About Us

Our approach to this project

Our goals for the sailboat were three fold.

1. We started by looking for a sailboat design that would be large enough to accommodate the crew and guests comfortably while cruising and seasonally living aboard while still being reasonably able to single handedly operate her if necessary.
2.  We also needed a design that would be utilized as a studio and vehicle for a travel blog.
3. We further needed a stable platform to provide a resource for education and self esteem building goals/challenges/adventures for youths that were conducted on 2 to 5 day field trips.

We believe we had found that in the Mark Smaalders designed Kahuna Nui.  Yvonne being the practical side of the operation suggested we slice the design in the center and add a pilothouse so we could be out of the weather in the likely event of foul weather days.  It sounded great so we contacted Mark Smaalders of Mark Smalders Designs who was the original designer of the Kahuna Nui and he worked it out.  After a time latter  we had the plans in hand and started ordering wood for the project.  In the mean time we had to build a garage large enough to house the boat during the building process.

Having completed the Garage we were strait into the building portion of our plan.  The official start date for the boat was 1 May 2013.  So far we have completed hundreds of hours of work and hope to roll the hull over soon.  Many aspects of the building process have been cataloged and processed in a YouTube time laps video.

When completed the Sailboat will be used as a platform for both a travel blog and a resource location for environmental education, and self esteem building.