Poor-Poise: A Hardware Store Outrigger
GALLERY | Click images to enlarge
A reader sends in his account of repurposing plastic canoe and kayak with hardware store parts to obtain a sailing outrigger. A Home Deproa! Thanks for the submission. -Ed
My name is Mason, I’m 25, and I work as a preschool teacher. I first started sailing at summer camp when I was growing up, and I’ve been looking for a way to enjoy it as an adult ever since. A few years ago I bought a 1978 16’ Hobie Cat catamaran, but I ended up being daunted by the rigging, loading and unloading, and the hauling of the trailer. I wanted a sailboat that was light enough to be paddled, rigged, and loaded on to a trailer by one person fairly quickly. A canoe seemed like a good place to start, but many of the kits were quite expensive for the modest sail and stability they provided.
Knowing that the pre-made kits weren’t the direction I wanted to go, I started focusing on the outrigger. I figured that, rather than two smaller outriggers out to the sides, I could use one larger outrigger and that, if I wasn’t worried about lifting it out of the water when under sail, a larger ama could support a decent amount of weight between the hulls. I was looking into making my own ama with fiberglass or wood when I saw a local store having a sale on kayaks.
From there the plans came together rather easily. It was about three months of weekend work and a handful of orders from the hardware store when the Poor-poise (poor-poos, a reference to the cost of the project and to the movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) started to take shape.
The mast is a sectional flagpole, the sail is an awning cover, and everything else is odds and ends from the hardware store in as many colors as I could find. Including the canoe and kayak, I spent under $1000 on the project.
I ended up with a sailing vessel that seats 3, and can support an additional 2 adults (depending on the tack) on the flat surface between the hulls. With a double camping mattress the area is quite comfortable! With wind it can even get a decent amount of speed. It’s certainly not going to win any races, but it’s faster than I could paddle! Plenty for a leisurely lap around the local lakes. The Poor-poise can be beached and launched from shore, as the rudder and dual lee boards lift out of the way, and the kayak has a waterproof cover to prevent splashes from filling it. The entire assortment can be disassembled and loaded onto a small trailer for storage and transportation.
This boat reminds me of the web-site that got me into proas in the late 1990s, Craig O’Donnel’s “The Cheap Pages” (which can still be found on WWW I believe), where he showed us his canoe-to-proa conversion, plus much else that was interesting about proas in the pre-web-page days.