Waka fleet uses ancient canoe designs and modern materials

[Stacey King]

ABC RADIO AUSTRALIA Updated May 4, 2010 07:54:12

A fleet of four ocean-going canoes sailing from New Zealand to French Polynesia is unique in how it has combined old and modern boat building techniques.

The canoes, crewed by people from several Pacific Island nations, are expect to arrive in the Austral Islands some time after May 5th.

This year's expedition will help lay the groundwork for a much larger effort in 2011, in which seven of the double-hulled wakas are expected to go all the way from New Zealand to Hawaii.

Presenter: Bruce Hill
Speaker: Greg Salthouse, the owner of Salthouse Marine in Auckland, which built the traditional Pacific ocean-going canoes

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SALTHOUSE: It was basically a traditional design, it was very close to what they first came down here with. They're basically just big long canoes. I believe when they were first built they were sort of carved or made out of the trees that were available so they're not very wide the hulls, they're very long and thin and they have a raise at the transom of these boats so that the wind can catch them. It's a very technical design for when they were done and basically we haven't changed anything, all we've done is turned it into a computer drawing for us to build it basically. And we took the traditional designs and sort of re-drew them, got an in-house draftsman to draw them up so we could build off them, because they were basically sketches because obviously they didn't need any construction drawings back then, they just sort of went along with it. But obviously we did.

HILL: Tell me about the materials that were used, did you use old materials or did you use modern stuff?

SALTHOUSE: No, no, the hulls are all modern stuff, it's all fibreglass and foam and we used a technique what they call fusing, so in other words we build moulds for the hulls and we lay all the glass and core, what we call core, which is the foam core on it, and then we vacuum bag it, so put the whole thing under pressurised vacuum bag and introduce the resin to it. So it all comes out complete once you take the bag off and pull it off the mould, she's a complete hull.

HILL: Now these are double-hulled wakas so they're pretty stable. What are they like as sailing ships on the open ocean, are they able to stand up to the rough treatment from the wind and the waves?

SALTHOUSE: Yeah they're a bit different to modern boats, because they were lashed together with wooden beams and the wooden decking they were allowed to move. So one hull would move up and down compared to the other, so they sort of wobble around a bit. But that's the design that they are, that's what sort of made them stay together, if they were too stiff or too rigid, they'd all sort of start breaking apart. So they sort of wobbled around, where obviously the catamarans of nowadays are all bolted together and made sturdy and quite a different concept.

HILL: So in fact some of the construction techniques used in the old wakas you actually adapted and used for these modern ones?

SALTHOUSE: Oh definitely yes, basically they are just two hulls lashed together on beams, there's 14 beams going down the boat and they are virtually just lashed there with rope and then a deck put on top of that. They were built traditionally as far as that goes.

HILL: And how do these old Tuamotu archipelago designs compare to modern catamarans in terms of capacity to sail long distances pretty fast?

SALTHOUSE: They were very good downwind and reaching, they are certainly not very good upwind, they can't go into the wind pretty much at all. We've modified them a little bit by putting a couple of centre boards in them which helps them out, but yeah, any head wind they sort of can't do, they've either got to reach or go downwind. But they do that just fine, they can reach up to speeds of 12-15 knots downwind, so they get along all right.