As a lifelong sailor and boatbuilder it is exciting for me to be now living on the shore of a beautiful lake in the western Amazon basin after five years spent high and dry up at 10,000 feet in the peruvian Andes. After Lourdes and I made the decision to move from Cusco to Laguna Azul my thinking naturally turned to, what shall I do for a boat?
I checked out used sailing boats in Peru's capital Lima but the offerings were few and laughably expensive. Which led me to consider building my own. Then I had a thought; what if I used two of the long, narrow wooden hulls of the typical amazonian river craft as the basis for a catamaran? I knew the resulting boat wouldn't be very fast or go upwind well but speed on a 3 mile long lake wasn't necessary and a small auxilliary outboard motor could be used as a 'third sail' when going to windward. It would for sure make a nice stable platform for lake cruising with the option of anchoring and letting people go kayaking, fishing, swimming etc.
Needing a source of income in our new location it seemed to me that offering sailing catamaran cruises on Laguna Azul could be the ticket to long term livelihood and warrant the time and expense needed for such a project. It would come under the now fashionable banner of eco-tourism and be something of a novelty as the only large sailing craft in the region.
Having made the decision to go ahead with this boat building project, I made a few design scetches and had a local boatbuilder make two identical 30ft hulls from the dense and rot-resistant wood
ana. I then added two shallow draft keels to their flat undersides. This elicited much curiosity at my lakeside building area and I had to constantly explain the rudiments of lateral resistance to dockside loafers and passers by. Most people in the Amazon region have never seen a sailing boat. All nautical propulsion here is either by paddle or motor. A boat pushed along by the breeze is a highly novel concept although a few thousand kilometers to the south their fellow countrymen at Lake Titicaca have been using sailing craft for fishing and transport since antiquity.
Upon hearing that the lifespan for a typical wooden boat here is 8 to 10 years I decided to coat the bottom of my hulls with fiberglass to prevent marine bugs from chewing through the planks. This would also have the advantage of stopping the wood becoming waterlogged and save an estimated 20% weight in the hulls. Finding the stuff in Peru however proved to be a challenge, but as I Ching say, 'perseverance furthers' and I eventually ran the materials down in a dodgy part of Lima.
At the time of writing I have fiberglassed the hulls in the area below the waterline and painted the topsides a bright yellow, experimenting with the paint sold for making lines on asphalt streets, my reasoning being that it must be a pretty tough paint to adhere to asphalt and stand up to being driven over by trucks. That and it only costs just a bit more than regular exterior paint and hundreds less than real marine paint. It comes in any color you want as long as that's day-glo yellow or white.
I built the first Phil Bolger-designed 'Micro' back in the early '80s in Miami, a boat billed as the biggest 16ft pocket cruiser available. There are now hundreds of them around the world and it is a tried and true design. For my jungle catamaran I decided to use the same mainsail design which is a loose-footed affair with a light boom tensioned by a snotter line. (Sorry non-sailing folk, we are getting into boring technical jargon here). It also has
vertical reefing with a line of reef points going up parallel with the mast. In a blow the boat can be reefed in 30 seconds: Head to wind, ease the snotter line, haul the reef line, haul the snotter line and bear away. It certainly worked well on that Phil Bolger design and I've had Lee Sails in Hong Kong make my new bigger mainsail with the same feature as well as a conventional hanked-on jib from rather light sailcloth as winds are mostly quite modest here. I'm doubtful if the sails will ever see 20 knots.
What to do for a mast? Well a high-tech aluminium jobby is out of the question, how about a tree? Plenty of those around here deforestation notwithstanding, problem is they mostly don't grow absolutely straight for 12 meters/ 40 feet. But eventually we tracked one down. It's a little on the spindly side but I think with a little extra standing rigging it will be OK. Time will tell on that one. Rather than use sail track I've had the notion to use some 1/2 in plastic water pipe surrounded by a wooden casing up the mast to accept the bolt rope of the mainsail. This whole project is seat-of-the-pants engineering using locally available materials, the only exception being a bag-full of running rigging hardware I picked up in a chandlery when I was over in England in March. The only thing I forgot was to pick up a small red ensign for the shrouds, so if any brit is heading this way please just jolly well pop one in the old suitcase, what?
I have just applied to the local powers that be for permission to build a wooden jetty a short distance away from our building site where I am beginning to build our multipurpose woodshop/classroom/house/cafe. Hopefully it will soon be approved after which I plan to turn my hulls right side up, launch them and build the platform structure connecting them alongside my new dock in shallow water. The big challenge will be refraining from dropping tools in the water! Especially plugged-in electrical ones. Arrrghh!!
Stay tuned for future updates on this project.
I can be reached at
martinstevens@juno.com
