This is  the eulogy of James Wharram, written by his long-time wife and design partner Hanneke Boon,  both true multihull pioneers. James was the last of my multihull colleagues from the 1950s, and while we were never really close, his embarkation for “the great perhaps” has left me feeling quite alone sometimes.      JB

Dear friends,

It is with great sadness that I have to tell you that my soulmate and life partner James left this life on Tuesday 14th] December. [2021] I have written a short summery of his very full and special life, which is attached and also published on our website. You must forgive the fact that this is not a personal message, it is a stressful time and I need to communicate with so many people that I and he considered great friends. I am here with our son Jamie and his lovely partner Liz, who is taking great care of Jamie and I. Also we have other close friends supporting us.

With kind regards and love,

Hanneke

Multihull pioneer James Wharram has died, aged 93, after a lifetime of voyaging, designing boats and enabling countless people to get afloat.

He became known as a young man, when in 1955/56, after studying ancient Polynesian multihull design and sailing, he designed and built the 23ft 6in catamaran Tangaroa and crossed the Atlantic.

The trip, with Jutta Schultze-Rohnhof and Ruth Merseburger, was the start of a lifetime of such projects for James and it gave rise to the vast number of Wharram followers worldwide who still gather reguarly to celebrate and sail his designs.

More than 10,000 Wharram designs have been bought by home-builders.

 He was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Classic Boat Awards 2018 and his stirring acceptance speech can be read in full here.

 James Wharram and Hanneke Boon

The following comment was released by James’ lifelong partner Hanneke Boon, after his death on 14 December:

We are very sad to announce that on the 14th December James Wharram left this earthly world, joining Ruth, Jutta and his many close friends that departed before him. At 93 years old his spirit has set out on the voyage to sail the oceans of heaven.

James was a trailblazer, a fighter with great determination and vision. From a young age he followed his passions – to roam the hills – for fair politics – for intelligent women – to sail the seas – to prove the Polynesian double canoe an ocean worthy craft – to become a Man of the Sea.

These passions made him into a pioneer of catamaran sailing and a world-renowned designer of unique double-canoe catamarans that now sail the oceans. He designed for people who wanted to break out of mundane lives, gave them boats they could build at an affordable cost and gave them the opportunity to become People of the Sea like himself.

 His chosen life was never easy, he would always fight convention and conventional thinking head on. His passionate and multi-faceted personality was very attractive to strong, independent women who helped him in his pursuits, starting with the steadfast Ruth, without whom he would never have reached his goals. Young Jutta joined them on their pioneering ocean voyages and was the mother of his first son. Sadly she died very young from mental illness as a result of her traumatic WWII childhood experiences.

  James lived his entire life openly with more than one woman at the same time, as many as five in his prime in the 1970s, with whom he built and sailed his boats. Alongside Ruth, who died eight years ago at the age of 92, I was his other life partner and soul mate. I first met James when he was in the full flow of designing his range of Classic Designs in the 1960s, which led to him becoming a cult figure in the alternative society of 1970s. In time I became his design partner and together with Ruth we were an unbreakable unit. I gave birth to his second son and together we gave birth to many new double canoe designs.

James achieved everything he set out to do in this lifetime, but only received public recognition from the establishment in more recent years. The final project was his autobiography, published a year ago as ‘People of the Sea’, on which he worked for many years, as he was very critical of his own writing. We worked together to complete it and to get it published.

People would refer to James as the great James Wharram, the living Legend, but he didn’t see himself as such. He was aware it was his large following of builders and sailors, their beautiful boats and great voyages that created the famous Wharram World. He saw them as the real heroes.

Sadly in the last few years James’ brain, which he always talked about as a separate entity, started to fail him due to Alzheimer’s. He was very distressed by losing his mental abilities, and struggled with his diminished existence. He could not face the prospect of further disintegration and made the very hard call to end it himself. It was with great courage that he lived his life and with great courage he decided it was the time to finish.

In this moment of great loss we should all remember the good and glorious times of a life fulfilled. This is not the end, I, we, all the Wharram World will keep his work alive.

With my fondest regards

Hanneke

https://www.wharram.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wharram

Wharram was born in Manchester, England. In 1953, after long studies into the records of boats of the Pacific in the libraries and museums of Britain, and inspired by Eric de Bisschop's book The voyage of the Kaimiloa,[1] he designed and built the first British ocean-going double-canoe-catamaran, the Tangaroa (length 23 feet 6 inches (7.16 m)) and in 1955–56 sailed with Jutta Schultze-Rohnhof and Ruth Merseburger,[2][3] across the Atlantic to Trinidad – the beginning of cruising and transatlantic crossing with a catamaran.[4][5]

No scholars in the Western world at this time believed that the Polynesians had boats capable of directed ocean voyages. Wharram believed otherwise and set out to prove it by doing it himself. He followed this first Atlantic crossing by building a 40-foot V-hull double canoe, Rongo, in Trinidad in 1957–58, with Bernard Moitessier's help, and sailing her across the North Atlantic in 1959 from New York to Ireland.[6] This was the first west-to-east crossing of the Atlantic by catamaran or multihull.

The story was told by Wharram in the 1969 book Two Girls Two Catamarans.[7]

From 1973 Wharram was assisted by his co-designer Hanneke Boon.[8] In 1987-92 James and his partners built a new flagship, the 63-foot catamaran Spirit of Gaia, which they sailed into the Pacific and round the world, to study Indo-Pacific canoe-craft (1994–98).

The Lapita Voyage[edit]

In 2008–09 James Wharram and Hanneke Boon conceived the Lapita Voyage expedition, sailing two double canoes based on traditional Polynesian hullform and crab claw sails, from the Philippines to Tikopia and Anuta in the Solomon Islands. The ‘Lapita Voyage’[9] was a major expedition in Experimental Marine Archaeology. It was the first exploration of one possible migration route into the Central Pacific by Ethnic sailing craft.[citation needed]

Wharram catamaran designs[edit]

Wharram designs are inspired by Polynesian double canoes and typically have an open deck, with small deckpod(s) for crew shelter. Wharram combined boat building with studies of Polynesian culture. Most modern catamarans are built as a single rigid structure thereby sustaining greater forces and stresses in waves, whereas on Wharrams the separate hulls are connected to the crossbeams with (synthetic) rope lashings, in true Polynesian style. The flexibility of the Wharram system makes the boats suffer less stress in ocean waves.[10]

Wharram's designs covered a range of sizes from the 14 feet (4.3 m) Hitia to the 63 feet (19 m) Pahi 63 Gaia.[11]

The rig on Wharrams since the early 1980s is the 'Wharram Wingsail Rig',[12] an appropriate tech squareheaded rig with low turbulence pocket round the mast and a short adjustable gaff at the head. The advantages of this rig are simplicity, low turbulence and the fact that it can be lowered in a following wind at any time. The Centre of effort on all Wharram rigs is kept low, giving them very good stability. No full-size Wharram has been known to have capsized.[13]

Many of the cabin interiors are designed to flexy-space principles, the concept being multi-purpose space on a human scale, in which less is more and the simpler the construction, the better. The slim v-shaped hulls have a very good speed/length ratio and all have canoe sterns, giving minimum drag, even when loaded. This hullshape requires no keels or boards to sail to windward, giving hulls with little draft and easy beachability. Wharram also keeps freeboards low for minimum windage.[14]

Personal life and death[edit]

Wharram died on 14 December 2021, at the age of 93.[15]

Memberships[edit]

Pahi 63, Wharram self built catamaran

Tiki 26, Wharram self built catamaran at Usedom

Pahi 63, Self built catamaran

• 1967 – 2021: British Marine (formerly the British Marine Industries Federation, BMIF).
• 1968 – 2021: Polynesian Catamaran Association (PCA). Founding Member.
• 1968 – 1975 Multihull Offshore Cruising and Racing Association (MOCRA). Founding Member.
• 1968 – 1978 Little Ship Club.
• 1973 – 2021: Royal Yachting Association (RYA).
• 1977 – 1991 Committee member of the RYA Cruising Committee
• 1992 – 2021: Andean Explorer’s Club. Honorary Member.
• 1996 – 2021: Roskilde Vikingship Museum friends.
• 2000 – 2021: Cruising Association.
• 2005 – 2021: Association of Yachting Historians.
• 2009 – 2021: Member of the Royal Geographical Society.

Publications[edit]

• Ocean-going catamarans. 1962. Ciba Technical Notes 231, Cambridge, UK
• Two Girls, Two Catamarans, 1969. Story of Ruth and Jutta, the Tangaroa and the Rongo
• Tehini. October 1970, Yachting Monthly, UK. Seminal article on Design approach.
• The Stable Multihull. 1976. (Researched for 1st World Multihull Symposium, Toronto.)
• The Sailing Community. 1978, Wooden Boat, USA, Prize-winning proposal for ‘Waterborne International Communities’.
• Catamaran Stability – Figures, Facts and Fictions. 1991. Practical Boat Owner, UK. Also published in several other countries.
• Nomads of the Wind. October 1994. Practical Boat Owner, UK. Analysis of the sailing qualities of the Polynesian Double Canoe.
• The Wharram Design Book: Build Yourself a Modern Sea - Going Polynesian Catamaran, 1996
• Going Dutch: The Tiki Wing Sail Rig. 1998, Practical Boat Owner, UK. Also published in several other countries, incl. Australia, Holland and France.
• Lessons from the Stone Age Sailors, A Study of Canoe Form Craft in the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
• Vikings go Home, November 2008. Classic Boat, UK. (Article about voyage of the 100 ft Vikingship reconstruction ‘Seastallion’ from Dublin to Denmark).

James Wharram and his several women were responsible for more owner-builders going to sea in their raft-type multihulls than all other designers of such vessels combined.    JB