Return Of The Phinisi

All but consigned to history, the growth of tourism in Indonesia has driven a delightful resurgence in this graceful schooner

- Ian Lloyd Neubauer

For more than 500 years, travel between the 13,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago was conducted on phinisis – graceful twin-mast, seven-sail schooners forged on beaches from ironwood and sweat by boatbuilders who passed their trade from generation to generation.

But the proliferation of motorboats in Indonesia after the Second World War, and the birth of commercial air travel rendered the phinisi redundant – a relic of the past, relegated to museums and books. There the handmade ships would have remained if not for the tourism boom born in Bali in the 1970s, since spreading far and wide across the archipelago. From the famed surfing breaks of Sumatra in the west, to Komodo National Marine Park, to the World Heritage-listed coral gardens of Raja Ampat in the east, phinisis have made a delightful resurgence in the crystalline waters of Indonesia.

In 2016, I travelled to the remote province of Sulawesi to study the origins of the phinisi with Raul Boscarino, an Italian-born but Indonesia-based sailor and boatbuilder who knows more about phinisis than any other Westerner alive. When the assignment wrapped up, Raul invited me to sail on his phinisi, a liveaboard dive yacht called Mantra, if I ever returned to the country.

When work took me back to Indonesia earlier this year, I took Raul up on his offer and made plans to join him and a few of his mates on a 16-day 1,000 nautical mile journey of exploration from the Banda Islands to Komodo. “We’ll stop at islands and dive on reefs in the middle of nowhere, and there will be no one out there but us,” he says, smiling from ear to ear as we motor south out of Ambon, a former Portuguese colony in eastern Indonesia. “It’ll be a real adventure.”

SPICE WARS