Dan Casey

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Once upon a time, an obsession seized sailor and cyclist George Tatum. The Roanoke schoolteacher gathered large plastic sewage pipe, bicycle pieces, conveyor belt parts, outboard motor scraps, plastic bits, rubber bands and other odd hardware items.

In his living room, he drilled them and sawed them and screwed them and glued them into a strange, monohull, human-powered, propeller-driven, floating contraption. It looked like a bike frame mounted on top of a 25-foot-long white cigar.

In the middle of winter he launched it into Smith Mountain Lake, and, true to the skeptics' predictions, it promptly broke, rolled over and dumped him into the frigid drink.

You might think Tatum would have given up at that point; that the time and money he'd invested was already far too great for so embarrassing a return; that with a bride and a family-to-be and an energy-sapping job, he already had his plate full, a load on his mind and far too little in his checking account.

On those points you would be correct, but you would be underestimating Tatum's resolve.

Tatum redoubled his efforts. Within a week he'd fixed the contraption, called the Sewage Pipe Prototype, and was back on the icy water. This time, he pedaled it a nautical mile and proved it could be done. That was in February 1996.

But the contraption, unwieldy as its name, tended to tip over easily and was slow as a one-armed swimmer.

Scourge of sailors, kayakers

Tatum never gave up. Over the next five years, he put 6,000 hours and $72,000 of his father's retirement savings into perfecting his invention. His father, Sam, a marine engineer from Tidewater, helped.

They patented the contraption and formed a corporation. Tatum built his "boatyard" in the most improbable location imaginable -- an old apple barn atop Bent Mountain, elev. 3,200 feet.

He replaced the sewage pipe with a sleeker, custom-molded plastic-fiberglass hull. He contracted with a company in India to produce the stainless-steel gears for the pedaled-powered transmission.

Tatum entered sailboat races and lapped red-faced skippers. He entered kayak races and left paddlers cursing in his wake. He named his third-generation invention the WaveBike. He exhibited it at a Smithsonian Institution inventors symposium where it was the hit of the show. He franchised the South Pacific rights to an open-minded Australian marketer who, Tatum says, is drawing thousands of curious onlookers to waterside demonstrations in Sydney.

A 10-year-old can do it

Much of this I learned one recent day when I bumped into Tatum, 34, at a store where we were both buying beer. Four WaterBikes were piled on a trailer behind his SUV out in the parking lot, and my curiosity about all things bicycling got the better of me.

Needless to say, it was a long time before I got home from that quick run to the corner market. And it took me even longer to convince my wife that I had indeed met a guy who made a bike that you could ride on top of the water.

The only thing left to do was try that contraption. I was a skeptic when I ventured, four kids in tow, down to Halesford Marina on Smith Mountain Lake one recent Sunday. But I'm a skeptic no longer.

The WaveBike works. It is easy to ride. A kid can do it, as my 10-year-old daughter, Erin, proved. And it's a lot of fun.

How it works

Here's what made me skeptical about the WaveBike: As a bike frame mounted on top of a single pontoon, it looks like it would be impossible to balance on the water. Not so.

Tatum solved this problem early on. The secret is a buoyant canard (landlubbers' translation: floating, turnable fin) under the hull directly beneath the WaveBike's handlebars. When the WaveBike is moving, the fin gently pushes the hull out of the water just a bit. In marine engineering terms, this "counters the overturning moment." The result: It's stable.

I will never fully understand these hydrodynamics, but it works like a charm. In essence, it's the same principle that governs riding a bicycle: balance is easy as long as you're moving, but nearly impossible when you stop.

To make stops and starts easier, Tatum added what he calls "Water Legs." These are long, spring-loaded tubular arms with a float on each end that extend from each side of the boat. They effectively turn a stopped WaveBike into a stable trimaran (landlubbers' translation: triple-hull).

These make the WaveBike simple to mount. Once you get up speed, the Water Legs easily retract with a tug on a rope. You can re-extend the Water Legs when you want to stop. If you don't, you're going into the water.

Not exactly a bike

Besides the lack of wheels, there are a few other key differences between a WaveBike and a standard bicycle. There are no brakes on a WaveBike, but there are brake handles. These are attached to a rudder at the rear of the pontoon.

You squeeze the right handle to turn right, the left to turn left. The handlebars turn the fin on the bottom of the boat. They'll help you maintain balance, and also carve your turns.

There's no crank or chain. The pedals turn a shaft through a custom gearbox, that turns another shaft that goes through the pontoon to a 20-inch propeller at the rear.

One convenient feature you don't find on most bikes is that you can pedal a WaveBike backwards.

Dan tries it out

It took me about five minutes to learn how the WaveBike works and another 15 minutes to get comfortable on it before I worked up the nerve to retract the Water Legs. Tatum had told me my speed would immediately jump as soon as I did this. He was right; I was off and running.

As long as I was moving, the WaveBike was stable. Its turns were nimble, and even tighter with the handlebars turned a bit. It'll cut through wind easily, and (hard to believe but true) it slices right through motorboat wakes, or rises gently over waves that strike the boat broadside.

I can't estimate the speed (Tatum says it tops out at about 11 knots), but it took me only a few minutes to get across the lake.

There's only a single speed with the WaveBike, which means if you want to go faster you've got to spin pretty fast. But you can also take it fairly easy. It's simple to stay afloat while pedaling at a pace that won't you leave breathing hard.

I fell off the WaveBike a couple of times. It turns over in the water, with the bike frame hanging down and the fin on the hull facing up. To right it, you reach up on the fin and pull with all your might. The boat will turn upright. As it does, you yank a rope to re-extend the Water Legs, then you climb back on and get going again.

My oldest daughter, Caitlin, 13, rode it with no problems (Water Legs extended). Erin, 10, took it out that way a few times. Then, with a running push from Tatum, she started from the dock's edge with the wings retracted. After a few falls, she was pedaling it easily.

Dan Casey | The Roanoke Times

George Tatum is an English teacher at Addison Middle School in Roanoke.

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A challenge to sell

Tatum has sold only four of these devices. There are, as he says, some "marketing issues." In other words, the WaveBike hasn't quite found a niche.

"You go to a kayak race or show, and all the kayakers give you these weird looks, like, 'What's a bicycle doing here?' " he says. "You go to a bicycle show, and all the cyclists give you these weird looks, like, "What's that boat doing here?' "

The price of the WaveBike doesn't make it a quick sale. Right now, it's almost $4,000, and that's because Tatum painstakingly builds each one by hand. He says the price would come way down if the machines were made in a factory.

In the meantime, Tatum continues tinkering and improving. He holds on for the day when someone will come along and be seized with the same obsession for riding a bike on water -- someone who has enough money and faith to take the contraption into mass production.

Tatum has long known that the difficulty with the WaveBike is not making it work, but proving to skeptical people that it can. Once he gets them on it, they're believers.

The hard part is persuading them to try.