CONCORD — Three years of dreams and a year-and-a-half of design and labor is coming together in the form of the first modern ferry built to navigate the Charles River.
Drew Rollert, founder of Wada Hoppah, recently showed Watertown News the nearly completed boat at Inriver Tank and Boat‘s production facility in West Concord. The idea of a water service from Watertown to Boston came three years ago when he and a group’s effort to get to Fenway Park by reasonably priced Uber or MBTA bus for a Red Sox game were thwarted.
With the idea hatched, Rollert needed a boat. He is an software engineer who used to sail growing up on the Cape, but did not have a boat design background. After finding out about the challenges of the river, physical and political, he teamed up with Inriver, a boat maker with a long track record of building rowing shells and boats for rowing coaches.
“We started a year-and-a-half, maybe a year-and-a-quarter ago,” Rollert said. “It went through different phases, like, so you know the design phase changes, and you know everything you know has to shift every time you make a change to something.”
Rollert and Julius Pereli of Inriver spent many hours in Starbucks hashing out a design that would work.
“We designed three different boats in that time, and we finally settled on this,” Rollert said. “So, this has three core design elements: it has to be wakeless on the back, it has to be shallow draft, and it has to be electric.”
One boat didn’t have the look that Rollert wanted, and the second was too long to make the turn into one of the docks. The final one found the middle ground between the two designs, Rollert said.
Ken Green, a partner with Inriver, said the project has been a new challenge for the company.
“We’ve done electric, we’ve done hydrofoils, we’ve done long skinny boats, we’ve done wakeless launches, but we haven’t combined them all together. So this is a fun project,” Green said. “Initially they came to us because we’re a rowing central centric kind of company. Everybody on the Charles knows us. We’re just hoping to make sure that still continues with the passenger service coming through, which is a great idea.”
Rollert wanted a “green” boat, thus it will have two electric-powered engines. The wakeless feature means that the boat won’t create waves for rowers or that would erode the shoreline. It has to be shallow — the boat will sit just 14 inches deep in the water — because the river gets shallow in spots.
“So basically, it’s long and thin, and will enable us to be able to get over that weird area between the Newton Yacht Club and Watertown Square, because what’s the point of like not it not reaching Watertown Square,” Rollert said. “That’s where the dock is.”
Another feature will be a system to lift the propellers up and down as the depth changes.
“We needed a design element that could swing between deep water and shallow water without changing the hull,” Rollert said. “When you leave Watertown, once you get past that area, it’s deep.”
Wada Hoppah’s boat will also have an AI object recognition system, Rollert said, that will be able to find submerged objects, as well as tracking movements of boats around it.
The boat will use a charging station at the Newton Yacht Club — a full charge takes about 8 hours. Rollert is also considering whether to add solar panels on the roof to help charge the boat.
When Wada Hoppah begins taking passengers, the initial set of stops, starting from Watertown Square, will be Herter Park in Brighton, then Cambridgeport (near the Memorial Drive Trader Joe’s). The boat will cross the river to hit stops along the Boston Esplanade: at Gloucester Street, then Boston University to serve Fenway Park, and Commissioners Landing which is near Beacon Hill. The route cuts back over the river to stop at Kendall Square in Cambridge before going through a channel near the Museum of Science to reach the stop next to TD Garden.
As of May 26, the shell of the boat was complete and could float on the river if needed.
“We’re gonna put on the Charles in a couple weeks, and then we’re gonna be doing route testing. The times that we tested with the other boats were different, because they weren’t electric, they weren’t wakeless, and they weren’t shallow draft,” Rollert said. “So we’ll do new route tests, and then we’ll also do new depth testing, and then eventually, after two weeks of shakedown, we’ll launch services.”
Before the testing can begin, the last touches will be made to the Wada Hoppah boat: paint, fixtures, seating for up to 15 people, a restroom, and windows. The
“This will look dramatically different in two weeks, with paint, everything hooked up, floors done, the seats,” Rollert said. “It took a while, but I’m pretty psyched. I’m really pretty damn psyched!”
Rollert wants the Wada Hoppah to be ready to carry people from Watertown to Boston for events such as the SailBoston Tall Ships, the Fourth of July Fireworks, along with commuters and trips to the Red Sox game.