I was born with eye trouble. As a kid, I was unable to play ball games or board games, but I was strangely drawn to playing alone with model boats. It’s been one damn boat after another, ever since.

In my teens, I was failing at everything I tried. I struggled with an identity crisis, hungered for offbeat adventure, and needed an occupation. At about age 22, I took a job as deck hand on a big sailing schooner. I loved the work and the boat, advanced to the rank of Mate, and acquired some sea time. That was my salvation, literally. It was my first taste of success, it gave me some identity and, because we had a diverse crew and we sailed to foreign countries, it exposed me to a wider world.

It even exposed me to the world of multihulls, which was just then becoming acculturated from ancient Oceania into the post WWII “west” — where it was not welcomed except by “lunatics.” Here was my chance to gain a unique identity. Like a voice crying out in the wilderness, I could shout, “Here I am! I am a multihull man.” And the wilderness was pretty much obliged to call back, “We notice you.”

But we multihullists were noticed with derision. The traditional nautical community said we were “on the lunatic fringe,” and with good cause at times. For most of us, the only way to get a multihull was to build it yourself, and few of us were boatwrights, so results were often crude. And unless you had some sea time, and few of us did, the only way to learn your seamanship was the hard way. In the trimaran field especially, (which is where I came into the fold), we had a rash of dismastings, steering failures and lubberly crack-ups. Nevertheless, there were some successes in voyaging and racing, just enough to reveal potential, and that really threatened the monohullists. Some respected yachtsmen and writers set up a raucous response to our now-vocal advocacy. As they saw it, we were an invasive species, cutting off their roots. We thought of it as ploughing virgin ground, and we loved it. We identified ourselves as “yachting’s underdogs,” and our boats gave us exclusiveness. They also gave us a chance to innovate, and a stone to roll.

As the political foment of the 1960s began to overflow, the multihull community naturally drifted toward the left. After all, we were already sailing as “the opposition,” and as the anti-Vietnam war movement amplified divisiveness, our multihull vs. monohull schism became more lively, sometimes even vicious. In this way, multihulls became icons of the counterculture which, I think, had a lot to do with their increasing popularity. In the 1960s and 70s, gradually the boats, their creators and their crews, disproved the multihull skeptics. In both racing and cruising, some epic sea stories emerged from that period, and by the 1980s, modern multihulls were being designed by trained professionals and production-built by competent manufacturers worldwide. To those of us who foresaw this change a’coming, it comprised perhaps the greatest sea change in all of marine architecture. Personally, I think it was that mono/multi vendetta — perhaps more than anything else — that dragged the ancient outriggers out of obscurity. We simply adapted their ancient configurations to the newly available postwar materials and design, and, thereby created an entirely new genus of watercraft.

But what, really, was so great about these creatures? To avoid sounding like a sales brochure, I will leave that answer to, well, the sales brochures. Even they, however, don’t often make the central point. They rave about the speed, the safety and the spaciousness of multihulls, but I think it has more to do with their versatility.

Multihulls can have a property that is so rare in boats that, when it’s there, it is often overlooked.
What’s that? It is the combination of splendid seakeeping with shallow draft — offshore worthiness with beachability. This conjunction favors not only high seas navigation, but also access to the planet’s huge, under-trespassed littoral zone — where the water gets together with the land. Indeed, that combination can exist more successfully in multihulls than in any other watercraft, and it explains most objectively why I went a’multihulling. Subjectively? It was that Freudian blather, like identity, exclusiveness and counterculture.

It was also about things like paranoia, escape and survival, but those are answers to questions not yet asked. So it is that in my 65 years of personal involvement with multihulls, as a sailor, builder, designer and pesky proponent, I have seen them thrash upwind from the lunatic fringe to the main stream. They may never be “traditional.” But they have certainly become “establishment,” and in a way, this seems a shame to me, because it means that a prime attraction from the early days — exclusiveness — is gone.