One of the worst boats I ever built was this 20 foot long outrigger sailing canoe. I can’t say enough bad things about this boat. It was heavy, it took forever to set up, it paddled terrible, sailed even worse, and the outrigger leaked.
At the time I was living on the open coast, so testing was challenging and ultimately, I had to give up on it after I exhausted the entire supply of local young men who were willing to venture out with me, usually just once and then never again.
This was 20 years ago and it taught me that you can’t just slap stuff together so it looks right and end up with a good result. Good small boat design takes a lot of time a lot of testing a lot of patience and a lot of money.
Fast forward to the present day and I’m seriously thinking about exploring outriggers again. Specifically, I want to use our canoe catamaran system to attach outriggers to a small tandem for use in challenging water. I’m certain this will work because if I can run Canoes catamaran together through Whitewater, the system can certainly handle the stress of an outrigger.
This time I would greatly prefer to skip the skin on the frame ama and go directly to an inflatable solution. It just seems a lot lighter and a lot safer and frankly building that little ama was annoying and I never trusted it.
I like the idea of two inflatable amas because that way even if the main canoe completely failed, you would still have a little rescue Catamaran, and you could also rapidly remove these to use as beach rollers. The only downside I’m running into is that it is pricey to have that stuff built. The best quote I’ve gotten for two 9” x 12’ tubes with pointed ends, and D ring attachments is $1200. Ouch. That’s twice what it would it cost to build a canoe.
My ulterior motive is that I would like to take a canoe on a coastal journey with the pedal drive and I just don’t see that happening without outriggers. (can’t use a kayak anymore because of my spinal injury).
I don’t know, what do you guys think? Is $1200 worth it to turn a pedal canoe into a coastal voyager?
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