FLYING CANOES

Hokitika Guardian, 16 May 1931, Page 7

FLYING CANOES

QUAINT ISLAND PASTIME. Model boat sailing is not confined to small boys along the waterfront or in park ponds. Adults have clubs of their own in the 01 c [ Country, and any day during the summer visitors to Tlagley Park, in Christchurch, can so? grown men. some of them quit" elderly, seduously racing their model yachts on Lake Victoria, the sheet of water that was created at the t’™' of the great exhibition in that city. Auckland has three model yacht racing clubs, and their membership includes bearded men. It will be news to many, however, that in the Pacific Islands, sum? of the natives are keen on the pastime, and spend hours perfecting toy canoes. If the speed claimed for them b" Captain M. M. Johnstone, of the steamer Nauru Chief, he correct, s om3 of the models made at Apia n S, a littleknown island in the sunny seas, must be the fastest craft afloat. On his last visit there he obtained a modal, which is now in the office of the British Phosphate Commissioners at Auckland, and in the letter accompanying it claims that he saw it travelling at a snood of 40 knots. “The s a il area would astonish you,” writes the captain. “I cannot give exact figures, but I am certain I do not exaggerate when I saw that these few sticks carry an area of 30 to 40 square feet. ] saw this model sail, and I consider if travelled at 40 knots. Others present did not think so —they claimed that it could not go faster than the wind, which was somewhere about 20 to 25 miles an hour at the most. 1 cannot explain in writing bow the sail is rigged, but the area is very big, and the leverage is great. The natives call it a ‘flying,’ not a racing canoe, and it does almost fly—just skims the water.”

The model sent up by the captain looks something like a catamaran, with an exaggerated spread between the hull an c ] the outrigger. The hull is a canoe-shaped bit of wooj no more than 18 inches long, and the outrigger is merely a strip of hoard set on edge and curved inward slightly at the bow end. The two are connected, by a light spar about oft long, an' 1 made fast to the “dock” of the canoe and the top of the outrigger. On f.b outrigger there is a sort of bowsprit slightly ever a foot long, to which one corner of the triangular sail is made fast.

“Von know quite well how did l like tin' natives are,’’ continues tlm letter, “and how tliev can unite casi’v spend days fooling about altering t K '- rig of a kite or some other tor. ,rbespent hours over the sails and ballast of the ea"o s the day we were at Ap'hiiig. so much so that I oOt t’red and impatient. Then the moment 1 1, natives had been waiti for arrived, and away tie canoe went down the wJ id on a mice fr tdi fbreey.e. T<h" on-> l’vni who «i'.ipt R the canoe stands up wind and his ‘opposite number’ away down wind about a couple ol hundred yards away, and when the ravoe misses, lie grabs it and turns it. in ord<-r to shake the canvas, as he could not hold 'it with the sail full and drawing. The man who .‘tart-s it holds it in the wind, keeping theca uvas just and when he wants her to go, just trims her to the wind, and throws her off.”