Outrigger Canoe Sailing in New Zealand spring 2004
Trip Log, Photos, and Digressions
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Harmen Hielkema came for a visit. He and Jefferson are old friends with a lot of common interests including proas.
They use the same style of outrigger attachment, which makes them some kind of relatives according to "canoes of oceania".
That book is sort of the bible of pacific canoes. Get an early edition, the halftones are a bit muddy in the reprints.
http://www2.bishopmuseum.org/press/web/detailed.asp?search=0-910240-19-1
Amazon will let you see some of the book's almost 900 pages.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0910240191/qid=1123625539/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-1628246-3265624


The natives with their bizarre weapons and regalia.
I had to cajole them into thus festooning themselves, but the work of an anthropologist isn't always easy.
Jefferson brought the hats and parang back from an island in Indonesia where they are current fashion.
They are accurate straw replicas of hats worn by Portuguese there in the 1500s.
He's got good stories from his time there and other interesting artifacts.
For instance he's got the best spatula in the world, made there by a blacksmith.
I wouldn't have thought our spatulas were lacking until I tried this one. It seems we've been out-spatula-ed.


We went down to the river to put the canoe on Harmen's car. The good looking guy is Jefferson's son Coby.


A pretty steamboat on the river.


Stern view of Anglo New Zealand's only indigenous boat type, the [insert geographical name] river skiff. A bit like a sharpie canoe grafted onto the bottom of a whaleboat.


And back to Harmen's house. I think this is a model of his own hand. He was a very prolific builder of large installations and commercial sculpture until his immune system rebelled against the chemicals. Now he can't work with epoxy or other modern luxuries without a severe reaction. He can still use resourcinol and waterbased "plastic resin" glues for boat  carpentry, but someone else needs to do the painting.


We went for a sail on Toroa. One needs two boats to take pictures. Or a fisheye lense and long arms.
He shunts the sail by means of lines without leaving his seat. That allows the outrigger to be light.
If he had to walk around a lot during a shunt he'd have to make the ama heavy to keep the boat from flipping when his weight was over the main hull.
Steering is by pulleys that raise and lower ogive-section daggerboards at each end of the main hull.
I had the usual reaction of "wow, that works really well". I wouldn't have thought it would.
Here's how it works: The ogive foil section is flat on one side and arched in a circular arc on the other side.
It gets lift at a shallower angle of attack than the main hull. The hull by itself might have a leeway angle of seven degrees.
The ogive foil starts to get lift at a negative angle of attack. So the board really bites into the water when he lowers it.
The ogive foil has fore-and-aft symmetry, so it works going both ways.
Remember that a proa doesn't turn through the wind, it backs up, and the wind is always lifting the outrigger.
The outrigger has a diamond cross-section and shaves an impressively clean wake through the water.

More Toroa pictures. We dragged a lure and caught a Kawai, but I pulled it in too fast and it broke loose.

Only you proa fanatics are going to understand this section.
Shunting geometry is most akin to the Fijian system. See the book "Traditional Sailing Canoes in Lau" aka "Na Camacau Mai Na Yatu Lau" for details.
The sail shunts by means of a loop of rope going through pulleys at the two bows.
The mast is long and the halyard is tied fairly high on the yard. The foot of the yard is long and has a section of polyethylene pipe around it to rub on the gunwales.
The yard slides along the gunwale until it seats in a hook at the new bow. Then the line loop is cleated off.
The spars are hollow wooden and tapered. Triangular section. Glued up and the corners rounded. They are light and stiff.
They look and feel nice.
Yard and boom have matching curves so the sail can be furled.
One effect of a curved yard is that the compressive forward pressure on the arch wants to push the arch outward.
That somewhat counteracts the sail's inward tension which would make the spar sag, increasing sail belly when you'd prefer it reduced.



Speaking of needing two boats to take good pictures, we could have done it because I had Ulua right there.
The next step was to put it in the water so I could sail across the gulf to Gary's place in Coromandel. If only I'd been thinking.
Throughout this trip my brain was a bit lazy. Probably a result of the schistosomiasis I still carried.
Now that I'm cured of course the ol' Steel Trap brain is letting nothing by it without a tussle.

    the crossing
About 2 or 3pm I said goodbye to Harmen, pushed off and sailed for the horizon.
Had an amazing crossing, broke the rudder (I'm getting good at that), steered with the oar, lots of wind and waves.
It got dark, lots of stars and phosphorescence in the water. Where the glowing tiny creatures splashed up on the boat there were stars on the boat too. 
Glowing magic dolphins in the phosphorescence swam along with me. What an amazing experience.

    breaking a rudder
I broke the rudder in my usual way, which is to say running downwind in waves. That puts maximum force on the rudder.
These traditional sails have a long boom. There's not much tension at any one point in the rig. The boat as a whole is a different matter.
When you turn downwind and you let that big boom swing out, all the sail force on one side of the boat.
The boat wants to turn and you've got to use a lot of rudder to counteract that.
That's why the old gaff-rigged catboats have such huge rudders. Then the wave gets a hold of your stern and you start surfing down the wave.
The wave is pushing you hard and wants to turn the boat sideways to flip and eat it. All that force goes on your rudder also.
The rudder was a prototype and the pintles were experimental fiberglass structures that I'd been stressing and straining for a few weeks.
Eventually one of the pintles (or gudgeons, I can never keep it straight) cracked and broke.
Fortunately Gary put an oarlock on the rudder/outboard motor bracket assembly. A steering oar is a fabulous thing on an outrigger canoe.
You just pry the stern around and there's no problem getting in irons or failing to carry through a tack.
"Carry through" in our language comes from sailing. It refers to fore-and-aft rigs, the kind now found on all boats.
You go upwind by zigzagging as close to the wind as you can. Tacking upwind, passing through the eye of the wind.
If you don't have enough momentum to do this, you haven't "carried through" the tack.
"Taken aback" is older. That refers to a square rigged sail. If the wind gets on the wrong side of a square sail it gets pinned against the mast and you're in big trouble.
"take the wind out of his sails" means to sail across upwind of someone so your sails block the wind going to his.
Our language is full of idioms that instruct us in various trades, not just sailing.
 
    oar steering
The oar was a lot of work to steer with when the boat was surfing down a wave.
The sail and the wave both wanted to turn the boat and I had to fight them at the same time.
I experimented with where to put the oar blade in the water. It made a big difference, but not in the way I expected.
Way back off the stern it didn't work too well. Windward side didn't work too well.
What worked really well was on the lee side, right where you'd find the quarter-rudder on a Norse or Indonesian boat. 
Right about where the steerer sits on a Hawaiian canoe.
I developed a theory about Bernoulli effect and vortex evacuation around the stern.
How the presence of an oar or paddle blade in that location controls the vortex formation and the flow around the whole structure.


Back at Gary's. "You haven't seen a Kauri yet? Let's go right now." So we went around the point to a park and hiked up to the old trees. Hugging a Kauri tree.
They're very massive for their height. The hills are full of rotting logs that the loggers couldn't figure out how to move once they'd felled them.



 It's a slow-growing tree and it was more like mining than logging. There will be no new saw-sized Kauris in our lifetime.


Fern frond, suitable for a desktop background image.

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