Regularly watchers of the Wharram website will be aware of our desire to establish reliable commercial builders of ready or part-built Wharram designs. Many would-be owners have a dream of finding a tropical island with a small boat building workshop beside a beautiful lagoon, where their dream ship with exotic and cheap local labour can be built for the proverbial peanuts. It is a lovely dream, but in my travels across the pacific and Indian oceans, I never came across such an ideal place. Building a light structured multihull is not the same as building a local workboat. Western materials needed for western boats often suffer from customs and agents problems.
Small firms can go out of business within hours.
The best place for JWD talents is in research and development. Perversely, Fiji s problem may turn out to be our tropical build would-be owners opportunity. For the Designers and ITS this is not seen as a purely commercial venture, but is also concerned with education, training, research and the transfer of technology of value to the inhabitants of the Republic of Indonesia. Price is as yet not determined. As such, it will function in a role similar to a Certification Authority, though not in conflict with the State one.