I just wanted to post that our build of Madness here in Thailand is finally registered. It took us about a year to build and another to register it. But hopefully we’ll be able to start venturing out and sailing her around the Gulf of Thailand a bit now.
We named her “Whiplash” in English, which is a bit of a joke in Thai as the English word “Whiplash” sounds very similar to a Thai word for “to have gone completely mad”. 
As I haven’t really been posting along the way, I figured I would upload a few pictures of our build process, and some of the more interesting points along the way.
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We hired a truck with a small crane to help us move the boat from my build tent at home to a boat ramp about a half hour drive away.
It made quite a sight on the Bangkok roadways. And yes, that is someone sitting on top while it was driving down the road. I’m not sure why, but the truck company wanted someone up there to keep an eye on it all while in transit.
Unloading at the boat ramp.
Given the width of the boat, I could only find one boat ramp wide enough to fit a boat with a 6 meter beam. Even this one had a fence pole just 5 cm too close in that would have prevented the pod from passing through down the ramp. But the owners were kind enough to let me move it.
We welded a simple launch trailer and use a winch on my pickup to control it up and down the ramp.
Raising the mast was an interesting trick. We welded a custom pivoting jig to hold the mast base in place and pivot it into the maststep.
Then we used “Y” poles to lift the end of the mast up, and the pickup winch attached to the main halyard with a telescoping ladder as a gin pole, with the forestays and shrouds acting to constrain the mast from falling to the side or toward the pickup. We also had extra lines attached to the jib halyards with people holding on to them to provide additional backup righting force in any two directions as needed.
(We had ropes tied to the telescoping ladder to stabilize it, too.)
Here is an image of her docked after launch.
We also added a long tail motor. For anyone unfamiliar with these, they are basically lawnmower or car engines mounted on a pivoting base with a propeller shaft directly coupled to the engine shaft.
When not in use, it stows nicely along the aka (crossbeam).
You can see in the above pictures that it requires maneuvering around the bracing wire to deploy it and stow it. We will probably modify it to be more like the sled in the design to avoid this, but it will require waterproofing the engine from splash better, so we are using it like this for now.
Nice work and an impressive launch!
Love the color- what is it?
It is a slightly orangish yellow. The easiest type of marine paint for me to source here in Thailand is a Chugoku brand marine epoxy paint, and this was their standard yellow. As best as I can tell, this is a common paint brand for the shipping industry here in Thailand, and their yellow looked rather nice to me. Given that very few people have seen a proa, I liked the original CLC idea to use a bright yellow to draw attention to the boat and its unique design.
Here are a few pictures of the boat from early sea trials. I had asked a friend with a motor boat to come along and take pictures.
There is a temple way out in the water when we motor out the canal, down along the mussle farms and finally get out far enough to safely raise the sails. It is several kilometres from the coast. I think there used to be a town around it, and due to coastal soil erosion and mangrove deforestation, the town is gone under the water, but they raised the temple up, almost as a monument to temind people about coastal erosion. I go past it every time I take the boat out.
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