Trond Are Øritsland, Industrial Designer, PhD in Interaction Design, has developed catamarans, kayaks, proas and sportsequipment, among other things since the earliy 1980´s. A full academic CV can be found here.
This site chronicles Trond Are Øritsland´s work on boats
The people of the south seas, the people of the arctic and of Norway´s northern atlantic coast, live in opposite extremes of environment, with different materials and boatbuilding technologies at their disposal. But they all lived by, and of the sea and developed their craft over thousands of years with some of the same requirements;
A craft for fishing and transport in open sea conditions, but still light enough to pull up on the beach.
A craft to be built from local materials, with simple tools, by the hands of the same people who would sail them.
Their crafts evolved over hundreds of years by trial and error, consequently they must have something valuable to teach us.
(left Geitbaat)
On this page I invite you to follow my exploration of efficiency in small craft. An efficieny that is best described by Lao Zi in the Dao De Jing:
All that is best can be seen to be like water.
Water
benefits everything and yet exerts no effort.
Water finds the lowest places, shunned by all.
In this water is the closest to the Great Way.
News
02.jan.2006:
updated Lat Thinking blog: Gibbons rig
11.oct.2005: updated Lat Thinking blog: Crabclaw model
24.oct 2004: Began the Pro2Proa story
12.sept 2004: LatThinking project project Blog.
25.august 2004: Published this page.
Stories
since august 2004: My current project LatThinking. Is concerned with continuing the exploration I left 10 years ago. Old ideas are reemerging, tempered by new wisdom and knowledge, and fired by the kind donation of a proa by Robert Biegler, and inspiration from my brother, sailor of the Pinta 33 trimaran "ImseVimse"
march 2004: After a detour of 10 years, where I have been playing around with the restoration of the fine ship ELMINA, I have now rediscovered the fundamental value of efficiency...
june 1994: I completed project Pro2Proa. Seduced by the prospect of a quickly shuntable symetrical rig to complement a small Hobie16 inspired hull, I set about building a boat with a rig I had seen in the designs of J.S.Taylor - the infamous Bolger rig. (oh, the perils of the young, innocent and industrious!)
My second commercial kayak design "Spitsbergen" for Eian Fritid a.s. in Mjøndalen, Norway, was developed over a three year period. First in frame/dacron, then mahogany/carbon, and finally in a GRP version, modified and currently sold by Eian Fritid
Spitsbergen
er designet som ren fartsbåt til bruk i åpene farvann. Kajakken
er utviklet gjennom en tre-års periode, og har hittil blant annet
vunnet Artic Double med Roy Willy. Torgeir Toppe har hentet hjem to seiere
i Artic Sea Kayak Race Maraton med Spitsbergen.
Dekket er utformet på en slik måte at isettet til åra
ikke blir for bredt. Langt fordekk gir tørr gange. Stor lastekapasitet,
så den er godt egnet til litt erfarne tur/havpadlere. Meget retningsstabil,
så lette padlere ikke vil ha problemer i sidevind. Forøvrig
er Spitsbergen utstyrt med 2 vanntette skott og luker, dekksfester med
tauverk og ror.
Lengde: 5,80m
Bredde: 0,53m
Volum total: 393 liter
1986 - 89: My second Catamaran design was a 6 meter x 3 meter camping cruiser in tortured ply/WEST system. built of 6 mm meranti and sheathed in glassfiber. It had small cabins with room for a bed and stores in each hull, a Tornado mast stepped on three 100 mm alu. cross beams. A sentral pod contained a 3 hp outboard. It was sold to Christian Døving??? who completed it and sailed it. It was named "Catastrofe"
If anyone knows what happened to it - please send me a note
Based on my experiments with glass/sandwich panels on the first catamaran
project my paddling buddy Einar Rasmussen, and I worked on developing
a lightweight kayak paddle for competition use. The first results were
encouraging so we speculated further on increasing the efficiency of paddles
by experimenting with planform. Einar was a theoretical physics student
at the time, and felt that by enlarging the area of the paddle we would
loose less energy to the pressure differential around the blade. The extremes
of this design produced paddles that were 60% wider than conventional
wooden Liminat paddles of the time and 40% of the weight. The limit was
found as we had to shorten the length (gear ratio) of the paddle to keep
a suitable cadence. These paddles where built in som hundreds by myself
and Einar in a small company called Sport Kinetics, together with iso
kinetic training apparatus. We developed a heated aluminium mould with
an air pressure bladder to mould paddle blade to filament wound shaft.
By pumping in air we controlled pressure on the wet lay up epoxy carbon
dyvinicell sandwich. At about 4 bar we forced to much resin out of the
fibre. At 2 bar we had an optimal saturation. Our lightest paddle to date
was a 216cm long women's paddle weighing in at 480 grams!
The filament wound shafts from Comrod
were reinforced with PU foam dowels at the hands to avoid deformation
and crushing.
At 16 I joined the Norwegian Multihull Club, and spent a summer designing a 5m catamaran based on my experiences with competition kayaking (for 2 years) and studying the local HobieCats, Tornados, and Darts. I had an old Unicorn A-class catamaran together with some kayaking buddies. We literally sailed it to pieces by overloading it and taking it out in extremely heavy winds. Fun!
The catamaran tok two years in the building process as I learned everything from scratch. The first hull was strip planked pine, glassed over, the second was Dyvinicell/glass and polyester. Beams in 100 mm alu. tubing, plywood rudders and daggerboards, and the old A-class sail on a stronger mast, with a foresail I sewed my self at the Norwegian Polar Institutes workshops.
The boat worked well for several seasons of sailing in the inner Oslo fjord, but suffered from structural problems, and was finaly scrapped.
Links
ProaFile - Michael Schacht's online magazine dedicated to the Western re-discovery of the Pacific sailing canoe.
Wingo.com - Joseph Oster's links site to the proa world
The Cheap Pages on Proas - Craig O'Donnell´s varied menu of ideas
The Flyack - my friend Einar Rasmussen´s foilkayak project is really taking off!
Yahoo Group on proas - the prime discussion forum
Home
Go to Trond Are Øritsland´s homepage