G'day,
Solitarry has been sitting in a field on the other side of Australia
for the last few months. The original plan was to take it up to
Brisbane (8 hours drive from the old harryproa factory) where it would
be finished off as payment for my input into a mast building business.
En route, the transmission on the towing vehicle blew up, and then
the tow bar ripped off the trailer. The trailer was designed and
built (at great expense) for the boat. It had a couple of masts and a
bunch of building materials on it as well as the boat bits, so the
damage was not altogether surprising. The mast builder decided he did
not want to get rich, so i was stuck with a boat on a busted trailer
4,000 miles away.
To get it over here would have cost almost as much as the boat had,
and a lot more than me building a new one. Consequently I sold it to
Michael who wanted a go fast boat and some building practise before
he starts a Visionarry. Typically, it was not a cut and dried sale.
Michael thinks the bows are too low, so we agreed we would sail the
finished boat before finalising the deal. There are a few options if
he is correct, but regardless, I won't have any boat building money
till Xmas, when it should be in the water. This is probably not a bad
thing, as all of a sudden harrys are in demand so I have a silly work
load at the moment.
To add some spice to the mix, a month ago Steve Callahan (journalist,
designer, survivor of 76 days in a liferaft) came on the yahoo
proafile chat group and gave me a hard time for quoting the negatives
from an article he wrote about Russ Brown's Jzerro. Whole lot of
words, mostly nonsense or insults, but yesterday he challenged me to a
race, Jzerro vs "my boat" for a wager of $2,000. A couple of harry
fans on the proa list are offering to help me get to Seattle
(apparently, I am the "aggressor", so I have to go to them) so the pot
is growing rather quickly. I suspect that when Steve cools off and
realises what my boat actually is (as far as I can see, he has not
actually looked at any pictures, words or videos about harrys) he will
try and change the rules. We shall see.
If it does happen, it will be next northern summer (even if I had the
money, I don't have the time to build this summer). I still plan to
race a boat in the solo Transpac in 2010, but don't want to leave it
there for 12 months. More specifically, my wife and daughter don't
want it left there for twelve months. So, if anyone in the USA
wants a Solitarry, either built here, Panama (see below) or in the
USA, now is a good time to buy. I would do all I could to make this
as cheap as possible (free plans, materials at cost, chase sponsors,
come over for a week of hard work helping build it, pay a charter fee
which was less than my shipping costs, borrow safety gear, etc etc).
The Panama connection is slowly coming together. Hopefully in the
next couple of months they will be in a position to start building the
charter proa. (more on that when I have finished sorting it out) and
a solitarry would be an excellent practise run for the bigger boats.
Anyone interested, please let me know. Anyone with a few hours to
spare, Steve's proafile rant started on April 3rd, and has continued
under various headings ever since. The wager stuff is all new, and
we have not heard from Steve since he made the offer.
regards,
Rob
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