Sailed from Pohnpei to Saipan in December 1979. It turned out to be a place I would stay for six years. I started out building furniture and doing boat repairs and eventually boats from scratch. About this time I discovered strip planking and was anxious to try it. I'd gotten very interested in small outrigger canoes after seeing some very attractive ones in Tahiti. My first attempt looked pretty good but there was more to learn.
Paddling six person outriggers was just getting stated there and I was hired to design and build one for a group of paddlers. They wanted a solid fiberglass hull so I chose C-flex which makes it easy to build a one off hull. A mold is made from formers and stringers to support the fiberglass rods and mesh.
I also designed and built a couple of plywood runabouts. The Whaler style hull below was also built in C-Flex for my dentist.
My partner Rose was working as a Windsurf instructor at a tourist hotel and I became very interested in this type of high performance sailing. I built about a dozen custom boards and we made some sails too.
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| It may look like I'm leading but the leader is already past the camera. |
Boat building went out of the picture for a couple years while I built us a small house and built a large one for a client. Then I got a job with the government as a building inspector for the construction of a new hospital. After six years in Saipan I sold the trimaran to a charter company and we moved to Honolulu.
Greetings from Saipan! I read about your 6-person outrigger from your book and wondered what it looked like. Thank you for the inspiration.
ReplyDeleteIt was unfortunate that a typhoon dropped a big tree onto it after a couple of years.
ReplyDelete