NEW! The Lapita Voyage website now has the latest boatbuilding photos - HERE

50 years On - Returning the Design..

50 years ago James Wharram, with the help of two German girls (Jutta Shultze-Rohnhof and Ruth Merseburger), sailed across the Atlantic in a tiny 23'6" double canoe he designed and built himself after long studies into the records of boats of the Pacific in the libraries and museums of Britain.

No scholars in the Western world at this time believed that the Polynesians had boats capable of directed ocean voyages. James believed otherwise and set out to prove it by doing it himself. He followed this first Atlantic crossing by building a 40' V-eed hull double canoe in Trinidad in 1957/8 and sailing her across the North Atlantic in 1959 from New York to Ireland, a voyage that had never been done on a 'catamaran' before. See two girls two catamarans

In the next 50 years James, over the last 30 years assisted by his co-designer Hanneke Boon, has worked, by designing Polynesian style catamarans for people to build themselves, to bring the concept of seaworthy, ocean going double canoes to the western yachting public, meeting a lot of resistance from the British yachting establishment on the way, particularly in the early years, when people still could not accept that a 'native' boat could be as good or better a sailing ship than a Western type yacht, particularly when such a craft was self-built by an 'amateur'. After 50 years they are now an accepted feature in the world of yachting/ocean sailing and can be seen in most harbours of the world.