READER BOAT: The Crazy Boat

Sometimes, great imaginative leaps in mankind’s development never quite take off.

- Russ Vinden

Genius is unrecognized, and dazzling ideas fall with a faint, localized thud. So it seemed to me anyhow, when many years ago in England I joined the Amateur Yacht Research Society, a small group of nutcases with a passion for small boat design and development. I was interested in foil stabilization—then barely surfacing into wider awareness— and I was told about an unusual craft in the Pitt Rivers Museum of anthropology in Oxford, only an hour’s drive away. So with some astonishment, I soon found myself gazing up at a foil-stabilized dugout canoe hanging from the museum’s ceiling—a genuine vintage example of a native ingenuity in everyday use in Madagascar, with the challenges of low vertical and directional stability worked out in a unique way that, by all accounts, had never been used elsewhere in the world.