Kayarchy - the sea kayaker's online handbook and reference

Pacific outrigger canoes

These were the fishing and voyaging craft of Polynesian peoples right across the Pacific islands. They have a long, very slim main hull, traditionally made from a single tree, stabilised by an even slimmer outrigged hull (ama) parallel to the main hull but a metre or more off to the side. The main hull has much higher sides than a sea kayak, so the crew sits higher above the water and gets a relatively dry ride. They can all be paddled, using long single-blade paddles.

To find out more about traditional canoeing, you could get a copy of The Hawaiian Canoe by the late Tommy Holmes (Editions Ltd, 1981 and 1993). This is beautifully illustrated, covers the history and culture of leisure, racing and surf use of Hawaiian canoes, and is well worth a read whether or not you want a canoe yourself. The image on the left is adapted from a diagram in the book and shows a wide canoe about 13 metres long with seats for six. It has a traditional crab claw sailing rig. See Other Multihulls For Exposed Waters, below.

Tommy Holmes' world of cruising, surfing, fishing and the occasional race has just lately been replaced by the "go hard or go home" approach, with an aggressive trend towards very fast, skinny, wet, lightweight, high-tech boats. They can't be sailed and are intended for sprint or marathon racing. There is an active club racing scene in Hawaii, in Tahiti where they are called va'a, in New Zealand where they are called waka ama, and California. Outrigger canoes are manufactured in fibreglass in sizes suitable mainly for one, three or six paddlers. Racing outrigger canoes are designated OC-1, OC-3, etc. There are some outrigger canoes in Europe, mainly the Tahiti style with low freeboard and low rocker for speed on sheltered waters, but no major racing or sailing scene yet.

One-person and two-person outrigger canoes intended for paddling in sheltered lagoons or for sprint racing are low, skinny and give a wet ride to the paddlers, who sit on them rather than in them. A one-person racing canoe (OC-1) may be 6.4 metres long but weigh as little as 12 kg thanks to the use of exotic materials such as vacuum-bagged carbon fibre in epoxy resin. The ama may be tiny because a skilled racer relies on balance, keeping the ama up in the air as much as possible. The ama of a modern OC-1 may be very short but on an OC-3 or OC-6 it can be half the length of the main hull.

Traditional canoes intended for sailing, fishing and paddling on the open sea are more substantial and heavier, with higher sides to shelter the paddlers from waves and spray. For example, the six-person canoe above. Also, the two-person sailing canoe in this drawing, which is based on the 5.4 metre Ulua beach cruiser by Gary Dieking, author of Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes (International Marine, 2007). 5.1 metres is about the minimum length that will give good looks and reasonable performance in a two- to three- person paddling canoe with overhanging ends like the ones shown on this page and here.

Racing canoes aside, an OC-3 for leisure use can be anything from 5.1 metres to 9.5 metres long. They make fast and seaworthy sailing boats if you add a mast, a small sail and a second outrigger to turn them into slim trimarans, steered with a paddle not a rudder.

Outrigger canoes are beautiful and exciting. Check out the big OC-3s at www.holopunicanoes.com. The catch is that for seaworthiness and speed they are 9 metres long. Except on flat water, a long slim hull will break in half unless its construction is heavy, high-tech or both, and that makes it expensive. A long, heavy boat must always be kept well away from rocks. For minimum construction requirements see the NKOA safety guidelines at www.wakaama.co.nz/nkoa/attachments/waka_ama_guidelines.pdf.

Sailing a canoe much longer than 5.5 metres usually requires a crew of three or more. An OC-6 can sail at 20 knots, with two of the crew struggling to steer and the others sitting on a trampoline rigged over the water between main hull and ama but after transport to a new location it can take six hours to rig one for sailing. They are practical for a canoe club which can store its boats next to the water.

Other multihulls for exposed waters

If you want a really light catamaran with a short mast and an efficient sailing rig, you could build one.

For the nice design on the left, with a crab claw sail rig for beach cruising, see Kris Seluga's site at www.rclandsailing.com/catamaran. Last time we asked him he did not sell plans but if you ask him nicely he may e-mail you the dimensions. We come back to crab claw rigs below.

Multihulls in general are much less popular than small monohull sailboats, except as total speed machines like Hobies, Darts, Hurricanes, Nacras, Prindles, Unicorns, C-Class and so on. Any sailing multihull is faster than a monohull of similar length, but more complex and expensive, and usually too wide to travel on the roof of a vehicle unless dismantled. Dismantling and re-assembly takes quite a long time.

To fit our definition of a boat which is both seaworthy and small, any multihull must be at least 5 metres long or it will give its crew a wet ride and be unable to cope with windy conditions. However if it is much longer than that or fitted with a big, powerful sailing rig, its crew won't be able to carry it up a beach on their own, and that is next to essential for a beach cruiser. It takes some thought to design a multihull which is hard to capsize but (since any small boat can be capsized by wind or by wave action) easy for the crew to right in difficult conditions.

If you want all that in a multihull you'll probably have to build it yourself. For some ideas, see Michael Schacht's great site at www.proafile.com and the proa section of Craig O'Donnell's Cheap Pages.

Micro-multihulls can be made as catamarans, trimarans or proas.

Catamarans have two long slim hulls. The prototype for the first commercially-produced catamaran, the Shearwater, was two racing kayak hulls fixed together about 2 metres apart, each hull built up at the sides for a drier ride and to give them enough volume to lift through waves. It was very successful for forty years.

The hulls of small cats are usually joined by two aluminium tubes (crossbeams), with a trampoline stretched between them for the crew to scramble around on. The mast stands in the middle of the front crossbeam. Hobie makes some very small cats - see www.hobiecat.com - but they still have fairly high masts. In strengthening winds at sea, you may find yourself wishing for a hacksaw and fingering your VHF radio. You may not need the hacksaw. According to Modern Marlinspike Seamanship (William P MacLean, Bobbs-Merrill 1979) "Hobie cats... are very lightly rigged for top performance in light airs. This is appropriate for small lakes and other protected areas where these catamarans are most often sailed. In the Virgin Islands, however, the rig regularly fails. Usually little damage is done and the whole thing can be put back together with a few new stays."

Trimarans have a central long slim hull, joined by crossbeams to two similar but usually shorter hulls, one on each side. The mast stands on the main hull. The shorter hulls keep it upright against the sideways push of the wind in the sail. Small trimarans with powerful sailing rigs usually have a trampoline on which the crew can get from one side of the boat to the other. Those with modest sailing rigs may not have a trampoline, because the crew sits always in a cockpit the central hull. Elsewhere we mentioned kayaks stabilised for sailing by the addition of buoyant floats on each side. See Sailing Rigs For Kayaks & Canoes. One French designer has made prototypes of his Windyak, a mini trimaran which is basically a kayak with a sail and outrigged floats. He says it can be paddled without removing the floats. Last time we asked, it was not yet in production. http://frederic.jouffroy.free.fr

There are some very cute micro-micro-trimarans which race in the Washington / Oregon area as the International Three Meter class. One model is John Marples' "Harbor Racer" and they don't claim to be seaworthy, just fun. www.nwmultihull.org

Several big manufacturers offer 5 metre micro-multihulls with main hulls which resemble kayaks but which cannot easily be paddled if the wind dies. There is the Windrider, made in polyethylene to a design by "Trimaran" Jim Brown. The high-sided main hull would keep you fairly dry but comes nearly up to your armpits, and the boat weighs 113 kg. www.windrider.com There is also the Adventure Island from Hobie, which is basically a polyethylene sit-on-top kayak with two long ama. It looks to us as if the outrigger arms would prevent you making easy use of a paddle. The boat is fitted with Hobie's pedal-operated Mirage flipper system instead. www.hobiecat.com

A proa can be described as a long canoe with a single ama, or as two-thirds of a trimaran. Proas capsize more easily than catamarans or trimarans but if a small proa does turn over, it can very easily be righted.

Traditional Polynesian proas have no rudder and both ends of the hulls are identical. When another sailing boat would tack to go upwind, a traditional proa "shunts" instead. This means stopping, adjusting the sail to point the other way, and setting off in the opposite direction. Back becomes front. Although that would be difficult with a modern sail rig, the Polynesian crab claw rig shown in the photo does it easily. This boat type may also be called a shunting proa or Pacific proa. A proa's mast is usually on the downwind hull. For very nice small examples, see the Ulua and T2 designed by Gary Dierking at http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/garyd

If the mast is on the upwind hull as favoured by a handful of 20th century designers, you have an Atlantic proa like the beautiful racing yacht Cheers designed by Dick Newick. It came third in the 1968 Observer Single-Handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) despite being nearly the smallest, lightest boat in the race.

Incidentally the crab claw rig does not suit proas alone. It would be very well suited to most other seaworthy small boats. The mast is very short. The long spars come down when you drop the sail. The sail can be cut completely flat, with no camber, so it could be made of a single sheet of fabric with no seams. All modern racing yachts have variants on the tall triangular mainsail known as the Bermudan rig. When properly set, a crab claw rig is more effective except directly to windward, and even then it beats most other sail rigs. At any rate, those seem to have been the conclusions of AC Marchaj, author of The Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, when he carried out wind tunnel tests with an Overseas Development Agency research programme managed by fisheries consultants MacAlister Elliott & Partners. See the WoodenBoat article Sail & Hull Performance by Colin Palmer, issue 92, January/February 1990. Apparently Tony Marchaj wrote in more detail in Practical Boat Owner, but we have not seen those articles.

Some small proas have a rudder, and they sail in exactly the same way as any sailing dinghy. To go upwind they zig-zag in a series of "tacks", now pointing to the right of the wind, now tacking so that they point to the left of the wind. On one tack, the buoyancy of the ama keeps the boat upright. On the other tack, the weight of the crew keeps it upright by acting as a counterbalance to the wind in the sail. Such boats are sometimes called Malibu outriggers, sailing outrigger canoes or tacking outriggers. For a lovely small example, see the Dragonfly design by Chris White (illustration at left). No doubt he still sells the plans for home builders, but his website now covers only his big boats.

For another illustration see www.boat-links.com/images/proapix/Dragonfly.gif

A few multihulls are stabilised in motion not by amas but by one or two of the surface-piercing hydrofoils invented in America by Edmond Bruce in the mid-1960s. A Bruce foil looks very much like the daggerboard from a small sailing dinghy, but it is set at an angle so that it acts like an underwater wing. Something very interesting happens if you take the amas off a trimaran and replace each with a Bruce foil.

The recipe for foil-stabilising a small sailboat is as follows: Each foil should be 10% of the sail area. In cross-section, the foils should have a rounded leading edge and a tapered trailing edge. See Making Rudders, Leeboards & Foils. The foils should be mounted on the end of a crossbeam so that they are at 45 degrees to the vertical, with the bottom of the foil closer to the boat than the top. Obviously the foils must be mounted so that they slice through the water when the boat is moving. The centre of the area of the foils should be at a right-angle to the centre of effort of the sails, and the distance from the centreline of the boat to the centre of the area of the foils should be the same as the distance from the waterline up to the centre of effort of the sails. That way, when the wind in the sail tries to push the boat over sideways, the force exerted by the foils directly opposes it.

While the boat is sailing, the wind in the sail tries to push it over sideways. The foil on the downwind side resists this like a wing, "flying" in the water so that it produces lift. The foil on the upwind side does the opposite, creating a force which sucks it down into the water. The result, if you made the foils the right size and the outrigger arms the right length, is that the boat sails along rock-solid upright, without any need for the sailor to move his or her weight around as a counterbalance. In fact most foil-stabilised boats have amas too, or at least some sort of buoyancy on the end of the crossbeam, because a foil only works if the boat is moving. If the boat is stationary, a foil is just a small smooth plank.

A few racing sailors use hydrofoils not just to stabilise their boats but to lift the hulls right out of the water. There's even a commercial version, the Windrider Rave at www.windrider.com, but we're thinking about the relatively gentle version, foils for stabilisation. An elegant and attractive foil-stabilised boat was the SkiSail, designed by David Chinery (illustration at left). This had a hull resembling a 5.4 metre racing ski hull with the stern removed to take a rudder, stabilised by small buoyant Bruce foils on the ends of a fibreglass outrigger, powered by a windsurfer rig. It deserved to be a commercial success, but wasn't. For a temporary foil Bruce stabiliser which can be strapped to any kayak, see the K-Wing at Sailing A Kayak.

There have been at least two small foil-stabilised boats on the market recently. The Raptor 16 by John Slattebo was a successful design until it fell victim to the recession. At the time of writing it's out of production, but see www.raptor-uk.net. Until 2010 the Triak from www.triaksports.com. was fitted with very small foils to keep its outrigger floats up off the surface, but there's no sign of them in today's model.

At first glance the Triak (red boat below) looks very similar to the SkiSail, having a main hull that resembles a 5.7 metre racing kayak, stabilised by trimaran-type floats on the end of a fibreglass outrigger beam. The sailing rig is sophisticated and complicated. The Triak really scores over the SkiSail because the crossbeam leaves space to use a kayak paddle.

 

Yachts & sea kayaks

There's nothing quite like entering a new harbour after a long voyage under sail, or sitting in the cockpit of your moored yacht in some quiet estuary, watching the sun set. Yachts are great, but they have three disadvantages. They are expensive, they break if you hit something, and they're not very portable.

It is a major undertaking to take even a trailer-sailer by road, so for weekend sailing, yachts are usually confined to a 75 kilometre radius from their home port. That's fine if you race, but gets a bit repetitive if you prefer cruising.

Nigel Irens (who ought to know, being the designer of Ilan Voyager and some of the fastest racing sailboats ever built, including Formule Tag/Enza, Apricot, Fleury Michon VIII and Fleury Michon IX, Ellen McArthur's 2004 trimaran B&Q/Castorama, Sodeb'o and IDEC 2) says "the richer you are, the bigger your boat, the more it draws, and the fewer places it can take you. I know of yachts moored in some of the most beautiful estuaries...and all their owners ever see is the same old stretch of coastline outside the river's entrance. There's a whole world upstream that they've never...dreamed of". A good reason for taking a sea kayak or two aboard your yacht.

Yachtsmen are understandably reluctant to get too close to headlands, reefs and islands; or to enter narrow creeks edged by ancient oaks, or sandy estuaries with their sweeping tides.

A yacht is usually more than 500 metres away from the coast, and on passage the land seen from the cockpit of a yacht is just a thin grey line.

Sea kayakers are usually to be found within 50 metres of the coast, looking at cliffs, towers and reefs, seaweed, waves, birds and animals.

 

 

 

 

 

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