This is the first of a short series by Simon North. Part 2 is here and part 3 is here.
Check his YouTube account for more sailing barge stuff!
Basketry in the hulls of Vietnamese boats
Reader Ken Preston has just had a substantial paper published about the basket-built vessels of the Vietnamese coast and you can read it for free online. I’d guess most of us have seen photos, but this is a serious description of the various sorts of boats either purely built of bamboo basketry, or a composite structure consisting of the bamboo basketry supported by greater or lesser amounts of wooden structure.
It seems the boats are more resistant to shipworm than wooden boats, and more able to survive work in surf, and of course they are cheap to make.
Some variants have a long history, while some are localised or widespread. I have to say I do find the outboard-driven round boats quite surprising…
The Texas 200 – 200 miles of sailing small boats in company
Well, it sounds like fun to me! The boat the film-maker used is the Chesapeake Light Craft Pocketship design – a neat 15-footer designed for home building. If you go to the CLC page, there’s a nice little video about the Pocketship…