I messed around with off center swimmers a few years ago.
Like George said, turn the basic shape on center but leave a lot of extra material around the nose and tail as it will wobble a lot when its mounted off center. Then when you are done with the off center turning, you can mount it back on center and clean up the nose and tail.
I don't use a duplicator so I just did mine free hand. I ended up slowing down the lathe quite a bit, the off center vibration makes the whole lathe 'walk' on the table so I ended up putting mine on a router matt and that worked pretty well. Doing it free hand it's tough to get the 2 opposite sides perfectly symetrical. Easiest way to get them close was to just make the same number of passes with the chisel on each off center side.
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