Sails Pitch

Patti Seery, a longtime American resident of Indonesia, always wanted the world to share her love of the archipelago. There was just one snag: hopping between Indonesia's 17,500 or so islands usually involved taking rickety local boats or squeezing onto impossibly crowded ferries. So she came up with Silolona, www.silolona.com —a two-masted ship of ironwood that she commissioned from the Konjo craftsmen of Sulawesi. Taking two years to build, the vessel is a replica of a phinisi , the type of sturdy cargo boat that plied Southeast Asian trade routes for centuries.

With its distinctive silhouette, Silolona ...