I think Arne is correct. I had the privilege of being in Aberdeen Harbour, Hong Kong, in 1978. I watched in admiration as a young Chinese girl finished her conversation with a man then sprang onto a sampan and sped across the harbour using a yuloh. 

The sampan had a standing platform on the stern and  a bracket with a ball-joint on top. Attached to the ball joint was a handle with a long oar lashed underneath over the stern. The front of the handle had a ring bolt underneath attached with a rope to another ring bolt on the platform. The girl proceeded by always pushing or pulling the rope before pushing or pulling the handle. Simple and quite marvellous.

Great stuff, Asmat.  Many thanks.

Ah, thank you Kevin.  You're very kind.  If I had any room on my bookshelves I'd be tempted, but I'm afraid I have they are jammed solid.  I doubt that many of his ideas would applicable to my little boat.  It was the yuloh I really wanted to know about and you've shared the relevant pages.

Jan, I'm really glad you have brought this topic up again.  I have been looking for O'Brien's yuloh piece for ages, but confess that I did think it contained rather more information.

Of course I no longer have access to a workshop and, to be honest, I'm not quite sure if I could actually fit a working yuloh on FanShi, but I'd dearly love to have one.  At least 50% of the time when I start my engine, a yuloh would have done the job and I hate the noise from the motor.  Anyway, I've now bookmarked this thread so hopefully, I can find it again.

Edit:  When I was in the Falkland Islands, Ilen was still there - she was built to go there as a working boat - and still being used.  I was so pleased to read about her restoration several years ago.

Anonymous wrote:

Karlis,

funny that you mentioned that yuloh of Johanna. It was not among my most successful creations, but still quite fun. Now I collected some photos of it, here.

Arne

Maybe I shouldn’t have revive an old topic, but I have just come across an interesting description of an experimental Yuloh, in Conor O’Briens 1945 book Yacht Gear and Gadgets. O’Brien was a famous sailor, he was one of very few to circumnavigate in a small boat before the Second World War. One of his designed boats, the Ilen, is still sailing.  It was built and used in the Falklands but somehow found its way back to Ireland in recent years.  I sailed around it on a very calm day last year.  O’Brien’s gadget book was explicitly aimed at making life easier for the cruising sailor, and it’s full of the type of illustrations that one finds in JRA forums.  

On the Yuloh, O’Brien says he was making 1.5 knots average on his 20 ton displacement boat.  He recommends it for smaller boats but recommends consulting an oriental specialist.  Nowadays he’d recommend the JRA!  I will post images of the Yuloh pages and of a couple of others that might be interesting.  One of those diagrams looks a bit like a 1945 version of a JRA wing sail diagram!