The story
This is one of my waterbikes.
She is one of the fastest and more efficient human-powered long-distance watercrafts in the world.
And this is me. My name is Giuseppe Carignani. I am an engineer and a member of the Human Powered Vehicle Association since 1995 (member # 6212).
When I designed this waterbike, back in the nineties, my goal was to build a fast, efficient and user-friendly long distance human powered boat for sports and tourism.
I joined the Human Powered Vehicle Association (it was called the International Human Powered Vehicle Association then) and with the precious advice of several friends (including Jake Free of Free Enterprises, who supplied our first drive unit) I designed the boat, that was built by Franco Mazzante, owner of Lamar Udine, a small firm specializing in advanced composites.
Unexpectedly,she won the long distance race at the Human Powered Vehicle World Championship 1999, distancing herself from the second by more than one kilometer at the finish line. In the following years we worked on several prototypes of boats and components and tried them out in different challenging environments (including the Venetian lagoon, where our boat ran twice the Vogalonga).
Meanwhile, with the invaluable help of the reasearchers at the Univeristy of Udine, and in particular professor Paola Zamparo and her team, including Luca Plaino and Barbara Sgalmuzzo, we decided to assess the performanaces of our waterbike and compare them with the fastest watercrafts in the world. The results were astonishing: we were actually close to be the fastest human powered long-distance boats in the World , within reach of the efficiency of the olymipic rowing shells.
Hundreds of persons contacted us: perspective customers, dealers, people interested in using the craft for its social or environmental value. The logical conclusion of the story could have been the start of a new line of products, bringing to market this beautiful craft, as so many perspective customers were asking us to do.
Then we thought better. And we decided to share with this community our knowledge and our experience and start this new adventure. The Open Waterbike Project.
The Open Waterbike Project
I invite you to join me and all the other community members in our effort to bring this (and other) high performance waterbikes to the market in a completely new fashion, improving together our knowledge, making business and having fun in the process.
Please join. Contact us
Our boat is faster than mine.