Date happened: 1957>59
Third chapter for Jim Brown’s memoir of modern multihull history and lore.
Summary
Chapter 3 The Skipper
THE SKIPPER

The author becomes a disciple of Arthur Piver, the Father of the Modern Trimaran. (Other key multihull personalities are featured in subsequent chapters). Story of author’s commitment to multihulls; countercultural schism between multis and monos begins. Building JUANA, marriage to Jo Anna, departure for points south in the first modern seafaring trimaran with Jo Anna 5 ½ months pregnant carrying their firstborn Steven. Click here to read Chapter 3 of Jim Brown’s “AMONG THE MULTIHULLS.”

Note: The following description of Among The Multihulls is repeated here from the Summaries for Chapters 1 and 2.

FULL DESCRIPTION

Multihull pioneer Jim Brown, after fifty years of designing, building and seafaring in catamarans, trimarans and proas, here offers Chapter 3 of his personal memoir. The focus of this two-volume work is on how the advent of modern multihulls has shaped the authors life and the lives of his colleagues, clients, shipmates and family. Volume One recounts multihull incidents and milestones from the 1940s to the 1970s, with a second volume in preparation covering from the ‘70s to the present. Brown identifies the cultural and geopolitical context from which modern multihulls emerged; explains the phases of their design, construction and application; and traces their progress from derision to acceptance in yachting, ocean racing, seasteading, and in commercial and military service.

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Chapter 3

THE SKIPPER

Sausalito, as seen from out in San Francisco Bay, first appears as a scruffy harbor front town, but on closer examination the waterfront marinas are stretched beneath a classy bedroom community that clings to the steep slopes of an often fog-capped mountain ridge. To the south, which is on the far left, there are two huge, disembodied towers that thrust above the fog. They are festooned with great cables that swoop down into cloud. It is The Golden Gate Bridge.

My deal with Wolf and Jeannie was that I would learn about fiberglass. We wanted to build our own boat of this then new material, and not a lot was known about how to work with it in larger craft. I heard that there was only one company in the United States using fiberglass to build a substantial cruising sailboat. it was located in Sausalito, California, a town just north of the Golden Gate that I’d never heard of. I arrived there in the summer of 1957 having crossed the country by motorcycle, and was promptly hired on at the Coleman Boat and Plastics Company.

Factory work was a jarring contrast for a boat bum but it proved to be a crucial experience for what was to come. This company was developing a manufacturing process for the forty-foot full-keel sloop called Bounty Two. The original Bounty had been a popular prewar design by Philip Rhodes for traditional wood construction, and it had been adapted here for fiberglass as the pioneering Bounty II. The commercial premise was that molded fiberglass could take the requirements of experience and skill out of boat building thereby transforming a costly custom yacht into an accessible consumer product. To demonstrate this premise, Coleman’s would hire unskilled labor; Embarcadero wharf rats, North Beach Bohemians and even boat bum bikers. Consequently the firm was dubbed by its employees the Coleman Bloat and Spastics Company. It was a great place to work. The production process was developmental. Any employee who had a good idea was given free rein to experiment. Know-how developed there contributed much to the fiberglass revolution in boat building but Coleman’s eventually went broke. I learned about more than fiberglass. I learned that trailblazers can easily expend themselves in finding the way only to have others later pave their footpaths with thoroughfares. The real skill in pioneering, as in business and life, is survival.

Sausalito was still recovering from having been a shipyard town during World War II, where dozens of Liberty ships and thousands of landing craft were produced for the Pacific campaign. At War’s end the original harbor front land owners, two aging Portuguese fisherman brothers named Arques, inherited a mile of shipyard junk from the Government and promptly undertook to make a living from it as “unimproved” housing. Semi-squatters were allowed to set up residence in the old tool shacks and wharfinger’s cabins and aboard the many beached hulks of rusting ferryboats, decaying lumber scooters and still-floating ammunition barges. Toilets discharged directly into San Francisco Bay. For thirty dollars down, two roles of garden hose, a propane bottle and several extension cords I set up housekeeping in a blocked-up landing craft, got to know my eccentric neighbors, worked at the boat factory and on weekends rode my BSA 650 on the nearby mountain byways. From my houseboat the view of Alcatraz and San Francisco was glorious especially at night and the Sausalito social scene was scintillating. For a while there I wished for nothing more but soon began to feel boatless.

The news from Miami was good. Jeannie got on with an airline and with her regular income she and Wolf rented an apartment with a back yard where Wolf was building a trimaran out of, yes, war surplus wing tanks. This was to be his means of returning himself, his cameras and all his photos and movie film (including those taken of us as a triumvirate) to Germany. He was to appear there in a long-planned television adventure series, and the TV station that had given him the cameras before he left Germany now wanted them, and him, back. He would be adequately paid. We were all performing according to the master plan hatched that magical night at Old Providence Island.

A few months later, Jeannie wrote that Wolf had launched his wing-tank trimaran and made a fast passage to New York from where the trade winds could sweep him across the 3,500 miles of North Atlantic to Europe. We eagerly awaited news of his arrival.

The Initiation…

At this time I began to learn of other activity in multiple-hulled boats. The first news was of small day-racing catamarans being developed in England and Australia, but the tip that got my attention was of a forty-foot Hawaiian-built catamaran named WAIKIKI SURF that had sailed across the 2,400-miles of Pacific to Los Angeles in 1955. The passage was made against the trade winds, and a real gale had developed in mid ocean but the upstart boat and crew had made the trip in less than sixteen days, a feat that was regarded as beyond human experience at the time. The designer and builder of the craft was said to be named Brown, Woody Brown. Like many traditional sailors I couldn’t help regarding the whole story as bogus.

Then I learned that this Was not the first Hawaiian catamaran of seagoing size. There had been a 38-footer, named MANU KAI, launched in 1947 by the same Woody Brown. It was originally intended for taking tourists for joyrides off the beach at Waikiki, but the boat had also competed well with monohulls on inter-island races. This made me want to go to Hawaii to find out more, but I was working and trying to save.

Then came yet more word of another Hawaiian catamaran named AIKANE (Friend in Hawaiian), this one very nicely designed and built by a friend and associate of Woody Brown named Rudy Choy. It too had sailed across from Hawaii to Los Angeles, and its owner had asked to enter the 1957 trans-Pacific yacht race to Honolulu. All I heard was that he was denied official entry by the race committee, and so decided to “accompany” the monohull fleet back to Hawaii unofficially. Leaving hours after the proper entrants, this catamaran arrived off Honolulu more than a day before the official winner, a famous ketch more than twice the length of the catamaran. This was downright humiliating to the yachting establishment, and I now suspect the incident initiated the mono/multi schism that would become a divisive part of yachting for the next fifty years.

With the impatient tutelage of my shipyard neighbor Don Kogut, an assiduous student of yacht design, I now learned that this upset was nothing new. Going back as far as 1878, the venerated Nathaniel Herreshoff, dean of American yacht designers, had also been prohibited from racing his developmental catamarans against the spangled fleet of the New York Yacht Club. He had humiliated them once with his futuristic catamaran named AMERYLLIS and was promptly banned. That incident appeared to have effectively halted multihull development until after World War II. However, with this news of AIKANE and other activity in small day sailing catamarans I suspected that this time, multihulls were not going away. I had to find out for my project with Wolf and Jeannie, and for myself. In a fit of great extravagance I flew to Hawaii, met Woody Brown and sailed with him in one of his Waikiki joy riders named ALII KAI, And I came home dazzled but frightened.

Woody was a wonderfully affable host, ebullient, even effusively enthusiastic about his boat, and he gave me a demonstration of its speed from which I’ll never quite recover. We left from the Waikiki beachfront, sailed right out through the surf while dodging surf riders enjoying the beneficent swells breaking on the outer reef. Rounding Diamond Head far enough to feel the gusts for which the Hawaiian inter-island channels are infamous, my first impression was that the boat did not heel to these gusts to spill excessive wind but instead stood up to convert all that wind power into raw, head-snapping acceleration. She went streaking through the waves like a seaplane on takeoff.

But she was cranky. In the hardest gusts she would not head up into the wind. Even with the tiller bar held hard down the boat kept driving off, actually running away to lou’ard despite the efforts of the crew. When pushed way beyond what I assumed would be the point of boat crash, with one hull almost flying free of the surface in this 38-foot boat, the sheets were finally released to bring the runaway under control. Woody and his Hawaiian crew felt this was the greatest fun, and expressed their joy rather vocally but I was shocked into silence. Beating back to the beach, I noticed that the boat was very slow in tacking, requiring that both the jib and the rudder be backed, and coming out of the tacks she was sluggish and aimless. Furthermore it appeared to me that her interior could not be made livable. Thus it happened that my initiation into modern multihulls was a hard hazing. I was frightened by so much speed with so little control. I just didn’t understand what was going on. I later learned that the boat’s behavior was partly explained by the fact that MANU KAI and the other Hawaiian Beach cats were just that; intended for operating to and from the beaches. Of necessity they had no keels and, most significantly, shallow rudders. Yet these guys had taken them to sea with historic results!

Neither was I taken with Hawaii. It was physically fabulous but too discovered, too expensive and too Americanized to give me the thrill of foreign travel. Of course I didn’t see enough of it or stay long enough to give the place a fair shake, and I’ve been back since and loved it, but at the time I was too jolted by raw speed to feel a future for myself or my friends in Hawaiian catamarans. Maybe it was my schooner background. Looking back I realize that, like most initiates to this new phenomenon I was too well washed by my schooner experience, and its traditional maritime heritage, to identify with this new phenomenon. Perhaps more than with other choices, when we choose a boat we select an identity for ourselves. I was still a schooner bum at heart.

Lost Leader…

On returning to my Sausalito landing craft there was a letter from Jeannie. Seven weeks had elapsed since Wolf’s departure from New York, and there had been no word of his arrival anywhere. The Coast Guard had put out an “overdue notice” to shipping, but there had been no “sightings.” We were both stunned. While we waited we continued corresponding but there was not much to say. The very thought of him dying in the sea was painful for us both and the hard part was not knowing. We didn’t even know how to contact his mother in Germany or his brother in Barbados. It seemed impossible for him to disappear because his boat, even the pieces of his boat, could not sink. He was traveling in shipping lanes so it seemed the most likely disaster would be collision with a ship. We could not imagine him surviving without contacting us. This limbo went on for weeks.

I began to contemplate building a cruising boat for myself. With great trepidation I told Jeannie of this plan. I finally asked if she would consider a visit to California. She declined, saying that she’d had enough adventure for a while and was enjoying her job and her house. In the end we each found that the best way to recover from having lost our leader was to pursue our individual lives in earnest.

(I lost track of her then and have not seen or heard of her since. Jeannie Miller, if you’re reading this, where are you? As described in Volume Two, it was 35 years before I would see Wolfgang again. No photos of our earlier time together had survived his wing-tank capsize in the North Atlantic.)

The Ancients…

My multihull education continued. Don Kogut undertook to clue me in on their historical background, and I soon realized that multihulls emerged very much within a global context. Long before the time of Christ, Pacific mariners devised the three basic multihull configurations still in evidence today. These vessel types now are called catamaran, trimaran and proa. All utilize two or three very narrow hulls, originally dugout or even solid logs, so narrow that they are easily driven even through rough water. One such narrow hull alone would be unstable (tippy) even while at rest, so the ancient architects spaced at least two of them wide apart and joined them together with outrigger beams and platforms. With this arrangement and much development they achieved vessels having good seakeeping properties combined with remarkable speed and, coincidentally, safety. These vessels were composed entirely of vegetable fiber and so could not sink even if flooded, capsized or dismembered.

I was quite amazed by what the ancients had done with these boats. Kogut gave me things to read that described how the early Polynesians and Micronesians made planned voyages of thousands of miles exploring much of the Pacific basin. In this vast wilderness, by far the largest single space on Earth, they colonized all the habitable islands thereby disbursing themselves over a wider area of the planet than any other race in their time. Much of this migration transpired during the same era, (the first and second millennia B.C.) in which the Phoenicians, the earliest European seafarers, felt their way around Africa in monohulls, always within sight of land. Our own rich maritime tradition is largely euro-based, yet if “traditional” means old, multihulls are the most traditional of all seafaring watercraft. However, the Pacific vessel types were (and still are) poor load carriers. Their narrow hulls easily outsailed the ponderous square-riggers in which the first Europeans arrived in the Pacific in the mid 1600’s, but the multi’s could not support the weight of cargo and cannon. If they could have, we might not be speaking English today.

Multihulls of ancient design are still operating now in the Pacific and Indian Ocean Islands – even as far west as the east coast of Africa. These stone-age craft, amazing lash-ups of sticks and string, were seen sailing on atoll lagoons at motorboat speeds by servicemen during World War II. To some extent the modern multihull was born as just another of the cross-cultural exchanges resulting from that war.

As early as 1662 there had been efforts to update the ancient Pacific multihulls but not until the decade beginning with 1945 did the essential ingredient of “modern” multihulls appear. Working more or less independently, inventors in such far-flung locations as Hawaii, Britain, California and Australia all struck upon the component that had not been present in the type since the Stone Age; it was light weight. Many of the ancient multihulls were wonderfully light for the materials and tools available to their builders, but the advances in materials science during WW II now became commonly and inexpensively available to anyone. Things like plywood, fiberglass, light metals, waterproof adhesives, synthetic fibers for sails and cordage, and stainless steel rigging wire… All combined to bring unprecedented strength, lightness, stiffness and efficient use of wind power to these sprawling seacraft. Now the postwar pioneers were in position to literally re-invent the multihull and make it “modern.” A smattering of experimenters – unregulated and often untrained and so unfettered by the constraints of traditional marine architecture – began to apply to multihulls what they knew of aeronautics, mechanical engineering and the new materials But it took more than materials and experimenters. Let’s pick up the story again in 1957:

“Live Buoyancy To Loo’ard”…

Arthur Piver (“rhymes with diver”) began sailing in his youth aboard his father’s fine 60-foot schooner Eloise. In his teens, the vessel traveled to Hawaii where he was attracted to the single-outrigger surfing canoes of Waikiki. Art became an avid surf rider in the days of wooden surfboards and he believed that the growing popularity of surfing was going to be responsible for the coming of an age where young people were no longer afraid of the ocean. “I grew up knowing that a big wave was something to be enjoyed,” he said.

In his mid forties Piver built a small sailing catamaran from one of the many kits offered by Skip Creger, who is acknowledged as a true multihull trailblazer. However, Piver said of his first catamaran, “The thing would go like stink on a reach, but it wouldn’t come about, wouldn’t go to windward, and was prone to diving the lee bow. It would trip on its own nose, and its upwind stern would somersault diagonally over its downwind bow. I thought I could do better than that.”

He subscribed to the journal of the Amateur Yacht Research Society (AYRS), a grapevine for watercraft inventors worldwide. Piver learned there of the work of one Victor Tchetchet, an eccentric, jovial Russian artist and boating hobbyist living in New York. As early as 1945, Tchetchet built the first of several boats that may be called modern sailing trimarans. (Tchetchet coined the term “trimaran” (long before Wolfgang used “trrri-maran” that night at Providencia. “Catamaran” apparently descends from the Austronesian “katu maram” meaning logs joined together). Dr. John Morwood, director of the AYRS, offered certain recommendations to Piver on how the trimaran configuration might be improved, and Piver realized from his catamaran experience that the outrigger hulls of Tchetchet’s boats were not long and buoyant enough to resist diving the downwind bow. In a succession of almost frenzied experiments during 1956-7 Piver and his friend Fred Jukich built and tested several small prototypes thereby arriving at the basic trimaran configuration still in use today. His 16-foot Frolic had long, very buoyant bows on its outboard “float” hulls, a serious dagger board to resist side slipping leeway when going to windward, and shallow ends on its main hull to facilitate turning. The float hulls were mounted rather high to barely touch the water’s surface when the boat was turning head-to-wind while tacking, and this greatly improved maneuverability. There was a deep vertical rudder for crisp steering, and the mast and sails were mounted rather well aft on the vessel to further discourage depressing the bows. This craft was crudely built of plywood, glue and nails, and its mast was made of a discarded TV antenna. Sails were made of transparent plastic film stuck together with tape, and the hulls were painted with a mixture of leftover house paint, “vomit yellow.”

But this was essentially the “perfect” double outrigger canoe. With a reference from Don Kogut I contacted Art Piver and sailed in this boat. I was amazed by its ability to ram right through the raucous conditions in the Golden Gate. San Francisco Bay has about the strongest sailing winds, day in and day out, of any sailing center in the world. This wind, when blowing against the roaring tides of the Gate, sets up a chop that looks like little Matterhorns; the waves are steep, very close together, and have three sides on them. When they break, their crests fall down all three sides at once and are seemingly replenished like fountains from within. Piver’s little Frolic could go bashing through that stuff at alarming speed under complete control. It was like dirt-bike racing over knee-deep potholes, but this collection of little plywood boxes held together. And it was responsive, forgiving and fun! Perhaps most important it was inexpensive. Weighing only 200 pounds it was light enough to be manhandled on the beach or on a trailer and it could be built by a clever scrounger for about a dollar per pound.

Because Piver and I both had schooner backgrounds we had something to talk about besides these little trimarans. I told him of my time in the Caribbean, and he remarked that I was the first experienced sailor to be attracted to his work; we were copasetic from the start. I was a bit put off by his persistence in calling monohulls “ordinary boats,” and by his branding of ballast keels as “technical absurdities,” but I began to understand the multihull concept in his terminology “live buoyancy to loo’ard.” He explained, “Instead of gaining stability by carrying a huge pendulum underneath the boat, which does more to pull it down than stand it up, we’ve got the loo’ard float lifting up. It’s live buoyancy instead of dead weight. Of course, catamarans operate on the same principle, but they’re narrower overall than trimarans, They need two centerboards and two rudders, and there’s really no good place to step the mast or attach the headstay. The cat might be faster on some points of sail, but the trimaran is more intuitive to sail. It just makes more sea sense to me.”

It did to me too. Perhaps because of my monohull background I liked the notion of a real boat in the middle with “training wheels” on both sides. After the worry of trying to sail JANEEN, with her fifteen foot-deep keel, in Bahama waters I was enthralled with the multihull’s shallow draft. Right from the start I felt that its real difference was its unique combination of shoal draft with what I could see were exceptional seakeeping properties. (It is that combination – not so much its speed – that I believe continues to distinguish the multihull to this day.)

Arthur’s demeanor ashore was that of a solid businessman and family man but once away from the dock he became animated and boyish, leading the way to a wacky brand of camaraderie that was infectious. He had a lovely home in nearby Mill Valley, two lively teen-age daughters and a very gracious wife, but no sons to sail with him. For a time there our friendship became rather thick, and I undertook to help him sell the rudimentary plans he was drawing for his upstart little vessels. We both felt like proselytizers with a worthy cause.

There were other Piver disciples early on, young men like Lauren Williams who eventually did most of Piver’s drafting; Don Kogut whose light weight and quick sheet work made him Piver’s crew in many small boat races; the Viking-like Rich Gurling who eventually sailed with Piver on many ocean voyages; and Piver’s long-time “bosom buddy” Fred Jukich, an absolute wild man in a boat and no Mr. Milquetoast ashore.

Soon I joined this fraternity by building a Frolic for myself just to have a boat on San Francisco Bay. I knew next-to-nothing of boat building but watched Art and Fred fabricate their Rube Goldberg boats, and figured I could do as well. They knew little of working fiberglass so I was able to assist, which brought a level of permanence to our otherwise disposable creations. Soon there was a little fleet of these nifty new watercraft dashing about on the Bay. We all felt like we knew something nobody else had realized: multihulls really work!

.From Sausalito the challenge of sailing in the Golden Gate is always available. With my Frolic I soon took up the practice, initiated by Piver and Jukich, of chasing inbound freighters through the Bridge, surfing their wakes at break neck speed while whooping and hollering to the dumbfounded crews of these huge commercial vessels. This kind of sailing soon suggested that a larger trimaran of similar configuration would make a very capable seagoing boat. We all suspected it but nobody talked about it.

When my paychecks from the boat factory began to bounce I took to building houses in the High Sierra. One day while working in the snow, the original commitment with Wolf and Jeannie came back to me strongly; I was seized by the desire to go back to the Caribbean and I had to go in my own boat. I imagined that by adding one more sheet of plywood to Frolic’s sixteen-foot length the resulting hull would be 24-feet long, and that seemed huge by comparison. I thought it would be enough boat for a long mostly coastal voyage down the western seaboard to Panama and points east.

Returning to Sausalito I discovered to my surprise that Piver already had drawn a 24-footer but it was intended only for day sailing with a crew of four. One such boat had been completed, and he gave me the name of its owner. I contacted Carlton Eugene, an auto upholstery man in San Francisco. His boat was rather roughly but adequately built for $600 in materials. We sailed it out the Gate to Mile Rock and the Potatopatch shoal where conditions are often raucous. Carleton’s was the first of Piver’s Nugget class trimarans, and seeing it sail right through gruesome overfalls in the Potatopatch was all I needed. Feeling the bottom, these waves literally turn somersaults, conditions that would even razz the big schooner… except that JANEEN, with her fifteen-foot draft, could never get into the Potatopatch. She’d be lying on her side at the edge of the shoal half full of water with seas bursting against her windward bilge, her crew stranded a mile from shore.

Nugget convinced me that if equipped with a little cuddy cabin it could become as seaworthy as any small open boat could be. It had the great advantage of being beachable, which I took to mean that its crew could conceivably find refuge somewhere along almost any shore.

When I expressed this opinion to Arthur Piver he thought for a long moment and finally said “Jim, you know what you’re doing, so I suppose you could sail a boat like that anywhere.” It seems now that the seafaring trimaran marks its own conception at that moment. I rented space in Fred Jukich’s sign shop and started building my Nugget trimaran. I did not know what I was doing.

A Doctor On Board?…

About four months later when the boat was half finished I met Jo Anna Holderby, a comely folk songstress and schoolteacher who was looking for adventure. Our first date was a calm moonlight sail in Frolic. It was a fortunate introduction to sailing for a girl from Kansas, and after that she could take anything. For me it was the most propitious boat ride of my life. “Jim-n-Jo” couldn’t get enough of each other. In a few months we married at the courthouse, lived on a houseboat, launched our boat, christened her JUANA and began preparations for a voyage.

Before we shoved off in August of 1959, Jo Anna told her gynecologist that she was going on a cruise to the Caribbean. He asked, “Will there be a doctor on board?” She replied that she’d find out, and simply declined to see the doctor again. She said that if necessary she could give birth anywhere, and I agreed to stop anywhere when the time came. We would “make it” one way or another.

On this junket we were joined by friend Dick York, an avid sailor who – like each of us – simply abandoned his life in California to set off on an adventure from which none of us intended to return to Sausalito. When our other friends realized we were serious about embarking on this voyage in this boat, especially with Jo Anna in her condition, they made quite a fuss. One old salt said angrily, “You’ll have to swim for your lives!” It didn’t matter. Because we had the boat, the world’s door was ajar and we could not resist. We sailed out the Golden Gate and turned left.

Horses And Bulls…

It is July, 1959, and JUANA is rushing southward in headlong surges down the slopes of big, blue-black water dunes. To prevent her from swapping ends, Dick and I are trading short, tense tricks at the tiller. Jo Anna, now in her fifth month is bracing her belly with her knees against the ceiling in her tiny bunk. We are all in our mid twenties, and all spellbound by what must be the most terrifying thrill on this planet… surf riding in the open ocean.

To us, JUANA is a little double outrigger, her center hull about as long as a limo but her cabin no bigger than a Beetle’s. A real back yard-built contraption, she may have looked like a giant water spider, but she was built like a hollow plywood glider, and now she is truly soaring on the sea. We didn’t know it at the time and we wouldn’t have cared, but this is the first time a “modern trimaran” has ventured offshore.

Just yesterday we had sailed out through the Golden Gate and turned south for Mexico. Until this morning we have been locked in the netherworld of fog, dodging fishboats and navigating by noises. At first light I relieved Dick at the helm and we could see the great moro of Point Sur on the central California coast. From our position about two miles out, Big Sur now looks like voluptuous draperies, hanging folds of Earth in richly blending hues. The summits of the Santa Lucia range are being highlighted in silver by the still-occluded rising sun behind. The redwood canyons are still somewhat obscured by white vapors hovering in staggered strata, and the rounded ridges of this, the steepest coastal slope in the contiguous forty-eight, look like they are plunging into the surf. Zephyrs are increasing with the sun and finally are blowing the fog away.

By late morning now, a sunny summer gale is building through twenty-five toward thirty knots of very steady wind from dead astern. With plenty of fetch the waves are stretching out and mounding up. Most of their crests are topped by the frothy cornices that sailors call white horses. JUANA seems to play with them by almost backing up, letting them rush down upon her and then, at the last second, she simply sprints away. This causes us some consternation. It’s not just her speed, it’s the strange sensations that she sends to us. It’s like riding in a fast elevator but the building is lying down and rocking end-to-end. As she lunges toward the trough ahead it feels like dropping from the top floor. We accelerate in a tongue-swallowing surge, but our speed through the water drops to nearly nothing. The helm goes mushy, the wind falls calm and the sails go limp, yet we outrun that snorting steed that canters right behind. What’s going on?

Now we’re slowing way down, like coming to the bottom floor, but our speed through the water is phenomenal. Spray flies everywhere, great fans peeling from the three prows. The sails slam full of wind, the steering gets crisp and we go bucking over mixed potholes and speed bumps in the long valleys between waves. Now she’s going to try diving into the back of the wave ahead…

Ah! She never does. Time after time we expect to nosedive but the bows always rise again and sometimes we even… Yes! We are climbing the hillock ahead even as it tries to flee. We make the crest and perch – almost pirouette –- and then hurl forward “over the falls.” Plummeting into roaring, deck-deep spindrift, we soon squirt out ahead to ski pell-mell before the roiling avalanche. Again spray flies… we’re decelerating again… bucking again… climbing again… hurling forward again…

Tonight we are still surfing in the open sea and the sensations are not just confusing; they seem beyond normal human experience. It is overcast with no visible horizon and no moon or stars to steer by. I fixate on the red glow of the compass but the white horses all around have turned iridescent blue from phosphorescence in the water. Sometimes I am overcome by vertigo and its accompanying nausea as the boat convinces me it is soaring in long climbing spirals toward a red beacon set among tumultuous blue-white galaxies.

Dick takes over, and in my bunk below, the noise is terrific. The plywood hull, only one quarter of an inch thick, is streaking through spindrift that is just beyond my ears; it’s like being inside a big guitar that is dragging down a gravel road. Lying on my back, arms at my sides with my hands against the trembling skin of the hull and my feet against the transom, I hear the waves approaching, lifting the stern and feel the crests slap my soles to catapult me head-first forward and upside down. The long surging dives seem never to pull out but instead plunge ever faster and steeper into weightlessness.

After two days and two nights of this we rounded Point Conception, called “The Cape Horn of the Pacific.” That was not riding white horses, rather running with bulls. By morning we were all very tired but much relieved to sail into the more protected waters of the Santa Barbara channel. Jo Anna emerged from her crypt to eat a hearty breakfast and enjoy the ride. We all agreed that we were sailing in a very capable boat, and after some discussion now, we began to understand our JUANA.

On downwind headings she could sail as fast, or even faster than, the waves, and the disorienting fluctuations in boat speed, over the bottom, through the water and before the wind, were being caused by strong opposing currents within the waves themselves. Sailing in normal boats had not prepared us for this because the speed of most single-hulled vessels is limited by their wide, deep and heavy hulls. Except for some modern racers, single-hulled sailboats can neither surf with nor overtake the seaway. When observing the phenomenon of waves from such boats, it is obvious that water at the wave crests is rushing toward the troughs, but it is not obvious that water in the troughs is also rushing back underneath the crests. Finally it became clear to us that white horses result where these currents collide; crest water, pushed forward by the wind cascades over the top of trough water on its return cycle under the cascade. Our narrow-hulled – but outrigger stabilized, lightweight boat was running through both of these naturally reversing currents at about the same speed as the seaway was advancing over the ocean floor. There was lots more to learn about our little trimaran, but this was our first initiation into what would soon become a new kind of seafaring.

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