Where to store the oars?

This is something Phil Bolger agonized over as he designed his smaller vessels. And he made sure that his design somehow provided a good place to keep the oars aboard while sailing, where they wouldn't get in the way.

This particular design leaves that to the builder to figure out. It was something I tried to get a handle on right from the time I first saw the design on Duckworks. For me, it helps to have the three-dimensional model to work with, since I'm mostly a two-dimensional designer. So having the oars and the boat there in 3D allowed me to get a bit of a grip.

I didn't want to leave the oars in the oarlocks, with the handles sticking out and the blades sitting on the forward or after deck. Too sloppy for me, and inviting a line like the sheet to get hooked on the oar handle and cause who-knows-what weirdness. However, if the oars were loose in the cockpit, they'd either take up the seats, or get underfoot in the foot-well.

But at least, if they're in the foot-well, I'll have the seats! I decided to keep them off the floor, and having decided that, thought that they could even be used as hiking toe-holds, a substitute for hiking straps.

So I made sockets for the handles and positioned them at the after end of the cockpit so that the oar would be about bench level:

 In order to use the oars for hiking (who knows, I may never! 😁), they had to be secured so that they wouldn't lift up or rotate, so I made stops shaped like the number seven and its mirror, to contain the blades at the forward end of the cockpit, with an elastic cord to lift them up into the stops.

The seat top is higher off the bottom of the boat at the forward end of the cockpit (that's why I decided that the blades should be forward rather than aft), and it just happened that the oar blades have enough room to slide down beside the mast step and pivot into the stops. I wanted the stops to be the same height as the width of the blades so that the oars wouldn't rotate.

To store an oar, the handle is first inserted in the socket at the after end of the cockpit. The blade is then wiggled past the mast partner and the cleat, pushed down into the cradle of the elastic cord, and pivoted so that the elastic pulls it up into the stop.

This arrangement makes the cockpit narrower:

But the advantages are that the seats are free, the oars aren't rolling around underfoot, there's space for feet underneath them, and they can possibly be used as toe-holds for hiking. I think there will be just enough room to crouch between the oars when one needs to.

The blade stops are made of yellow cedar. What lovely stuff to work with! Aside from how fragrant it is, it carves smoothly since it has virtually no noticeable grain. In the photo below, the stand-in mast shows how the forward end will look with the mast stepped and oars shipped:

This idea may not work and I might have to abandon it after a trial, but I think it's worth a try.