Outrigger Canoe Sailing in New Zealand spring 2004
Trip Log, Photos, and Digressions
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Rioting pigeons attacked this woman's lunch while her baby distracted her.

I went out to get some food and bought a copy of  "Sea Kayaker's Guide to New Zealand's Upper North Island" by Vincent Maire.
I now had that, the good topo/road maps I'd copied earlier, various free maps and literature, and the lonely planet guidebook.
That last is way too thick and heavy. It's one of that publisher's heaviest volumes. I couldn't do anything about the weight because it was a borrowed copy.

I'd been studying up for this trip for a while. I saw the movies "The Piano" and "Once Were Warriors"  so I was an expert on Kiwi history and culture.
Such documentaries as "Zena, warrior Princess", "Star Wars: George Loves Natalie"(I forget the real title), and "Lord of the Rings" had made me intimately acquainted with the geography of the country. I resolved to stay away from Mount Doom.


Dinghy decorated like rusty battleship. Unfortunately the main dinghy room was closed for museum-closed-room-ification.


Speargun and details. The trigger mechanism is similar to a caulking gun.


Paddleboard and sailboard, steps on the evolution from Hawaiian surfboard through Tom Blake paddleboard to windsurfer.


I have a waterproof case on my camera which partly obscures the viewfinder, hence my framing is often bad.
But sometimes I just take pictures and don't know why. Maybe this is a picture of the lashed beams of the hall.
I just figured it out. This is a side view of that paddleboard, showing how much rocker it has.


Tiny outboards. The orange shoe is there for scale. Somewhere I have accurate measurements of the shoe which is an Indonesian copy of an addidas size 9 1/2 sandal.


James Sears' "Taratai" Gilbertese voyaging canoe from the book of the same name.
It sort of fills the hall and you'd need a fisheye lense to get a shot of the whole thing.


Many smaller canoes are crowded around it. It's really hard to get shots of a complete canoe due to beams and other canoes obscuring them.


The Niue canoes looked particularly good to me. They're made to go in and out of surf and be carried up rocks since Nieue has no lagoon.
Harmen Heilkema owns one. He says it wants to turn and you have to correct ahead of time. You end up going in a zigzag path.
That's the experience I had with Papuan dugouts with a similar shape. It's less pronounced with Ulua due to vee in the ends, but still present.
Traditional Hawaiian canoes have no vee and apparently have the behavior more. That's good with a 40 foot 6 man canoe, making it possible to
skip a stroke and steer it.
In Sydney Frank Bethwaite's daughter (excuse my bad memory for names) gave me a brief lecture about steering a long Hawaiian racing canoe, how you push water against the side and pry water off the side. In Seattle I spent an afternoon paddling with some racers and trying to figure out what the steersman was doing. Whenever I met an outrigger paddler I'd try to ask them about steering. I spent a lot of time with Ulua playing with a paddle, watching the stern vortexes, and .developing theories about flow attachment, bernoulli effect, and vortex migration. Eventually I figured out what she was talking about.  The way to steer it is totally different from a Canadian canoe, even though it looks similar. You steer the Canadian by pushing the stern left or right. You steer the Hawaiian by managing the stern vortex. You turn right by pushing water against the left side of the canoe. That makes the vortex migrate over to the other side where the flow breaks off from the hull. The flow rushing there around your left side creates lift and pulls your left side outward, turning you to the right. That makes the right-side vortex even stronger like a mechanical amplifier. If that makes sense to you make a diagram and I'll post it.
Turning left is done by putting your paddle down vertically against the side of the hull and prying the water off it. That makes the vortex come over to the left side and the mirror image of the right turn process happens.
Shedding vortexes off blunt shapes tend to alternate sides. That's what makes a flag wave or a truck waddle down the highway. It's pretty impressive in a windtunnel or simulation. That's why the canoe wants to turn first one way, then the other. The vortex can't just hang straight off the back. It gets too big and has to break off to one side or the other.
This "I'm turning now" behavior that round-tailed canoes have is disconcerting to us gringoes since it's nothing like how any of our boats handle.
It makes for a boat that's good in waves cuz it's a smooth underwater shape and the lateral plane is small compared to a paddle. Pretty much all gringo boats have a major skeg or deadwood in the back and track like arrows, but are prone to pitchpoling and hard to control once a wave grabs it.
Gary Dierking built a low-sided paddling canoe with the same Ulua underwater shape and a foot-steerable rudder fin. It tracks perfectly and effortlessly. I wonder what a plain skeg would do. Probably if it's in the right place it'll keep the stern vortex from crossing the keel line and make the boat behave more like a Canadian canoe.


Jefferson Chapple and/or Harmen Hielkema have made good drawings of this Kiribati canoe.
Kiribati is prounounced "Kiribas" which is how the locals said "Gilberts", the old British name for the islands.
It has a particularly thin and graceful steering oar.
This canoe is unusually small and the sides have been spread out quite a bit to give it some volume.
I believe this distribution of volume would make it prone to hobbyhorsing  in chop.
I've seen other Kiribati canoes with almost parallel sides in the middle section.


Maori fishhooks.


Maori clam rake. Today you're not allowed to use anything like this. You have to dig for them with your hands and feet.
That seemed strange to me. I guess the clams aren't as good at running away as the fish are, or not as good at moving to NZ from other countries.
You're allowed to sportfish with a 60 meter net and 70 hooks on a line.
I saw people using kites to pull their longlines out to sea. They've got a small population and lots of coastline.

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