New life for canoesailing.blogspot.com

ACA sailing canoe

I did not have time to update this blog during long time, so I thought it would be better to give it new life. I started to make my first sailing canoe in 2004. At the same time I made complete instructions to convert open canoe to ACA class sailing canoe. Instructions are in Finnish and they are still available at Finnish canoe sailing pages at www.kanoottipurjehtijat.fi as PDF.

So, now I though that I will translate instructions to English and put them here - page by page. This is the beginning! Pages are going to be messy in the beginning because I try to figure out what would be best way to publish instructions - but please come back to see how these pages are developing.

Feel free to post comments.

Sails for sailing canoes

This is a company you should check if you seeks sails for sailing canoes with competitive prices: Żaglownia Vector Sails (www.vectorsails.com). Company is located in Poland but they do deliver outside of Poland also. You should contact them in autumn - winter time if you wish to sail [with new sails] next summer.

Links

I spent quite some time with 'googling' something new - with very little success. Many sites I visited I have already checked. Anyhow, www.smallsailboats.co.uk .. has relatively good set of links to canoe sailing or related web sites. Worth to check though some links are not valid anymore.

Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes

I have to admit - I am not big fan of outriggers but I was very impressed after reading this book. This book gives very good overview of outriggers and instructions should be detailed enough to build your own sailing canoe. Writer's attitude is great: build traditional sailing canoes (not only because they are traditonal) but with new building methods. I have to store this book for some 25 years. Then I am retired and live somewhere in northern Brazil. I believe that's a good place to build and sail the outrigger sailing sailing canoe.
You should find the book from www.amazon.com (ISBN-10:0071487913).

Centerboard

I tried to find [again] instructions to build a simple pivoting centerboard... Some reason I was not too keen about the previous post - maybe it just looked too experimental and not strong enough. BUT, this one here actually looks pretty good, simple and strong enough. Is suppose the basic design principles are widely used but I had problems to find simple drawings like this one. Full instructions here

Lang Warren's pivoting daggerboard

My both sailing canoes have leeboards. Older (ACA) has only one and it works well. Second (5M/C) has two leeboards and I have had problems to get them work because of glassfibre structure - I did not get (yet) good friction to keep leeboard down in the water (I will put rubber between leeboard and hull). Now I am planning the third sailing canoe and I would like to build it with centreboard.

I got picture of the pivoting dagger board - which looks like interesting option for sailing canoes. Never seen this type of construction before - I would like to know if it really works (if it is paractical) or is it just a nice design idea ..

Aquamuse

Aquamuse (www.aquamuse.jp) is probably the best commercially available canoe sailing concept at the moment for those who want off the self product. Unfortunately availability is limited to Japan only (assumption made based on Japanese web site). It looks very well made (quality of work & design), safe, and it looks really cool. Sails area seems to be a little bit small (less than 4 m2) and hull shape does not look very good for paddling but who cares about paddling capability. Video clips are worth to check out. (Copyright of image: Aquamuse)