Is it possible to build a catamaran with bamboo?
I don’t see why not. “Bamboo rafts are probably some of the earliest boats ever. With hollow, watertight compartments bamboo is a natural choice. But over time the ways bamboo has been used for boats has expanded. Chinese junks used bamboo for mast, booms, oars, rails, woven into sails, push poles, ropes, outriggers, etc. Several years ago Tim Severin built an entire boat of bamboo to try to prove that the Chinese may have crossed the Pacific hundreds of years ago. Over a hundred years ago Fridtjof Nansen was marooned in the artic and used bamboo poles and sail cloth to build a kayak to save himself. The Japanese used split bamboo to make a basket like boat for fishing. The Vietnamese make a type of boat from plaited bamboo. In ancient Polynesia the people built big catamarans using bamboo for mast, shelter, rails, floors, and as containers for fresh water.
If bamboo is the only building material available then you could build a form of catamaran. Bamboo is structurally ‘interesting’ lending itself not only to incredible strength and flexibility, but also lending itself for over all lightness to strength ratios. While the deck of a catamaran can be out of nearly ‘anything’ that can be rigid enough to support the pontoons and rig and crew and goods on it, the pontoons themselves must be light and buoyant. Bamboo could be used ‘as is’ as pontoons. Meaning cut down and tied together to form bundles. The Leading edge would be problematic and would most likely require careful placement of individual stalks of bamboo to where their ‘compartments’ those spaces between knuckles form a ‘prow’ end of your pontoon, of course the excess end cuts would have to be filled with ‘something’ in order to prevent slowly of the craft due to drag. Processed or laminated strips of bamboo could be used. If you have a marine epoxy (glue) and the form work you cou
