Trimaran Nomadness, Microship Wordplay, & Kayak
Bubba
Camano Island, WA
wordy@microship.com
I have a long history of technomadic adventure; in 1983 I took off from
Ohio aboard the Winnebiko and covered
10,000 miles around the US, leading to the book, Computing Across America. In
1986, I took on a traveling partner, conjured the imaginatively-named Winnebiko II, and
covered another 6,000 miles. Intent on taking the concept to its
logical extreme, I then spent 3.5 years building the 580-pound BEHEMOTH, which trundled
ponderously out of Silicon Valley in 1991 (here are photos from Wisconsin and Joshua Tree). This machine is now retired
and on display in the Computer History Museum.
The Microship project began in 1993 with a kayak, and was supposed to
be quick... but it turns out that the average completion time of a
homebuilt boat is 137 years. In the past decade, I've been
through
four completely different substrates, three labs, a succession of
relationships, over 130 corporate sponsors, and uncountable variations
in on-board system designs. Wordplay
is the resultant of all this, and is an amphibian pedal/solar/sail
micro-trimaran built around a canoe... some fresh photos may be seen here.
The Microships underwent their first real test in the fall of 2001, in
a 132-mile loop through Puget Sound (the map of that adventure is here, and various local kayak trips are documented
in a collection of maplets).
There are a number of detailed
Microship articles in the resources section
of this site, and I post updates
and
photos on a blog and live page.
My home is on Camano Island, Washington, where I have a solar house in
the forest as well as a 3,000 square-foot development facility (at 3X
the size of the house, it's an indicator of my priorities). In
addition to these projects, I'm working on a backpack-scale technomadic system called Shacktopus as well as a new boat of world-voyaging scale named Nomadness.
Photos of the fleet are below...
Nomadness anchored in Von Donop Inlet on Cortez Island (Desolation Sound)
