Ghost Ship 'Amilee' Floats Past Hawaii

Abandoned on Her First Outing (Watch the Before Video)

The fishermen checked to make certain no one was onboard. The photo was taken on Monday.

There she was, Ghost Ship Amilee, ghosting westward about 150 nautical miles south of the Big Island of Hawaii. The people on a passing fishing boat took a picture of the 46-foot trimaran and shared it with the Coast Guard.

Amilee was tracking toward her owners’ original destination, even though her owners had left her nine months earlier. They were on what would be the boat’s first and (likely) only ocean passage.

This is the story of Amilee’s star-crossed life.

Kurt of Kurt Hughes Sailing Designs is a prolific naval architect working from an office in Seattle. Hughes specializes in multihulls that are light, fast, simple and better than average for windward work.

Amilie under construction in the Vancouver area. Those flares on the central hull translate into settees inside.

Amilee was based on a Hughes 38 “flared hull” design. She was built by John Jacques in Vancouver, Canada. Jacques’ version was 46 feet, built it in his yard over a period of five years. That sounds like a long time, but not by backyard-boatbuilder standards.

By the time Amilee was launched, but not before her rigging had been completed, Jacques suffered a stroke that would preclude him from sailing her. She was put up for sale. Asking price: $199,000.

A YouTube video at the time portrays a cleverly designed and finely finished vessel, complete with funky tri touches such as a tight main hatchway, tiny interior passageways and tiny gas tanks for her twin outboards. This is just how we roll, the tri-tribe would tell you.

As if compensatory, the main saloon/galley and aft master cabin are quite spacious. Watch the video.

After some years on the market, buyers came along, a Frenchman and his wife. If you have met any Gallic sailors, you would come to realize that a boat like Amilee affects many of them like felines to catnip (tri-nip?)

Kriss Plante later said the asking price was cut in half “bringing her within my financial reach.”

Even though there were only few miles under her keel, Amilee required a great deal of prep work before Plante and his wife could sail her to their home in the Marshal Islands. They ran the clock getting her ready. Plante described his predicament:

Winter began to set in; our visas were nearing expiration, and—at the same time—so were our savings. It was time to leave. We sailed out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and headed for the open ocean. A few days later, I went aft to clear some seaweed that had become fouled in the rudder. It was swaying on its axis, supported by a single mount. The lower one had simply snapped.

Amilee was in heavy seas about 200 miles off the coast of Oregon. Plante said a “carbon chainplate approved by Kurt Hughes” had failed. The rudder was a pintle-and-gudgeon assembly, which suggests that his word “chainplate”—as translated from French—may have referred to the failed lower mount, or, as the Saxons would say, gudgeon.

Here’s where it gets interesting, Hughes told Loose Cannon that the builder had not entirely followed his plans, which called for a kick-up rudder, not pintles and gudgeons. Moreover, Hughes learned that a boatyard hand had advised Plante to retrofit Amilee with a kick-up rudder to make the steering system more robust.

Hughes is a big fan of kick-ups and said he was confident that type of rudder would not have failed under the same circumstances.

In any event, Plante and crew were in trouble:

I mentioned the situation to some friends in Hawaii, who called the U.S. Coast Guard. The Coast Guard offered to tow us in a few days’ time. In the interim, however, the seas picked up, and the sailboat began taking on water. The steering cable conduits—located below the waterline in hard-to-reach spaces—were leaking several hundred liters a day; I managed only to slow the leak, but could not seal it completely. Once on the scene, the Coast Guard refused to tow us, and—with heavy hearts—we were forced to abandon our sailboat.

Amilee was abandoned on August 5, 2025. When word got out that a Hughes design was just floating around out there, the news fueled two entirely different impulses—a desire by some to help recover Amilee and recriminations on social media.

Hughes posted the loss on Facebook and said he received serious offers of help from two individuals. One had access to “satellite tracking,” and the other had a towboat. All they wanted was coordinates for Amilee’s location when abandoned to get a starting point for the search.

Hughes said neither Plante nor the Coast Guard was forthcoming. Why not?

Kriss Plante and his wife bought Amilee from her builder. (Facebook photo)

The answer may be embedded in Plante’s public explanation of the event. His statement, released in French, overflowed with a sense of resentment. This Facebook screed, abridged below, is difficult to square with the YouTube video above:

The builder’s technical skills were sorely lacking in practical know-how. The daggerboards were delaminating; they slid into their wells with difficulty when the boat was stationary—making them all but impossible to handle while underway. The hatch covers were all cracked and had delaminated from their sandwich cores; the same applied to the aft companionway, where large blisters had formed on the steps.

No provision had been made for running electrical cables inside the mast. The plumbing layout was utterly nonsensical, cutting right through the middle of the storage lockers and suffering from numerous leaks. Electrical cables were simply twisted together—bare, exposed, and completely unprotected... The mast was extraordinarily heavy: 400 kg (850 lbs) according to Barb and John, or 700 kg (1,500 lbs)—including the furler and standing rigging—according to the crane operator.

For a carbon mast, that is an enormous weight—indeed, it is downright dangerous for a trimaran.

Amilee had been outfitted on the cheap. The mast track was undersized—falling well short of the manufacturer’s specifications. It tore right off during our very first sea trial under sail. John and Barb initially blamed Stuart from North Sails in Sidney, BC, but eventually admitted that they themselves—in an effort to save money—had ordered an unsuitable, albeit inexpensive, track. The cleats all bent because they had been mounted using 3/8-inch fasteners—hardware far too lightweight to secure Amilee safely at the dock.

The halyards had been cut too short, a cost-cutting measure taken so that the same spool of low-quality line could be used for every single one. The standing rigging was undersized and constructed with a complete disregard for common sense—relying on plastic components to support the entire mast assembly... In short, it is abundantly clear that this couple were not sailors. I would go so far as to say they knew absolutely nothing about the sea.

Not a single proper sailor’s knot on board. There was absolutely no nautical logic to the boat’s layout. It was impossible to reef the sails; the reefing lines simply didn’t work. The winches kept slipping, the rope clutches wouldn’t hold... Ultimately, I brought in the naval architect—Kurt Hughes—to inspect the sailboat before our crossing. That was when I learned that the boat was actually based on a 37-foot design that John had stretched to 46 feet.

It was the first time Kurt Hughes had ever laid eyes on the vessel! The central daggerboard trunk (which was unused) was positioned far too far aft of the mast. The rudder lifting mechanism did not match the original plans. The control system for the rotating mast—which was completely nonsensical and non-functional—was not the one specified in the plans; nor was the daggerboard system on the outriggers, which was utterly unusable... John had built in a series of chines—steps in the hull located about 15 cm above the waterline—that were roughly 30 cm wide and perfectly horizontal. At the slightest wave, violent shocks would reverberate through the cabin—so intensely, in fact, that any object sitting on the saloon table would literally jump several centimeters into the air. I felt as though the hull itself was about to shake itself apart!

There is no need to go on; as you have surely gathered, I made a colossal blunder by buying this sailboat sight unseen. We worked tirelessly for six months—and invested thousands of dollars—to rectify the situation and restore at least a semblance of seaworthiness to this wreck, which had merely been disguised as a beauty…

Even though I knew the seller had royally ripped me off, I hadn’t given up hope of one day making her safe and reliable. Unfortunately, she was simply too fragile. I ran out of time. We lost everything! The sailboat, all our belongings, and our entire investment. John and Barb offered neither a word of sympathy nor a helping hand. Like the cowardly opportunists they are, they simply blocked us on social media and accused us of negligence.

Critics noted that Plante could have sailed Amalie back to port using some form of “towing a warp,” which is the ancient art of dragging something off the starboard quarter to effect a course to starboard and off the port quarter to veer to port.

In its purest form long lines are dragged, with length adjusted for effect, but all sorts of modern-age stuff can be included in the mix—buckets, milk crates, dinghy anchors, etc. The fact that the amas—outer hulls— are so far apart makes the technique all the more effective for trimarans.

Apparently, no such attempt was made, however.

“Which is odd, too, because Kriss had said he sailed around the world before, and I would have thought he had a whole bag of tricks, but no,” Hughes said.

Hughes was quick to learn of Amalie’s brush pass by the Hawaiian Islands. And his reaction was a mix of regret with something else. “I’m glad it survived, though. It just lost the mast. I don’t know if the chain plates are intact still or not, but it looks very salvageable.”

Meanwhile, Amalie continues her inexorable westward movement in the general direction of the Marshall Islands, where her people may still reside. She’s half way there—just 2,000 miles to go.

Amilee with her rigging on.

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