Bow thruster
To make steering even easier, Zinfandel has a bow thruster. These solve most of the problems found by inexperienced steerers when manoevering a narrowboat – if the bow isn’t where you want it, you can just steer it round until it is.
Propulsion power
Because we live on a river rather than a canal, we needed to make sure that the boat would have enough thrust to take the current in its stride. The PropGen engine develops 27.9 HP at the propellor. As a Sea Otter aluminium boat is fairly light compared with a steel boat of the same size, and has a V bottom, this gives plenty of power to help even a relative novice avoid disasters around bridges and weirs.