The 2011 Seattle Boat Show has come and gone, without much of interest to report to Proafile readers, per usual. The sailing ghetto held its own and maybe even grew a bit over last year. Marine Servicecenter was displaying a Weta trimaran, my first look at the boat in the flesh. The Weta’s beams and mast are carbon fiber (mast is 6 lb.) making a pretty convincing argument for the judicious use of the black unobtanium. If the boat…
Gary Dierking is a small craft designer inspired by the native canoes of the Pacific islands. He started out with some elegant cedar strip versions of a Micronesian proa and a Hawaiian outrigger, but it is the “three board canoes” that I admire most. From Gary’s site:
In the late 1800’s, when sawn lumber began to appear in Hawaii and other Pacific islands, the local canoe builders immediately saw it as an easier way to build…
There’s a great rant over on Sailing Anarchy about the continuing use of wind energy and sailing in various vaporware investment schemes that make little sense except as tools to separate fools from their money. B9 Shipping is SA’s well deserved target, which perhaps should have replaced the 9 with an S? To counter that, here’s a little green lesson from the past:
1978: Sunburst (formerly Bits ’n Pieces) was built in St. Maarten, from…
Here’s the Wally Fulcrum 88’ Concept Yacht recently accomplished at the Art Center College of Design. One might easily presume from the continual output from Art Center that, deep down, all designers would really rather be designing starships, and they’ll quickly turn any vehicle of transportation into one at the drop of a hat. Note my own previous design concept as an example of this insidious impulse.
I’ve had a good amount of…
Othmar Karschulin of Multihulls.de has recently launched Kalapuna, an 8m proa of his own design. The new boat is a Pacific proa with crab claw sail, flat bottom hull, and two retractable rudders similar to Russell Brown’s Jzero. Designed for coastal sailing in warm Aegean waters, the boat was built in Othmar’s garden in a small fishing village in Southern Turkey. Construction is plywood, fiberglass and epoxy, with home made spars of…
This is old news, but I’m always happy to hear about another win for the team of James Wharram and Hanneke Boon. The brief from Classic Boat magazine was for an under 10m boat that would not require a license for fishing under sail or oar.
They chose the new Wharram Ethnic design, the 27ft Amatasi double canoe, the only catamaran entry. The design is developed from the 21ft Tahiti Wayfarer design and inspired by the Ethnic canoe craft…
I love me a good boat restoration story. I’m glad there are people out there who can take a forgotten boat from derelict to Best In Show with a little patience, love and elbow grease. Unfortunately, old multihulls are rarely restored, but in this case, a forgotten Gougeon Tornado at the Oklahoma City Boat Club was saved from the chain saw by Andy Davison:
I have just about finished restoring a Gougeon Tornado. I have always had and…
This design was inspired by the Delta-7 Aethersprite-class light interceptor that Obi Wan flies on a reconnaissance mission to the planet Kamino in Episode II: Attack of the Clones. The Delta 7 is a small, one-man starfighter not capable of light speed, so to travel great distances it uses a Syluire-31 hyperdrive ring. Obi Wan docks into the hyperdrive ring and zips out to Kamino, where once safely in orbit, he undocks and descends…
Jim Morris launched Aye Aye, his 10m crab claw powered proa early this year and has been having all kinds of fun living like Thoreau and sailing with his young daughter among the mangroves of Hervey Bay, Queensland, AU. Alas, it is time for this ‘lost boy’ to head back home to wife and responsibility, so Aye Aye is being offered up for sale, ready for the next adventure.
Americans may have made the first sustained powered flight, but the French will be the first to fly a sailboat over a few meters above the waves. It’s bordering on a national obsession, with l’Hydroptère being the world’s fastest and highest flying sailboat to date, but hydrofoils are just baby steps. The French dream big.
Designed for Renault, the “Zep’lin” by industrial designer Damien Grossemy is a hypothetical vehicle to explore…
