For this issue of Tell Tales I wanted to write an article that inspired yachties from a full spectrum of the sport. As a lifelong sailing addict, I thoroughly enjoy the conversations I have with customers on a day-to-day basis, with work often feeling like a brilliant never-ending game where sailing questions of varying complexity are constantly coming through. One customer might be seeking a replacement block for their Cavalier 37, the next might be looking to reinvent racing multihulls entirely. This article focuses on a customer of the second category.
I vividly recall my first encounter with Matt Tucker. It was April 2020, COVID was starting to spread throughout the world, and I was making the most of temporarily inheriting the office of a senior colleague thanks to social distancing measures. We received an email from a customer in Tasmania building an experimental racing proa with a 360° rotating rig. I knew I must find out more, so I immediately called Matt Tucker.
I soon found out that not only was Matt building a very interesting racing proa but he had also grown up on a home-built 48 foot Herreshoff Ketch named New Zealand Maid along with his 4 brothers and in 2006 had sailed from Hobart to Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica, with his brother Ben and father John on the 34 footer Snow Petrel. The best part about this was that he made a fantastic three-part Documentary about the voyage, which is available on YouTube, and I somehow hadn’t seen it yet!
Given the scope of topics and details I wanted to know, I found it hard to combine all the questions I had about these topics into one digestible article, so I thought I would simply list them all below for the reader to tackle one at a time.
Our readers may not be familiar with the proa concept, basically a proa is an ancient catamaran favoured by Pacific islanders with a long leeward hull and a short windward hull. The rig is traditionally on the leeward hull. So why did you decide to build a racing proa? What are you hoping to gain compared to a traditional catamaran and what type of racing is it designed to do?
Okay, so, what initially drew me to the proa was it was out of the ordinary and unusual, which my character is always drawn too. The thing I always say to people is there’s three types of multi hull, the Cat, Tri and Proa. All 3 were initially modernized at the same time. If you look back at the 60s, 70s and early 80’s, they would all race against each other and the proa would hold their own. Then people got carried away and started making high risk proas that capsized a lot, so then they got banned. The rules still ban proas to this day. So, I just thought, what a terrible reason for there to be no racing proas! And then I started to look at the calculations of sail area and power to weight ratios of cats, tris and proas. It makes sense to me that the proa has the potential to be as fast or faster than any other multihull. So that’s what I set out to do, test the theory. I hold no attachment to the idea that it will be better or faster, I just want to test it so that I can be convinced either way.
In terms of the racing that it is geared towards, I see proas as potentially excelling in shorthanded offshore racing. So, the idea with this one is to test ideas and configurations and then scale it up to something offshore capable.
