Weta sailboats: a New Zealand-conceived one-design trimaran built to be teachable and fast
The Weta is a small one-design trimaran named after the weta, a bent-legged insect native to New Zealand. Weta Marine, the company behind the design and the class, is based in Auckland, New Zealand — but the company is the brand and class authority, not the builder of the boats themselves; construction has moved through several offshore factories over the design's life.
Origins and ownership
Roger Kitchen and his son Chris Kitchen founded Weta Marine after researching boats worldwide for something that fit a specific brief: a boat simple enough to teach a beginner in but still fast and exciting to sail. Roger Kitchen had been a mathematics teacher and served three years as chairman of the Yachting New Zealand Junior and Youth Committee, which oversees recreational and high-performance youth sailing in New Zealand. Chris Kitchen holds a mechanical engineering degree from Auckland University, worked short periods as an engineer, and — a highly skilled Laser racer in his own right — is a qualified Yachting New Zealand sailing coach who has coached New Zealand sailors at world regattas. Sail-World credits Roger with hatching the boat's concept, with design input from multihull designer Tim Clissold, before Roger and Chris continued to evolve it themselves.
The designers
Weta Marine's own account credits Tim Clissold, of TC Design, with the boat's original design. Clissold came to the project with a boatbuilding trade apprenticeship and a Small Craft design course behind him, and his multihull design work has centered on features including spray rails, spreader-less masts, and boomless mainsails — the last of which appears directly on the Weta. Practical Sailor frames the origin a little differently again, describing the boat as conceived by the father-and-son Kitchen team and designed "with collaborative help from a handful of experienced sailors." Read together, the sources describe lines Clissold drew for a concept the Kitchens originated and kept developing afterward, rather than a boat with one sole inventor. US Sailing's one-design class profile lists the Weta's design year as 2006; Sail-World reports the boat was released in 2007 — different milestones on the same timeline, not a conflicting record.
Construction through the eras
Production began as a small test fleet built in New Zealand, then moved to China, and later — more successfully — to the Xtreme factory in Indonesia, the same yard that builds the 29er and other one-design classes. Practical Sailor, reviewing the China-built boats, described them as part of a new trend in Asian boatbuilding, moving away from an industry once associated with thick, resin-rich laminates.
Structurally, a carbon-fiber and E-glass tubular framework connects the outer amas to the main hull and spreads rig and hull loads. The mast and sprit are carbon fiber, while the hull structure, daggerboard, and rudder use less-costly E-glass and Divinycell foam — a deliberate split between where the boat spends money on stiffness and where it doesn't. Practical Sailor found that the vacuum-bagging and strict resin control used in construction eliminated resin puddling and delivered excellent weight control. The boomless mainsail, made by windsurfer sailmaker Gaastra, uses tubular battens to control draft, with the mainsheet attached to a reinforced clew rather than a conventional boom.
The design also evolved materially over its production life — most visibly in the hull shape, the foils, and the sail plan — enough that two Wetas built at different points in the run are recognizably different boats up close.
Who Weta is for
The founders' brief — teachable but fast — has carried the boat beyond one-design racing: Sail-World notes it has also been used in longer-distance events such as the Race to Alaska, a use case that speaks to more than beach-boat range. The class picked up a Sailing World International Boat of the Year Award in 2010. Between the coaching pedigree behind its design and its crossover into distance events, the Weta reads as built for sailors who want a genuine dinghy-style thrill without giving up the ability to point it at something farther than a triangle course.