According to Tommy Holmes in “The Hawaiian Canoe’: “The Hawaiians were quick to notice that the Europeans had new materials and techniques that could make life much simpler, especially when it came to building a boat or canoe. Milled lumber, screws, nails, and pitch were viewed by many as godsends. Sometime in the mid to late 1800’s some creative Hawaiians built the first outrigger canoe out of these western materials.
As these early composite canoes were essentially made out of three boards or planks, one on each side and one on the bottom, such craft came to be called ‘three-board canoes’ or sometimes wa’apa.”
My friend Noah wanted a canoe so I decided to draw on a 150 year old Hawaiian tradition of making outrigger canoes from three planks. The last canoe, the Proa, was a Micronesian style – this canoe will be of a Hawaiian style.