Summary
Date happened: 1955>75 Date posted: 2010/3/1
Opener for Jim Brown’s memoir of modern multihull history and lore.

Author’s contact: outrig.org@gmail.com

Multihull pioneer Jim Brown, after fifty years of designing, building and seafaring in catamarans, trimarans and proas, here offers a brief Foreword to Volume One of his personal memoir. In two pages he describes modern multihulls as, “an entire new genus in the phylum of surface watercraft,” credits his declining eyesight for the visual multihull memories he calls “phantom visions,” and invites readers to participate in the OutRig! Project by telling their own multihull-related stories at this Site.

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.

Largely autobiographical, the book contains many sea stories of the author’s and his client’s escapades, mishaps and achievements. Brown relates the adventures of “seasteading” in foreign waters for years with his family, and then describes how, at age 76, his personal world view has been shaped by incidents in the books, and draws scenarios of what multihulls may mean to the future of humankind.

Multimedia coverage…

To see examples of the OutRig! multimedia presentation of “Among The Multihulls” and other productions, you may wish to visit the following links:

• As a free site launching special, the first three chapters of “Among The Multihulls” are to be serialized monthly here on OutRig! To read Chapter 1,see the listing on the OutRig! Time Line or click ATM-1 TEXT.

• Sample illustrations for each chapter (both stills and moving footage narrated by the author) will be posted on You Tube concurrent with the chapters serialized here. To see these sample illustrations for Chapter One, select their listings on the Time Line.

• This book has an introductory video titled “The Multihull Pioneers.” Featuring profiles of five early multihull trail blazers, it appears in two ten-minute segments on You Tube as listed on the Time Line. To watch it directly click PIONEERS VIDEO part 1 and Part 2.

• The above video has a text counterpart. It is the original manuscript (before editing) of an article from WoodenBoat magazine titled “Multihull Pioneers.” It contains more detailed profiles of the same five early trail blazers featured in the video. This and other articles are listed on the Time Line, but you can click PIONEERS ARTICLE now.

• Text downloads and extensive on-line graphics for all the succeeding chapters of this book, and also the print edition of Volume One, will all be available soon. To express your interest in any of these please click INTERESTED.

Finally, to read the two-page Foreword to Jim Brown’s book “Among The Multihulls” click CONTINUE

Options for other formats may be available in the Time Line list.

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FOREWORD

If the ancient outrigger canoe seems to us now an almost Jurassic creature, then today’s multiple-hulled boats must constitute an entire new genus in the phylum of surface watercraft. Modern catamarans and trimarans began evolving right after World War Two for survival in the new world of sport, speed and adventure, and they have since become viable – even dominant – species in several diverse environments.

The author is sometimes accused of being one of those who sired these mutations in the very nature of seafaring, but actually I am just a progeny of the true multihull forbears. I do profess, however, to know something of the almost fanatical enthusiasm that drove these mutant vessels into being. I think we early multihullers were not unlike the early aviators who abandoned normal lives to go barnstorming around the country giving aerobatic demonstrations of their flying machines. They were sometimes called aerobats. We, however, were known by other names like yachting’s underdogs, and the hell’s angels of the sea. Sometimes our boats looked like early aircraft, that is, back yard-built contraptions. They were even called “sailing reptiles” and “anti-yachts,” but in these sometimes cantankerous critters we too went storming all around the harbors and across the oceans, behaving like The Magnificent Men in Their Sailing Machines. All right, we had some crack-ups, and we did not endear ourselves to the Corinthian establishment, but we surely did have fun! Besides the technical development of multihulls, it is something of those crack-ups, escapades, foibles and achievements of what I call the “aquabats” that this ramble now endeavors to preserve.

What follows, then, is my account of how modern multihulls were conceived, and of how they have shaped my life and the lives of my colleagues and clients, my family and friends. It is told as a memoir, and we all know how it is with memories. They invade our thinking without regard for time, and it’s often hard to figure where they fit in, where their story really starts. Sometimes they can be hard to describe because they seem to have happened to someone else or in another life, yet with some of them we can almost feel that old soaring sensation, and we can remember clearly what the scene looked like, as if it’s going on right now!

Surely I’m not alone among septuagenarians to see things. Maybe it’s just the senior’s long-term memory trip, the sudden yesterday, the blue hair’s increased presence of the past. But for me it’s stronger than that, it’s like spying on my ships and shipmates and myself, especially my self! But I have an excuse, an explanation for why such mind’s-eye recollections are abnormally intense for me. They’re what I get to, see, for slowly going blind.

There is a big blank blotch in my central vision that looks like I’ve put both index fingers in the butter and then pressed them to my glasses. The periphery around the smears looks like I’m peering through a driving rain. This is a common affliction called macular degeneration. It is age related, epidemic in America, and largely untreatable so far. It leads to what’s called legal blindness, you can’t read, can’t drive, and can’t quite tell what’s on your fork until it’s in your mouth. It’s both adventurous and frustrating but it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t kill, and it seldom deprives one of “walk around” vision at least when there’s plenty of light.

Of course there’s nothing bright about a slowly growing darkness, but believe me; you do get something for it: Failing eyesight can make memory strikingly visual. Such images are nothing new to those who suffer vision loss. They are said to be neurologically akin to the “phantom limb” sensations felt by amputees, so I call them “Phantom Visions.” They are not like seeing, but being seen. For example, if I close my eyes and contemplate my time among the aquabats, often the “sights” that appear – the doctors call them formed hallucinations – are…Well, I’ll try to describe them in the chapters that follow; they really happen in the present tense.

Of course my memories of multihulls are but a snippet of the whole story, for there are thousands of relatively unknown multihull designers, builders and sailors – pioneers all – whose stories are pleading to be shared. What’s more, those now-obscure episodes are vital to understanding the context from which modern multihulls are now emerging big time. To collect those stories we invite submissions to our Website from anyone with a true, multihull-related story to tell. Yes, I love to tell my own stories, but half the reason for my telling them here is to entice others into telling theirs.

The OutRig! Website is a place for us all to do the telling, and its listings are chronological, a “time line” of multihull history. In what follows, however, we must accept that our mind’s-eye memories do not play chronologically. They can embark from anywhere in time, even in mid passage, and the only way to “watch” them is to jump aboard.

Casting off!

Jim Brown
Hick Neck, Virginia
March 1, 2010