This is an interesting time capsule - a 1955 Manu Kai class 20’ catamaran, designed and built by the legendary Woody Brown. According to the seller, the original owner has passed away. He special ordered the boat direct from Honolulu and it was made specially for him. The catamaran has been stored inside and has not been used for years. From the included paperwork:
Manu Kai Catamarans are built to the highest construction standards by…
The story of this rig begins in Hawaii, with Euell - “Have you ever eaten a pine tree?” - Gibbons, a half century ago. Now, thanks to a renewed interest in proas and the easy flow of information on the Internet, the rig has received some new attention, and looks to become a very good proa rig indeed.
Writer and naturalist Euell Gibbons was living in Hawaii and dining on the jungle flora and fauna in the 1950’s. He soon realized that…
This is a nice interview of L’Hydroptere skipper Alain Thebault by CNET’s Molly Wood. L’Hydroptere is a member of a very exclusive club: “Former holders of the world sailing speed record”. Unlike most record holders, the flying hydrofoil trimaran is not limited to shallow and waveless speed traps, but is open ocean capable. Highlights include photos of Alain’s early scale models that he built as a teenager.
This post is also a test of…
John Dalziel gives a summary of his series of experiments on his proa C. L. Brock with a Bolger-type rig. Note: Frequent references are made to Philip C. Bolger’s proa "cartoon", which first appeared in an issue of the late Small Boat Journal, and was later published in Boats with an Open Mind; International Marine, 1994.
The Bolger proa rig echos the unique symmetry of the proa: the airflow reverses direction during a shunt, just…
A report on the 2014 Proa Raid in Poland
We are a group of friends sailing proas from Poland and Germany. Every year we meet to share our experience and to raid together to gain some more experience. Last year we were sailing on the Baltic Sea. We had the same idea this year, after the Proa Conference at Jamno Lake in Poland. But we had to change our plans. The channel between the lake and sea was closed, what we had discovered in the…
Long time Proa File contributor Chris Ostlind is working up a new ultra-light, hybrid human/wind powered tri based on an A-Class cat hull. Now that’s what we call recycling. Chris says:
I’ve been pretty much out of the design arena for a little over two years now, so I was excited when I was asked to develop a set of amas for a fast hybrid function boat being built by my friend and multihull guru, Mike Leneman. Mike’s boat is based on…
The 32’ Podcat was designed and built by D. Kirk Fuller in the late 1980’s. The iconoclast cat was featured in the March/April 1988 edition of Multihulls Magazine in a story written by Jim Brown. Apparently Jim and I were among the few who liked the design, because few, if any, were ever sold. Innovative in its day, the Podcat featured all composite construction with fiberglass truss beams and a carbon fiber free-standing mast. To…
An overview of the potentials and problems of the remarkable rig of the native Pacific proa.
The Traditional Oceanic sprit rig (aka crab claw) has, in Western eyes, been considered a romantic if not particularly effective rig that most likely compared to the Mediterranean lateen in aerodynamic performance. That is, until famed sailboat aerodynamics researcher C. A. Marchaj published this startling graph in his research paper Planform…
Whenever we drive by a marina, we almost always have to duck in and take a quick look, to see if there are interesting multis lurking about. It’s called walking the dock, and the online version is perusing Craigslist and brokerage ads. When we stumble upon something interesting, we’ll post it here as Dock Ranger.
Sundreamer is the iconic performance cruising cat designed by New Zealand artist David Barker, and built by he and Fiona…
The proa has unique requirements for a sailboat rig, the main one being that it is reversible fore and aft. Since no Western craft have this ability, we who are developing the proa for use here in the West are truly in uncharted waters.
The obvious place to look for inspiration is with the traditional proa rig: the Oceanic sprit, developed over thousands of years of ocean voyaging by the Pacific Islanders. This rig, often called the…
