Here is an old commercially-made canoe, coupled with windsurfer parts, re-created into a small tri. Sailor Mark Schoenhals shares about his craft called DRAGONFLY with us in the videos below.
I am only sharing 3 of the videos he made about this project in this post. To see all of them you can visit the videos page on Mark’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/birchmark/videos
Mark writes:
This summer I began work on a small homebuilt trimaran using an aluminum canoe and an old wind surfer as raw materials. It was Jim Gallant’s design that inspired me to go for the canoe conversion. The result has been a fun little craft I call Dragonfly.
I was always a canoe tripper and i felt that there must be a good way to sail a canoe, better than some of the dogs I have seen. I saw a guy on line who used a canoe to make a trimaran. I was hooked.
The biggest challenge was the outriggers, as they are basically two halves of a sailboard cut lengthwise and turned sideways. This required creating a new deck to which I could attach the ladder as, the inside of a sailboard is just Styrofoam.
I’ll sail on lake Peoria, Illinois river and hopefully lake Michigan if I get the nerve.
Here are a series of YouTube videos showing construction and a video of first successful sail…
