Obviously the first thing I did was scour the 'net for pictures, and then jumble them together in my head so I had a kind of generic look to aim for. Not unlike how I did my European sailing ships. Then I sketched out what I was trying to do. I assumed that I'd use matchsticks as the basis for the hulls, and worked from there. The sailing ship at the top of the sketch was just for scale.
And here's the basic bits - 20mm and 15mm lengths of matchstick, shaped with emery-board.
I used small pieces of thin card to create the effect of the highly curved bows and high sterns. The platform for the catamarans is card, with a matchstick fighting platform. I've probably made the catamarans a little wide, but they look right to me, so I'm sticking by the design. I mocked the vessels up on bases to make sure I had the right look. I'd sketched two canoes to a base, but three looked better in reality.
Catamarans
Canoes
And finally the finished vessels. I cut the masts at 15mm and added sails using thick craft paper cut into triangles.
Theses designs will be very easy to replicate if I feel the need to expand my fleet. There's just over 100pts of vessels in those four, which is an adequate force for a game, but it would be fun to expand this force and then create a duplicate one in a different colour-scheme for some Pacific Island naval warfare.
Very effective scratch building - good looking canoes and catamarans.
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