Boating NZ

ECO BOATBUILDING

Kiwis may have voted against legalising dope, but the issue isn’t settled yet. You may not be allowed to skin up a fat one any time soon, but you could soon be setting sail in a tinnie or a hemp boat. As if that weren’t enough, it might also be built from old plastic drinks bottles, aluminium window frames, pineapple leaves, cork and old cardboard boxes.

That’s because a number of determined innovators are breaking away from the near ubiquity of glass (or carbon) fibre lay-up in yacht hulls to offer less environmentally damaging alternatives.

Not in a conceptual, pie-in-the-sky, still-on-the-drawing-board sort of a way, but in the practical sense of already proven technology. People like Germany’s Friedrich Deimann, a boatbuilder and engineer who has dedicated the last decade of his life to proving hemp as a viable fibre for building composite boats. The recently launched Flax 27 dayboat is the floating proof of his vision.

He started his career as an apprentice wooden boatbuilder. “I loved the aesthetics, the feeling of wood, but I realised that it would be hard to make a living

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