"FLYING CANOES."

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 106, 7 May 1931, Page 3

"FLYING CANOES."

QUAINT ISLAND PASTIME. "SPEED OF FORTY KNOTS." BRITISH SKIPPER'S STORY. Model boat sailing is not confined to small boys along the waterfront or in park ponds. Adults have clubs of their own in the Old Country, and any day during the summer visitors to Hagley Park, in Christchurch, can see grown men, some of them quite elderly, seduously racing their model yachts on Lake Victoria, the sheet of water that was created at the time 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 some of the natives are keen on the pastime, and spend hours perfecting toy canoes. If the speed claimed for them by Captain "M. M. Johnstone, of the steamer Nauru Chief, be correct, some of the models made at Apiang, a little-known island in the sunny seas, must be the fastest craft afloat. On his last visit there he obtained a model, 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 speed of 40 knots. ''The sail area ' would astonish you," writes the captain. "I cannot give exact figures, but 1 am certain I do not exaggerate when I say that these few sticks carry an area of 30 to 40 square feet. I saw this model sail, and I consider it 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. I cannot explain in writing how 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, wit-h an exaggerated spread between the hull and the outrigger. The hull is a canoeshaped bit of wood, no more than 18 inches long, and the outrigger is merely a strip of board set on edge and curved inward slightly at the bow end. The two are connected by a light spar about oft long, and made fast to the "deck" of the canoe and the top of the outrigger. On the outrigger there is a sort of bowsprit slightly over a foot long, to which one corner of the triangular sail is made fast. "You know quite well hoAv child-like the natives are," continues 'the letter, "and how they can quite easily spend days fooling about altering the rig of a kite or some other toy. They spent hours over the sails and ballast of the canoes the day we were at Apiang, so much so that I got tired and impatient. Then the moment the natives had been waiting for arrived, and away the canoe went down the wind on a nice fresh breeze. The one man who starts the canoe stands up wind and his 'opposite number' away down wind about a couple of hundred yards away, and when the canoe passes, he grabs it and turns it, in order to shake the canvas, as he could not hold it with the sail full and drawing. The man who starts it holds it in the wind, keeping the canvas just shaking, and when he wants her to go just trims her to the wind, and throws her off."