Ray Hodsdon’s beautiful little Shellback Dinghy sports a PolySail lug. Click on the picture for Ray’s testimonial and more customer pictures.

Construct your own rugged white polytarp sails from our PolySail® Kit in a few hours for a fraction of the cost of traditional sails. No sewing required!

Our kit is ideal for the small boat sailor or builder who wants a sail or two now for minimal cost or experimental purposes. Made from brilliant white, extra heavy-weave polyethylene (polytarp) and extra-strength, double-sided tape, our PolySails® are difficult to distinguish from traditional sails in appearance or performance on the water.  In fact, recent research showed that our material was twice the initial strength of ripstop Nylon and 72%-94% the strength of some of the synthetic sail materials used by some of the major sail makers.

To learn more about our white polytarp sails, sail kits, PolySail® construction, click on the buttons above or scroll down to the buttons below.  We offer a number of additional pages of interest to boatbuilders, such as our popular old boat plans (click on the three-masted clipper at the left) or our free and low cost boats pages.

From step 1È

To sailing  in about 4 hoursÆ

Click below to access the PolySail Library and Sail Database…..

Essence, our 16’ sail testing sharpie. Click on the picture for more on Essence.

Build a $200 racing class sailboat! We’ve built two of these boats and helped build tthree more. Why? These boats are simple to build, stable on the water, and great fun to race. PolySail International supports this fast-growing, family-friendly, wide open sailboat class. Click the button to learn more.

This PolySail page is dedicated to families, youths and others who might want to try their hands at building a boat for the first time. Most of the plans require little investment in time or money, but pay off big in terms of learning, relationships, health, and recreation.

PolySail racing? Well, I live near the most famous track in the US and maybe the entire world-the Indianapolis Speedway, a.k.a. the Brickyard. And I really like NASCAR; so here’s a little boat for all of us speed fans.  Evolving from the lightweight Hot Tub scows (see below) and sporting a new environmentally friendly 4-cycle outboard, this little racer should scoot!

Here’s an updated list of carefully selected links related to polytarp sails and boatbuilding.

Check out the evolution of our scow-type fishing boats from the Styrofoam-hulled Hot Tub to Hot Tub III, a tunnel hull disguised as a large box. Summer 2002 update--we try sailing Hot Tub III at the Lake Rend IL Messabout powered by the D4 sprit sail. (Also see Z-Boat above).

Here are some great old boat plans and designs from the late 1930's and early 1940's. My brother Dan, who collects antiques, bestowed an old coverless paperback upon me, and I've been pouring over these boat plans ever since.

This tool calculates standard sail dimensions for various sail types from a luff length you supply. The tool also calculates the size of the PolySail Kit needed to build your sail.

Foolhardy was our first sharpie design. Trials showed her to be very fast, but she was built from leftovers and soon rotted when flooded in a winter storm. She’s now being rebuilt.

Click on the button to the left for instructions on building a lightlweight box mast for your dinghy.

Click on the Weekender Jib & Gaff button to learn how to build the jib and gaff for this popular Stevenson Projects pocket cruiser from our 15' x 20' Weekender White PolySail Kit.

Advantages to the home boatbuilder of our stronger, U-V protected white polytarp material include:

1.        Low cost and ease of replacement (Our kits start at $59.95)

2.        Strength and light weight (We placed a 42 lb. battery on a suspended 3' x 4' piece of white polytarp material to see if it would stretch out of shape. It didn't.)

3.        Resistance to water, rot, and sunlight (We've used our white polytarp for boat covers for the past five years. Unlike blue tarps, they don't disintegrate in a season or two.)

4.        Speed and simplicity of construction (White polytarp can be taped rather than sewn, but the material sews easily if you want to reinforce edges and corners, add battens, or include windows.)

5.        Opportunity to experiment with different sail shapes and sizes (See our web pages for simple directions.)

6.        Appearance and performance that rivals "real" sails (See the Stevenson Projects link on our links page for their comparison of polytarp and dacron sails.)

PolySail International

22 Sunblest Court, Fishers, Indiana 46038-1175.

 Email polysail@aol.com or call Dave Gray at 317 915-1454

PolySails–Sold on the Web since 1996. Customers in all 50 states and around the globe.