Transitioning to Low Carbon Sea Transport

As promised in the previous posts we would like to explain in detail what exactly proas.is supports in the Marshall Islands:

Under the umbrella of a big Climate Change project called “Transitioning to Low Carbon Sea Transport” (short TLCSeaT, funded by the German Government and implemented by GIZ) we work together with the local NGO “WAM” on a revival of traditional and contemporary sailing canoes in the Pacific outer islands. The island people have a high demand on fossil fuel free transport means (fuel is ridiculous expensive) but rely mostly on outboard engine powered boats. The native sailing and canoe building skills (you can see a traditional sailing canoe in the video of the previous post) were lost in some places due to american colonization.

To change that, we teach selected Marshallese how to build high quality plywood boats with contemporary materials. Henrik is holding a 3 month boat building and sailing course together with Rob Denney from HarryProa.

Within the workshop 2 new designs will be build:

Mini Cargo Proa

WAM Catamaran

The WAM catamaran is a basic 20ft double canoe with V shaped hulls, build in stitch and glue technic. It was designed in 2018 by Henrik in collaboration with the boys at WAM.

Main requirement is to carry 6 bags of copra (dried coconut meat) in each hull, that’s close to 1000kg payload all together. A nice side effect of that is the spacious interior (for a 20ft cat). 2 adults can easy sleep inside (4 if they like each other) and the cabin offers enough headroom to sit upright. Passenger transport and fishing trips will be a pleasure.

For reasons of simplicity a traditional Marshallese sail is used (in the western world known as “crab claw”). It can be made from anything between polytarp and dacron on a domestic sewing machine, doesn’t require shape (in fact its flat) and offers great performance (better than most cruising sails). On top, the mast design doesn’t put any tension on the cross beams.

The entire catamaran can be build in 3-4 weeks on a budget of approx. 2000 USD. We will come up with a separate information page about the construction and some sailing footage soon!