My husband, Barry, and I enjoy independent and isolated nomadic living. So we really thought we had it made 11 years ago when we bought a 40-foot ketch and began island hopping up and down the West Indies. Eight years later, however, we’d both had had our fill. The ketch was a constant expense and every safe anchorage for a boat of that size, we’d found, was too populated by curious natives and/or other ships and yachts for our tastes.…
An appreciation of the catamarans designed and built by the firm of C/S/K—or Rudy Choy, Warren Seaman and Alfred Kumalae.
The yacht design partnership of C/S/K was responsible for some of the finest ocean sailing catamarans ever built. The firm was active in the 1960’s - a decade of creative innovation everywhere - but especially in the amped up cultural milieu that was California.
They rode a remarkable wave of opportunity that…
Contributed by Chris Ostlind. Chris is a performance small craft designer/builder in Salt lake City, Utah. See more of his designs at Watertribe.
PB Racer is a sail/paddle kayak double for expedition adventure races such as the Watertribe Everglades Challenge. I pulled the basic hull form from an expedition double I had designed to see how well the form could be adapted to a concept boat of this type. I just gave it a transom and some…
James Wharram Designs has announced the completed prototype of a new production moulded GRP catamaran: the Tiki 8m by Multimarine Composites Ltd. “The design features gently curved V section canoe hulls with stern hung rudders on skegs. A wingsail sloop rig with boomless mainsail provides a low centre of effort for increased stability. With a trampoline forward, and GRP bridgedeck tray with self draining trampoline seats, it also has a…
Below is a list of proa rigs under active development today. As you can see, there is hardly a consensus as of yet! None of the rigs are perfect, and all have various strengths and weaknesses. The Rig Ratings Table is a first attempt to quantify three rig performance areas: Performance, Handling, and Safety. The table is the result of some spirited discussion on the subject by the Proa File International mailing list. Many thanks to…
Brian Schulz of Cape Falcon Kayak in Oregon has been sailing Fog and Thunder, his skin-on-frame version of a Hawaiian outrigger sailing canoe. “Adapting the hawaiian outrigger sailing canoe for skin on frame construction has been a powerful and revelatory experionce for me… at 20 feet long and less than 150 lbs fully rigged it has renewed my faith in the endless adaptability if skin on frame technology. Building it mostly from scraps I…
Part Two of Wade Tarzia’s epic first sail with a crab claw rig.
Bleeding while you are swimming is disarming and kind. What seems to be water dripping in my face is actually something horrific—that it never stopped dripping should have clued me in, but I’m still pondering that nth dimensional paradigm. Somewhere a baby is crying. I know this sounds like a cliche because, in all the bad novels, as soon as something interesting…
The Nigel Irens designed “Rustic Schooner” catamaran was launched from Constellation Yachts in January 2005. I really like this boat - it proves that modern multihulls don’t all need to be hi-tech spaceships. “Sequoya” is a 64’ LOA x 28’ beam day charter cat built from plywood - and it’s one of the few big cats that will actually improve the view of the harbor in which it’s anchored. Check out the photo gallery at Constellation Yachts.
Manu Kai [Bird of the Sea] is a voyaging double canoe: a sailing catamaran for raids, beach cruising, and coastal sailing. It’s designed to be simple, tough, swift, safe, environmentally friendly, and economical to own and to manufacture. It is the sort of small cruiser that I wish were on the market—that Hobie Cat® would make.
LOA: 23’
Beam (sailing): 12’-0”
Beam (trailer): 8’-6”
Weight (approx): 750 lbs.
Draft: 1’-11”
SA: 205 sq.…
Part One of an account originally posted on the ProaFile Discussion Group. We all thought it was a wicked good story. By Wade Tarzia.
My girlfriend tells the story about her father who saw someone waste a few hundred dollars on some unworkable scheme, and he wisely observed it had been money well spent because “how often can you get a lesson that lasts a life-time for just a few hundred bucks?” My own father, well, I think he would…
