Retired boatbuilder Chris Maas lives in the San Juans on an island with no ferry service, so he built this fantastic electric foiling catamaran from recycled parts to be his commuter.
His GIZMO has been nominated in the Motorboat and Sustainable categories at Foiling Week. It’s marvelous to see Chris up against the over-hyped and overpriced foiling toys, best of luck to him.
UPDATE 3/17/22: Ryan Finn has rounded Cape Horn yesterday, 3/16/22 in the early AM hours, according to his FB post and the tracker. Congratulations Ryan! A great accomplishment for the sailor and also for his proa, JZERRO, originally designed and built by Russell Brown. Cheers!
1/20/22: Ryan Finn has started his second try at breaking the New York to San Francisco sailing record (solo no less) in the JZERRO. The proa departed NYC on…
Independent Catamaran and the new IC36. I have to say this boat is pretty trick (is that even still a word?) but it should be for the €400,000 asking price. Demountable, container friendly, stylish and fast, the way cats really can be. I gotta admit that they had me with the Eames chairs. I also gotta admit that Eames did not design their chairs to become icons of cool for the 1%.
A continuation of this July 5 article about the Das Brothers. As I noted earlier, the twin brothers Rudolf and Robbert Das had a long career as technical illustrators, architectural designers, authors and futurologists. Since then, Proafile contributor Paul Dunlop has found and acquired five rare volumes of Das books that were published in a series called Toekomst (“Future”), between 1983 and 2008.
Paul has scanned and uploaded the…
Well here it is late 2021. The world has been in a COVID-19 mess for 18 months, with no real end in sight. Global supply chains are a complete train wreck, and it’s not looking to change anytime soon. Prices of lumber, especially plywood, have skyrocketed, along with most everything else related to boat building. Back in the day, when so many plywood classics were designed and built, good marine plywood was a very reasonably priced…
Nicolas Duchein is organizing the first proa only ocean race ever, called the CHEERS Challenge. Set to start 01/03/2023 (I assume that means March 1) the race course circumnavigates the Caribbean islands of St. Croix and Martinique.
Note: This is not actually the first proa only race because many proa races have been held in the Pacific in recent years for instance, the Majuro Day canoe races in the Marshall Islands. Maybe the first…
This is the Polar Pod - a research platform which is intended to circumnavigate Antarctica by drifting along with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
The craft is technically a multihull sailboat; it has four hulls - one of which is above the waterline. It’s fitted with ten vane-like sails; these will help the craft avoid encounters with icebergs and the like.
The Polar Pod was originally proposed by the French explorer Jean-Louis…
The new owner of MADNESS has submitted some recent pics and videos of the 31’ proa doing his thing on Chesapeake Bay. MADNESS is a plywood and epoxy Pacific Proa design of John C. Harris. The plans are available here at CLC Boats. He says:
Proa MADNESS has been back in the water for 1 year and logged approx. 300 NM.
Max speed so far has been 17 kts with average speed being 8 to 10.
The video has some great footage of the lee pod…
Henrik Richter-Alten has submitted a new proa development project to Proafile called Proasis. His team has recently completed the launch and a successful test sail. Henrik explains:
“I’ve started the Proasis Project together with Christian Arriens, a good friend of mine. We are both involved in the Low Carbon Sea Transport Project at WAM*. My contribution was the WAM Catamaran design, he did the recently launched solar-electric…
B&B Yacht Designs is continuing their development of a very neat little adventure trimaran. It has pretty much everything you’d want in a pocket tri, nothing you don’t, and all in excellent proportion.
“Features include a roller furling mainsail and headsail for easy reefing and a boom for superior sail control. The amas retract into the center crossbeams to reduce the overall beam for trailering without having to demount the amas. A…
