THE FAILED DROWNING OF WOODY BROWN
By Jim Brown

Yes, as of this writing (2007) Woody Brown is still alive and well in Hawaii at age ninety five. [Woody died a year after this was written.] He was an early Waikiki beach boy, a champion glider pilot, an early big-wave surf rider and the innovating, originating, trail blazing progenitor of the first modern seafaring multihull, 1947.

Woody had been a soaring enthusiast before World War II, had built his own manned sailplanes out of wood, and with them he won longstanding international records for altitude, distance and duration. His sailplanes were often less sophisticated than those of his then-champion German competitors, so I asked him why he did so well at gliding:

“I was nature boy,” he said. “Ever since I was a little kid I loved to watch the soaring birds, they could fly without flapping their wings! ‘If I could just be like that,’ I thought. Then I used to sleep on the concrete floors out at Mitchell Field (Long Island New York) just to be around the airplanes. That’s where I met Lindberg; he was getting ready for his flight across the Atlantic. He was my hero, but then I went to Elmyra, New York and learned about gliders. And I realized that powered aircraft were pretty crude. With enough power you can make a barn door fly, but the glider, to stay up there without any motor, depends on its perfection. I thought, ‘Now that’s working with nature instead of against it,’ and I just carried that with me all the way.”

So it happened that un-powered flight became a key element in the global context from which the modern multihull emerged. Here was a guy who could “see air.” That is, he knew enough about the atmosphere, how it behaved and what gaseous flow was all about to really soar in that medium.

Woody was also a sailor but just sailing was not enough for him, and it was not sailing but surfing that became the next factor in the multihull context. Woody was one of only four or five guys who dared to ride Oahu’s windward side giant surf on the old “swastika” boards, those solid wood, displacement planks that had limited speed and maneuverability. They learned the hard way that such boards were inadequate for “riding “in the steep and fast-moving lip” of huge breakers. Together these “aquabats” soon evolved the modern planning, straight-run, square tailed, fin-equipped surf boards that were fast enough to cut across the curling crests of huge waves without “sliding ass” (broaching). So Woody was a guy who not only could see air but sense water, sense the currents and cornices of onrushing liquid dunes, and devise a tool for turning their power into a big kid’s playground. Both technically and empirically he understood the dynamics of flow in both fluids. Here was an intellect just ripe for exposure to the ancient outrig concept. The very notion of the multihull was lurking in antiquity and waiting for a future to be catalyzed by something cataclysmic, like a war.

During World War II Woody was a conscientious objector (at a time when that just wasn’t done) but he served on a survey team sent to Christmas Island to lay out an airstrip. It was there that he noticed the native single-outrigger canoes: “The military had hired a bunch of native boys to do the work, explained Woody, “and they had come from all the surrounding islands in their outrigger canoes. That was their way of life, sailing canoes.” Add lifestyle to the multihull context.

When examining these swift, Weatherly craft Woody was intrigued by their asymmetry. The main hulls of these single outriggers were longitudinally curved or “fat” on one side and were relatively straight or “flat” on the other. They were called vakas, (now known as shunting proas) and were descended from the ancient Micronesian voyaging canoes, which were the first real seafaring vessels known to mankind. Due to the limitations in materials and tools imposed on their creators, and due to the fact that they had to operate from the beach, these Stone Age but sophisticated craft had no keels, centerboards or rudders. But something was needed, Woody realized, to provide lateral resistance. “Those canoes sailed either end forward,” he explained, “always keeping their outrigger float – and the main hull’s fat side – toward the wind. And when they took me for rides in them I could see that they did indeed sail well enough to windward, and they were so fast! One day we even passed the navy’s motor launch! I told them, ‘No white man’s sailboat can do that! Man when I get home I’m gonna build me one.’”

He came home at a special time; the early postwar period when modern materials like plywood, fiberglass, waterproof adhesives, light metals and synthetic fabrics and cordage all were becoming commonly available for the first time.. But it was more than a materials-driven epoch. It was the age of great optimism. The developed world was high from defeating the despots in Europe and Asia, and Americans felt they were a special people; they could do anything and solve any problem with technology, wealth and will.

Back in Honolulu, Woody personified this optimism. He and his friend Alfred Kumalae, a gifted woodworker, prowled the catacombs of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum where the world’s largest collection of ancient outrigged watercraft is housed. There they met Kenneth Amory, a venerated anthropologist who had recorded the material culture of the Tuamotu Archipelago, including its canoes. It was Amory who convinced Woody and Alfred that the asymmetric hulls of the native proas were not the result of Stone Age craftsmanship or of working with crooked logs. No indeed, these “lopsided” hull forms, were proven over millennia to improve windward performance.

Recognizing that the asymmetric hull was a highly sophisticated solution to the problem of lateral resistance in extremely shoal draft sailing boats, Woody deduced that the concept would also apply to a twin-hulled vessel that tacked to windward instead of shunting. The catamaran, like the proa, could keep the fat side of its downwind hull – the one more burdened by heeling and thus more deeply immersed – always toward the wind. As an aviator Woody knew that asymmetry, as in the section of a wing immersed horizontally in flowing air, generates lift. In an asymmetric hull immersed vertically in flowing water this was “lift” on edge and toward the wind! Furthermore these ancient vessels, being free of vulnerable appendages, were ideal for operating from the beach. What beach? Waikiki of course, that placenta joining land and sea that had served to gestate the ancient Hawaiians into riders of surf. This was also the motherwater that brought Woody and so many others into a world where big waves were not to be feared but instead enjoyed. Now, added to the ancient outrigger concept there was life style, new materials, optimism, aeronautics and aquabatics; the modern multihull was ready to happen.

In 1945 Woody built a 3’ model catamaran to express his newfound notions. The model sailed well; he learned a lot from it. Then came a 16’ prototype catamaran. It sailed like what it was, the first little beach cat, and because of its asymmetric hulls it may rightly be called the predecessor to the early Hobie 14 and 16 which would lead the way to a blizzard of similar craft that are now the most popular small sailboats of all time. As a matter of fact, it was sailing in Woody’s prototype that set Hobie Alter on his course to beach cat fame. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves and away from the central qualifier here; seafaring.

By 1946 the die was cast. Woody designed, and Woody together with Alfred began to build, a 38 foot-long, very lean, asymmetric-hulled, extremely light weight catamaran. This vessel was literally built as if to fly. Working with all hand tools – no electricity on the uncovered site – they crafted frequent-but spidery plywood ring frames and frequent-but-delicate lumber longerons all of Sitka spruce. This comprised a bird-like skeleton that was then covered with a thin skin; Quarter inch sheet plywood on the hulls’ outboard “flat” sides; double-diagonal cold molded 1/8” veneers on their “fat” inboard sides; all converging at a robust laminated combination keel, stem and sternpost. The streamlined, cold molded wing joining the two hulls had internal trussed shear webs that were integral with main bulkheads in the hulls. Consistent with classic wooden aircraft construction the weight of the skeleton and the weight of the skin were divided more or less equally between the two and the weight of each, plus the weight of everything else – including even paint – was considered in grams. All woodwork was bonded with urea-formaldehyde “waterproof” glue, and all glue-clamping fasteners were removed after the adhesive had set. “I was an airplane man,” said Woody, “and it was a sin to leave a nail or a screw in the structure of an airplane.” Thus Woody Brown and friends brought wooden aircraft construction into boats, a stimulus that has since extended to today’s aerospace technology being used in boats (honeycomb/carbon sandwich construction as in the America’s Cup vessels and the mostly French racing multihulls).

Named Manu Kai (Sea Bird), Woody’s 38-foot catamaran was carried to the water by the loving hands of his many friends. “Hawaiians love to clown around” he said. “As the boat was moving toward the water, two of the beach boys got underneath the wing and made like they were carrying the thing on the tips of their fingers.” No one in this impromptu group knew it at the time, and they wouldn’t have cared, but sixty years later Manu Kai would be acknowledged as the first truly modern, seafaring multihull. What makes a modern multihull modern? Light weight!

Woody didn’t know it then, but Manu Kai and her progeny would become his meal ticket for the next forty years. Waikiki tourists soon grew tired of sun and sand and now they could take to the water for thrilling joyrides under sail. Impressed with their new moneymaking tool Woody and friends soon ventured to cross the boisterous channels between Hawaii’s high islands. A nearly constant trade wind gale blows down the inter-island channels, and this generates probably the most mature-but-refracted seaway of any yachting center in the world. In races between islands in this kind of open sea the Manu Kai proved herself a startling performer. Clearly she was something totally new under the sun. She was not an adaptation of her ancient predecessors, not a re-creation, replica or imitation of some Stone Age contraption. No, she was part sailplane and part surfboard but born as a sailboat with mirror-image Siamese twin hulls joined at the wing. Perfectly adapted to the local water and the global context, she was indeed a new genus of boat. Yes, she had descended through eons of evolution to emerge, as all new species do, the result of forced adaptation to a changing environment. But as a specimen she was as yet unclassified and rare, so rare that she was, as her creator still is today, literally one of a kind.

Woody was also mentor to many. Manu Kai attracted the attention of a young Hawaiian named Rudy Choy. Ten years later the Choy-designed catamaran Aikane (Friend) would stun the yachting world by easily – if unofficially – out sailing the venerated 83-foot racing ketch Ticonderoga in the 1957 Trans-Pacific Race. Rudy then went on to co-found CSK catamarans, the 1960s custom builders of the world’s first true multihull yachts.

Of course these upstart vessels attracted the attention of other designers world wide, and besides the rather frantic quest for speed, cruising multihull designs now became available for owner building. Beginning in the late fifties, designers like James Wharram and Arthur Piver spearheaded a craze that resulted in literally thousands of utilitarian catamarans and trimarans being launched from the back yards of neophyte adventurers world wide. Moreover, the ebullience of the fifties had given way to the threat of nuclear annihilation, and Americans realized that at least some problems like poverty, bigotry and apathy, defy solution. The trimaran Everyman sailed into the nuclear test zone, and multihulls became the anti-yachts of the anti-establishment. Add adventure, escape and counterculture to the multihull context.

But of course the world twirled onward toward the morning. Woody’s Manu Kai has since combined her small passenger capacity with that of hundreds of much larger “cattlemaran” excursion boats now operating from the warm water resorts world wide. These vessels have exposed literally millions of people to the sensations of multihull sailing, and an astounding variety of production multihulls, both power and sail, now constitute the growth area in an otherwise contracting marketplace.

After our interviews with Woody, we took him for a rousing sail. We arranged for two sister ships of his original Manu Kai to come together off a beachfront park near Lahaina, Maui. Both vessels had been built to Woody’s original plans for operating in the tourist trade from Hawaiian beaches. Both were acquired as derelicts by their present owners, Phil Carr and Tom Warren, and literally reconstituted to sail today. Clearly devoted to Woody’s designs, Phil and Tom were excited by the prospect of getting him, at least one more time, out upon the waters of Hawaii.

Woody is a bit unsteady on his feet but with a little help from Barry Choy, he managed to ambulate the two blocks from the parking lot down to the beach, board a dinghy, shoot the surf and scramble aboard Phil Carr’s Manu Kai, namesake to the original. (Barry is the son and partner of Rudy Choy. Together they campaigned AIKANE X-5, their 62-footracing catamaran to set a record of less than seven days for crossing from California to Hawaii in 1989. It was a great shame that Rudy could not be in the cockpit for this present caper with Woody; he is still living at 88, but a recent stroke had deprived him of his mobility.) Scott Brown (a renowned Canadian cinematographer but no relation to the author or to Woody) boarded the other sister ship, Tom Warren’s Kamehameha, from where he kept his video camera whirring at us all the way.

We set sail and headed out beyond the wind line for perhaps the most fulfilling boat ride of my own long multihull involvement. It was on this ride that I told Woody we had met before – 50 years before – when he and his crew of two Hawaiians took me for my first ride in a modern multihull from Waikiki in 1957. When I recounted that experience to Woody and told him of my Searunner trimaran designs I think he understood that he had shaped my life, but I don’t think .he yet understands how profoundly he will shape the lives of so many mariners yet to come. Recreational multihulls have joined the main stream of popular culture, but it is the commercial – even the military – motorized multihulls, that now constitute a sea change in marine architecture. These futuristic vessels, like their sailing forbears, not only achieve the highest speed with the smoothest ride and the greatest safety of any seagoing configuration known, they also exhibit unprecedented energy efficiency. It is this property that now assures their increasing importance to humankind, and in my view it is certain that modern rigs and sails will also play a part in that importance.

But when going for a rollicking ride in one’s nineties, who cares about that stuff? Not Woody. As we get under way, he is seen to become a kid again:

Driven by gusts pouring over Maui’s volcanic heights, the boats are cantering side-by-side among white horses in the Molokai Channel. I look back at the parallel wakes and am reminded of taxiing for takeoff in float planes with their similar twin wakes of salt steam. Woody whoops for joy, takes the helm, shouts orders and tells stories of his days soaring beyond the height of adequate oxygen, of riding giant waves on little boards, and of running off in mid-ocean storms in boats just like these that we are in right now!

Tom and Phil, being as excited as Woody to have this happening, begin to spur their steeds, competing for the hardest drives, the highest spray and the closest calls. By today’s standards these are very narrow catamarans; only fourteen feet of beam for their 38’ length (modern multis sometimes approach equal beam to length). I can feel that we have seemingly minimal stability in these featherweight and capsizable boats, and they are being sailed by excited, competing friends in rowdy gusts on a peak occasion. I am concerned by the prospect of us becoming known as the guys who drowned Woody Brown. I plead for caution, but Woody is unconcerned. At the height of one 35-knot gust he yells with glee, “Now we’re all going swimming.” But Phil and Tom know what they’re doing; they play their main sheets constantly like sailing giant dinghies and we stay “on both buns.”

As the two vintage boats tear offshore to rollick among the
many breaching whales and wheeling birds we slash through the waves under cottonball clouds, then mosey in the lee of high and verdant islands, then dash out again. Woody waxes eloquently of jibing only while catching a big wave, of discovering the spiritual meaning of aloha, and of living life doing what you love. We are all reluctant to return, but as the sun gets low and the wind dies down we bask in the spell of a seminal sailing event.

So it is that this thumbnail account of the modern multihull ends here just sixty years from its origin, and the saga of one wondrous wag named Woodridge is, at his age of 95, left happily incomplete.

Author’s contact: outrig.org AT gmail DOT com