Swordfish is gone to his new home in the PNW! Sorry, if you want a proa you have to build one. Probably more fun anyway, eh?

K O'N

Hi

A year or more ago, I decided I wanted a bigger boat. So I gave Skip Johnson a few hundred bucks for P52, thinking it would make a good simple sleep-aboard mini-cruiser. I particularly liked the slide-out beams that let the boat trailer at 8' and sail at 11' wide, that's a really slick idea.

Sadly, I then started to have some bad skin reactions to working with epoxy, and briefly thought I couldn't work on boats any more. So I put P52 (which I was now calling Swordfish) into a cheap covered storage place near me and forgot about it for a while. Eventually I figured out that I can use epoxy, but I have to go very slowly, make sure it's really cured before I sand or grind it, and I have to be super careful about getting even the tiniest bit on my skin. This means I'm slow, and this means, I think, that I'm not going to get to work on P52 any time soon. I've grown tired of paying storage on a boat I'm not using, and it doesn't look like I'm going to work on it anytime soon, so I'm offering it up to anyone who'd like to adopt it before I cart it off to the dump.

It's still a nice boat! A little dirty from a year in storage, but it hasn't sat full of water or anything. I think the decks need to be glassed, or even replaced, that's the biggest job I'd do before I went sailing. I've attached some pictures below, and you can see there's some checking on the deck, and one place where it's cracked and I duct taped over it to keep water out.

It comes with the two bunks I show on the trailer, the super-cool rudders, the mast, all the hardware that's on it, and if you want to sail it as a crab claw you can have the big crab claw sail in the driveway picture and video below, I can't imagine I'm going to use a big crab claw any time soon. Although honestly you might just want to get a sunfish sail to start out. I think it would work really well as a crab claw. If you're close and you want some help I'd be glad to come sailing with you and help you get the rig set up.

It's quite light, and quite slippery. If you're not familiar with his work, Skip is a fairly famous canoe designer whose boats hold many records in canoe races. For a flat bottomed boat Swordfish slides right along.

There are two single bunks inside, and as shown you can fit a small dome tent to make a little cabin for camping. That's what I was going to do. Sniff.

The boat is an hour south of Houston. It probably needs to go in the next month or so (that is to say, by the end of September 2014); the tarp is going, as you can see in the picture, and I'm reluctant to buy a new one just to keep it in the driveway.

The trailer is a good one I bought from my friend Laurent before he left for Singapore. He used it to haul a boat all over Texas with no trouble. I'm going to sell it after the boat is gone. If you'd like to buy it I'll sell it to you for what I paid for it, $600. It's in good shape, it has good lights and tires and bearings. Laurent is a somewhat maintenance-obsessed French engineer . If you have your own trailer that's fine, I'm not anticipating having trouble selling it. You're welcome to just come and take the boat.

I reserve the right to not give it to you if I think you're going to go kill yourself. It's a proa, you should know what that means and have some idea of what you're doing, and know how to sail, for example.

If you're interested, email me and we'll talk: K_S_ONeill at yahoo dot com.