The idea of building your own boat in your backyard sounds both quaint and rewarding. Boatbuilding is also a project that, for a lot of hobbyists, could be quite doable with some decent skills and the right materials. Of course, most of these homemade boats will be on the smaller, more basic side, and in many cases, probably not something you’d want to take out onto the open ocean.
Sometimes, though, homemade boats can get more ambitious than a simple canoe. One Chinese farmer even built his own functional submarine, which places quite highly on the homemade boat rankings. But that little sub might be outdone by a homemade boat called the Kaleidoscope, which isn’t actually just a ‘boat’ but a 100-foot-long catamaran yacht built entirely in a backyard more than 80 miles from the nearest ocean. Dreamed up and built by a California man named Clyde Stires, the ambitious project took five years from concept to completion.
When finished, the boat was so big that it had to be taken apart for truck transport to the ocean and then reassembled. And once in the water, the yacht didn’t just putter around the harbor to prove it could float, but it’s done all the stuff a ‘real’ yacht should do, including trips around Central America and even a journey through the Panama Canal.
Built, not bought
What’s especially crazy about this yacht project is that it wasn’t done with the resources and attention of today’s internet and social media era. Clyde designed and built the boat way back in the early 1990s, when there weren’t YouTube tutorials to get tips from or internet forums to hop on for advice — things that hobbyists take for granted today. And he did so all without professional engineering or boat-building experience, using plans made with skills he learned from taking a semester of drafting in high school.
As you might imagine, a man building a 100-foot yacht in the yard of his inland Southern California home generated a lot of interest from neighbors, and by the time the boat was nearing completion, he’d become a bit of a local legend, generating local news coverage of his endeavor. And even better for us today, Clyde has the entire construction process, as well as the sea-going adventures of the boat, documented in detail on his YouTube channel.
Does Kaleidoscope have the latest technology and flashy luxury features that would rival the most expensive yachts of today? Probably not. But what’s impressive is how it does not have the appearance of being homemade at all, and visually, at least, it wouldn’t look too out of place among today’s most expensive and high-end yachts. And that’s before you consider that it had to be specifically built in sections for ground transport.
Adventure is part of the plan
While the scope of this homemade yacht project is extremely impressive, when it comes to actually getting out there and operating a large homemade watercraft, the results can sometimes be pretty sketchy — as someone recently found out while taking their homemade houseboat out on the Great Lakes. However, having a sense of adventure is essential for a project like this in the first place, and Kaleidoscope has more than lived up to Clyde’s goals for it, so much so that at one point it was even stolen by a drug cartel in Mexico.
Most people who came aboard the ship, if they didn’t know the unique origin story in advance, probably wouldn’t suspect or believe that Kaleidoscope was built by an amateur builder in his own backyard. But as you can see from the craftsmanship and scope of this project, Clyde seems to have both technical skills and imagination that go beyond even the most talented amateur boat builders. And his imagination hasn’t just been used for ocean-going vessels. Before beginning the Kaleidoscope project, he bought a double-decker bus from Germany and rebuilt the entire thing into a stylish, two-story tiny home on wheels.
In reality, most of us probably couldn’t come close to building something like Kaleidoscope. But hey, maybe knowing that a man can design and build a 100-foot-long yacht in his backyard might just give you the inspiration needed to finally attempt that smaller DIY project you’ve been thinking about.
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