmetric allowing the rower-gondolier to use one oar, which is on the side of a line dividing the boat along halves. The gondolier stands on the boat and steers it while looking ahead in the direction of travel.

There is no rowing involved when you take a gondola ride. The gondolier uses the oar to make certain movements along a special trajectory. Gondoliers are able to switch the oar from one mode to another and they leave the boat at night (because it’s safer) much like car owners take their battery home. Firstly, it’s difficult to steal a gondola without a fork, and secondly, the cost is affordable by itself! The production of the part only lasts for three days-a week.

Every year on the first Sunday of September, the Historical Regatta is held in Venice. Before the competition, a gondola parade is also organised. It’s followed by a gondolier competition. The race is this distance each island or region wants to place their boats in the competition.

The price is set by the gondoliers’ union and can’t be changed. Considering the boat is expensive, it’s made for each individual gondolier and its size must be strictly regulated, manual labor for transportation on top of that would make things even more expensive. However, there is a loophole. You can save money on getting from A to B by getting a taxi. Six people can get picked up with the same cost as it would be for one person with a taxi. So if you’re going to be around for at least an hour (could be longer!), why not rent a boat and go together? Definitely, it is not something you want to go through alone. But in this situation it’s a choice between your own personal feelings or business/economic standpoint. If you observe as I did, a more elaborate company for the job can be more preferable because the price per trip is cheaper and that could be just what makes the difference when your business needs reliable partners.

There is another way to ride a gondola—a traghetto. They are the most budget-friendly option and they can be found across the Grand Canal where bridges would otherwise be too far. Traghetto boats are a common part of Venice’s public transportation system and are often the only option for people in need of transport. They even provide a more authentic experience for travelers and locals alike, as rafts and gondola usually just serve as tourist attractions nowadays.

The Venetian gondola has been a constant symbol of this Italian city on the water for decades. Unique boats that resemble Turkish gülets or Arabian dhows are not found anywhere. You can find the same for Italian gondolas. And their design and construction has been retained through centuries of use, so it’s not surprising if you sometimes need to deal with regular maintenance issues

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It appeared in April 2016 in Hamburg, Germany, the largest port city in Europe, through which the beautiful Elbe River flows. Such transport is the best fit for this city, many of whose attractions are located near the river.

Taking passengers and tourists on board, on land the amphibian travels as an ordinary city bus, according to time and schedule.

And according to the licensing requirements of the municipality, it is equipped with a retractable ladder, stop request buttons and all the other features inherent in ordinary public transport.

According to the creator and owner of the amphibian, it took him as long as four years to obtain state permits. It turned out that the German code of regulations and laws lacked such a concept as public transport in the form of an amphibian, so the bus had to be given the most traditional form, equipment, and of course, safety features.

On land, the bus travels at the speed allowed in Hamburg city traffic, on water it is able to speed up to 5.9 knots. And despite the fact that it looks like a bus and has a Manov truck chassis, it is in fact equipped with a waterproof ship hull, which was specially created for it by a shipbuilding firm in Bulgaria. By the way, it is registered as a ship too – it flies the flag of Bulgaria, not as a bus, but as a passenger ship, i.e. as a ship.

“The biggest challenge for me was to find technical personnel to maintain it. After all, such an amphibious vehicle is both a vehicle and a boat. And all the ship mechanics were not friendly with the machines. I had to send my staff to MAN for advanced training. Now they are very handy, and can fix a bus within hours if necessary,” explains Fred Franken, the author of the floating transport.

In just the first two months of operation, the Hamburg amphibian was able to transport about 6,000 passengers, and now the record is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Its successes and shortcomings are closely watched by officials and specialists of other German cities. If successful, such “water buses” will appear in at least five more places in Germany.

An interesting way of traveling in the Netherlands has appeared relatively recently. Amphibious buses are very popular among tourists. The tour begins in Amsterdam by road and then continues by water. The trip on the water lasts about an hour and a half. The Amphibus is produced by a company that can build you an amphibious vehicle if you suddenly want to have a real off-road vehicle that can not only drive on land.

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Transport SR-N1 was the first operating screen-plane, but it could be used only when the sea was absolutely calm, because it rose only 23 cm above the water. The reason is that when Christopher Cockerell built his transport, he did not equip it with a rubber cushion. It was this strip of rubber, invented by another Englishman, Latinaire Leeder, that provided the practical application of the screenplane.

Latiner Lider was struck by Cockerell’s experiments, and he came up with the brilliant idea of creating a so-called rubber skirt. Thanks to the “skirt” the screenplane could fly over the waves that sometimes force ferries going through the English Channel to stay in port. Later, thanks to this invention, hovercrafts on all continents became vital in places where no other machine could operate.

But what’s the point of a rubber skirt. It’s actually quite simple. One fan blows air into the rubber skirt, which inflates. Another fan blows air under the bottom of the boat, creating an air cushion, and the rubber “skirt” holds that air. To better understand this process, let’s go back to the world’s first hovercraft SR-N1.

This screen-plane had no rubber “skirt”, so most of the air cushion, as well as the air curtain, simply dissipated. For this reason it flew very low and could only operate on calm water. The “skirt,” on the other hand, is designed to hold the air, which with great force lifts it above the water to an order of magnitude higher. Since the “skirt” is made of rubber it can bend to overcome obstacles such as waves or rocks in the way and “fly” further. All modern airfoils are now equipped with rubber skirts.

This is a representative of one of the modern hovercrafts “Freedom 90”. It weighs 36 tons, is 24.5 m long, and has 98 passenger seats. The weight of the skirt is 2.5 tons. This hovercraft has two 420 hp engines, which provide the necessary lift. Aft of the Freedom 90 is two more liquid-cooled 12-valve diesel engines with 800 hp each. They are coupled to a massive air propeller in a shroud. It is an ideal transport for carrying hundreds of passengers by sea and land.

Steering the Freedom 90 hovercraft is comparable to juggling balloons, as both the thrusters, which act like giant hair dryers, and the stern rudders, for determining the direction of the transport, must be operated simultaneously. Because the hovercraft moves over the surface of the water at speeds far higher than displacement ships, this makes it an ideal fast-moving vehicle. It also has the distinct advantage of being able to access unequipped coastlines or simply put, it does not need a port.

One of the largest hovercrafts in the world is the majestic The Princess Margaret SRN-4. It is the world’s largest amphibious hovercraft with a capacity of 454 passengers, and 54 vehicles. Speed on water and land is 130 km/hour. The Princess Margaret crossed the English Channel in 19 minutes.

The hovercraft is powered by four Rolls-Royce engines with 3,600 horsepower. The jet engines spinning the lift fans are the size of a room, and the air propellers are 6.4 meters in diameter. But like the famous Concorde, the largest hovercraft, The Princess Margaret, has fallen victim to time. Now this hovercraft is a mothballed ship, taken out of service because of high fuel prices.

But hovercrafts are no longer a curiosity. Many countries are working on their improvement. They are recognized as a very promising form of transport. They are used as landing craft by the Navy and as civilian ferries, ferrying people and cars over water obstacles.

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The team is led by Dominique Görlitz, 53, a German experimental archaeologist. For him, this will be the fourth such expedition, which is called Abora IV. Görlitz and his team intend to travel by water from Bulgaria to Cyprus, passing through three seas. The goal is to prove that ancient Egyptian merchants could sail to the north and back across the Black Sea.

Dominik Goerlitz claims that Egyptian sailors brought iron from the Caucasus to build the pyramids. The German scientist was part of the group that studied traces of iron in the giant blocks of the pyramid of Cheops, dating back to the third millennium B.C. In the traditional sense, the Iron Age began about 1,000 years later.

Görlitz’s previous experiments illustrated the possibilities of traveling in reed boats from Sardinia to the island of Elba (an expedition in 1999), from Egyptian Alexandria to Cyprus (2002) and from New York to the Azores (2007).

The boat will be 14 meters long. The launch from the port of Varna is scheduled for the end of August. The vessel will cover about 3,000 kilometers, including crossing the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and the Aegean Sea. “This is the sturdiest vessel imaginable,” Görlitz says, pointing to a drawing of an ancient Egyptian boat. It was in this image that the team leader drew inspiration.

Thousands of years ago, prehistoric vessels could sail and even withstand the wind, using, according to Görlitz, “secret weapons”: centreboards, retractable fins that prevent the vessel from drifting into the wind, which can be raised or lowered to control and steer the ship.

In fact, the trade routes crossing the Mediterranean and the Black Sea played an important role in creating the conditions for technological and cultural advances, essentially being the “highway” for transporting raw materials used by the advanced civilizations of the time.

The choice of Varna as a port of departure symbolically recalls the existence of the “Varna culture”, an archaeological culture from the late Eneolithic period (circa 4400-4100 BC) in northern Bulgaria. At that time Varna was an important trading port on the Black Sea.

In the footsteps of Thor Heyerdahl
The team includes two Bolivians: 50-year-old Fermin Limachi and his 25-year-old son Yuri. They are members of the Aymara Indian people who live in western South America. The older and younger Limachi are specialists in building totoras, traditional cane sailboats and canoes used on Lake Titicaca. Fermin Limaci’s father was even part of the team that built the Ra II. On it, the famous Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl made it from Morocco to Barbados in 1970, covering more than 6,000 kilometers.

Limachi grew up on a small island on Lake Titicaca. He says he began learning his craft at an early age, taking part in building Totor boats with his father and grandfathers. Most of the ships now in use on Lake Titicaca are built of wood or fiberglass. “There are very few people left who still know how to build totora boats,” Limachi says. He’s been part of the Dominic Görlitz team since 2001. “This is the first time we’ve ever built a boat with Lake Titicaca materials in another country,” Limaci admits. Three previous boats were built on the lake and delivered to the point of origin, he explains.

Such boats are built by tying reeds into rows that end up in a banana (or crescent) shape. Once shaped, the builders spend hours tightening the reed rows by hitting them with a device similar to a baseball bat. At the same time, they also stretch the tying ropes until most of the air between them is out, which gives the boat extra strength and buoyancy by reducing the rate of water absorption.

After the hull is formed, a 12-meter, two-legged mast (in the shape of the letter “A”) is placed on the boat with the help of a crane. The crane also lifts and fastens two hand-sewn papyrus and reed cabins which will later be converted into crew berths. Then the boat will be launched into Lake Varna, where tests of the boat will begin.

Pils will be among those who will set sail on the boat. He compares the adventure to conquering peaks like Kilimanjaro or Chogori on the China-Pakistan border. “It’s hard work, but it’s worth it,” states Mark Pils.

There is another German representative on the team, or rather a female representative, 35-year-old Heike Vogel from Chemnitz. She, along with everyone else, spends her days wielding ropes and other tools to build the boat.

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Very wide, almost rectangular in plan, raised bow and stern, quadrangular sails made of mats and bamboo slats. In the era of the sailing fleet, the junk was used for military purposes.

Today’s junks are used to carry cargo, and often serve as dwellings as well. Junks have a shallow draft and a capacity of up to 600 tons. Shipbuilding in China, according to many historians, began earlier than in Egypt. The Chinese used their ships for long voyages.

Reliable information on the voyage of the Chinese to the overseas country of Fusan, which is very similar to the description of Mexico. That was several millennia before Christ. More than 300 kinds of junks were created in China, unsightly in appearance, with sails made of matting, but exceptionally seaworthy vessels. Preserved to this day, they impress with their seaworthiness, capacity and practicality.

All of them – regardless of their purpose – were structurally very similar: flat bottom, vertical hull sides, slightly pointed bow, blunt, stumped stern with cabins and batten sails woven from reeds. As in Europe, eyes were often drawn on the cheekbones near the bow.

The superstructures at the stern protruded slightly beyond the hull. They housed crew and provisions. Junks with a capacity of 1,000 men are mentioned. The design of a junk is so rational that it survived almost unchanged until the present day. The junk’s armament is the rake armament. The Chinese batten sail (commonly known in Western Europe as the junk armament) is effective when sailing on both sharp and full courses to the wind, is easily corrugated and maintained by a small crew.

Due to the fact that the sail is made up of parts and the rigidity of the structure is provided by the bamboo, it can be easily and quickly repaired. This simple and effective armament has never before been used on workboats in other parts of the world.

In the 15th century, the Chinese sailed their ships, the junks. They were considerably larger than European ships: some junks were more than 10 times the displacement of the ships of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese navigator who discovered the sea route from Europe to India.

These ships were flat-bottomed and wide, making them very manageable and roomy. The broad stern of junks was raised high and the bow was lowered. They were usually painted with images of dragons and other mythical creatures. Junks had special watertight compartments. They had three to five masts with rectangular sails. The masts were made of bamboo poles, and the sails were woven from reed mats and resembled fans. And they were rolled up into a scroll like fans. The sails of junks could unfold to better catch the wind. Reed mats could withstand even strong gusts of wind, but they made the ship heavier, so, with the lapse of time, they were replaced by cloth sails, which considerably improved the speed of junks.

Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who visited China at the end of the 13th century, was astonished by such feature of junks as the presence of spare masts on which more sails could be placed.

At first, the Chinese sailed junks on rivers and near the coast, but over time junks began to be used in other Southeast Asian countries and made longer sea voyages on them. They were used mainly as transport and merchant vessels, and less frequently as military vessels.

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Horse crossing was the only way to get from Lambeth to Westminster, and the controversial idea of building a bridge instead of a ferry was proposed several times starting in 1664. However, repeated objections from watermen and residents of Lambeth prevented the project. But when in 1736 by the decision of Parliament the construction of Westminster Bridge was started, Horse Ferry slowly began to lose customers, as the carriers feared. Finally, in 1862, the Horse Ferry was replaced by Lambeth Bridge. The horse ferry then ceased to operate, but the memory of it is preserved by the road, which today is called Horseferry Road.

The legend
The horse ferry played a role in early modern ideas and legends. One famous story about the ferry is the escape of Queen Mary of Modena, wife of King James II, in 1688 at the beginning of the Glorious Revolution. Secretly fleeing the castle in the middle of the night with a young prince, Queen Mary and a few loyal supporters crossed the Thames on a horse-drawn ferry, beginning their journey into exile in France. According to Agnes Strickland’s later account of the river crossing, the night was so dark and stormy that the Horse Ferry passengers could see each other as they huddled together in the small boat. Strickland’s record continues. Thus, with only one flimsy plank separating her from eternity, the Queen of Great Britain crossed the turbulent waters of the Thames with her delicate six-month-old baby in her arms (Strickland 198). The journey continued and the queen and her young son arrived safely in France.
Local legend associated accidents on the horse crossing with bad luck. In 1633, a ferry sank when William Laud, his servants and horses were crossing the river. Fortunately, all passengers survived, but the incident was remembered as a bad omen when the archbishop was later executed for treason. Similarly, when Oliver Cromwell’s carriage and horses were wrecked at Horse Ferry, people pointed to William Laud’s experience and said that the incident portended bad luck for Cromwell (Lambeth Bridge).

Another part of the Horse Ferry’s history was the notorious character of its carriers, for the rudeness of the Horse Ferry operators was legendary. Their vulgarity and insolence became such a problem that in 1701 a law was passed requiring carriers to pay a fine of 2s 6d if they used immodest, indecent and obscene language with their passengers.

The vessel was driven by wheels, which in turn were turned by horses, which were given a separate place on the ferry. Horses get tired, and since there were from two to five of them, such a vessel could not move quickly and over long distances. If you wanted to cross, say, Lake Manitoba and you had enough time, the horse ferry was the way to go. But eventually, the steam ferry became a faster and more sensible way to cross Canadian waters.

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