After 1987 I still sketched boats all the time. A few years later I was living in Sydney and while I could have been on the beach I was in the science museum sketching. I suddenly decided that it was time to get a proper career, go to university and become an engineer, I literally got the next flight home. TP1 had become all consuming so didn’t do a boat focused course but ‘Engineering Product Design’. It was a course to design consumers products, I loved it to bits and the jobs I eventually did.

Roll forward to about 2005 and I had a new design I was itching to build. This had a conventional European single Bermudan rig mounted in the middle of the main hull (vaka). It didn’t have a centre or dagger board but two rudders mounted near each bow / stern. These where linked and would rotate in opposite directions. This enables the CLR to move fore and aft and give you steering.

When in Weymouth I had been to various talks arranged by the Amateur Yacht Research Society. One in particular had stuck in my mind, it was my Dave Culp, an early pioneer in kite sailing. He had said that experimental boats should be disposable, built cheap, dirty and quickly. This way you are willing to scrap something and start again as you have little investment in it. As you can see TP2 is a very simple ply box type construction.

This was tested at Scaling Dam and….. well it worked. I could sail where I wanted to, shunt and was pretty much in control.

It was not perfect and had two issues

1) foils only work when moving so when stopped I had no control and would sometimes get back winded i.e. the ama to leeward. I did develop a way of getting the right way around by dipping the bow or stern and pulling the sail all in at the correct time and sequence.

2) the foils where quite low and dragged in the water at speed, easy to solve just a nuisance.

I was pleased that I had produced a working single handed proa and moved on to othe stuff…….