Coconut Is Sailing Now

**24-Foot Sailing Fishing Proa Coconut Sails 4-15-2019**

Links to Coconut’s sailing videos are at the bottom of this page; watching them will give you a better idea what she’s all about than still photos. But we have those too:

(Below) Coconut at the dock, early in the Hawaiian morning. Her float is to the right; her crossarms, or connectives, are the beams going over to the left to her main hull (the big one). The bouyancy pod is the thing sticking out on the left; they didn’t have them on the original Stone-Age Pacific proas that Coconut’s design was derived from. A rudder on each end is on the pod side of the boat.

(Below) Coconut with sails up; she’s got a fully-battened mainsail and a roller-furling jib at each end. How do we tell one end from the other? We call them “End One” and “End Two”, thanks to the Dr. Seuss book Cat in the Hat with its characters Thing One and Thing Two.

(Below) Coconut just sailing along.

(Below) Jack at Coconut’s helm. It’s obvious this is his element.

(Below) Jack sitting on Coconut’s ama, putting out a fishing lure.

(Below) Jack steering Coconut, about 4 miles offshore near Kawaihae, Hawaii; Dad checking the sail trim.

(Below) Coconut “tipping up” at about 35 degrees; you can’t see it, but the ama keel is 5 feet out of the water, and the daggerboard is flying in air. After doing this three or four times, we stopped calling it “capsizing” and called it “tipping up” instead, because we realized it was so safe. We won’t claim that Coconut is completely capsize-proof, but she’s practically uncapsizeable. During these sea trials we once got her up to a 60-degree angle of heel in a 40-knot plus gust of wind (this photo is only 30 degrees), and she was still quite stable, and came down by herself.

(Below) Rose on Coconut, looking as happy as a 14-year-old girl can whose skin is getting roasted and making more freckles by the second, and who has been forbidden by her Mom to be on her iPhone!

Click below to watch Coconut’s first self-righting trial:

Here are four additional YouTube videos of Coconut sailing (with some overlap in material):

And here’s a video of Coconut NOT capsizing:

Coconut is similar to the 24-foot sailing fishing trimarans Tim built in the Marshall Islands in the 1980’s, except she’s highly resistant to capsize when compared to the 24-foot trimarans, and faster under sail. These are VERY positive improvements for a small boat like this.

Her design comes from Micronesia, and is a couple of thousand years old at least. However, Coconut is built with modern materials such as marine plywood, fiberglass and epoxy, aluminum spars and dacron sails, which improve on her speed, seaworthiness, and safety. In other words, she’s a modern Stone-Age proa.

She’s 2,100 pounds at design waterline, that’s 1,000 pounds of boat, rig and gear, two 200-lb people, 400 lbs of fish, 200 lbs of ice, and 100 lbs of fishing gear. She’s 22 inches wide at her waterline amidships on a 22-foot waterline, for a 12:1 waterline fineness ratio. She’s fast under sail, and two people can paddle her at 3 knots when the wind quits.

Paddle? Yeah, in places where gas is $8/gallon (if they have any) they’ll be real happy with how easily she paddles!

She’s bolted together, and can be disassembled and trailered in about two hours from on the trailer to in the water ready to sail. There’s a daggerboard in the ama (outrigger) which helps with leeway.