Gary Dierking has been designing and building boats for more than 40 years. Raised in northern Wisconsin, he served in the US Coast Guard, then built a 37' trimaran and logged 20,000 nautical miles throughout the Pacific. His interest in outrigger canoes and other multihulls continued in the 1980s, when he worked as head builder and assistant designer for Rudy Choy Boatworks in Honolulu, building a series of high tech offshore catamarans for racing and the tourist industry. Since 1991, he has run his own boat shop in Coromandel, New Zealand. He designs, builds, repairs, and modifies a wide variety of working and recreational vessels, especially multihulls, up to 50 feet in length. He series-manufactures his Ulua outrigger canoe design in molded fiberglass.