THE CASE FOR THE CRUISING TRIMARAN (PREFACE) by Jim Brown
Date happened 2010/3/15
Author’s preface to the third edition of this 1979 book on multihull safety.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION OF THE CASE FOR THE CRUISING TRIMARAN

By Jim Brown

Since this book was first published in 1979, the modern multihull has changed from an often suspected, sometimes reviled, sub-cultural aberration into a usually accepted, often preferred mainstream phenomenon. With the running of the 2010 Americas Cup races in giant multihulls, and the accession of extensive multihull archives at the Mariners Museum, Newport News, Virginia, the modern multiple-hulled seacraft has even entered the hallowed halls of nautical tradition.

In the 1970s, however, multihulls were still being called “unsafe on any sea.” Most of these upstart vessels were still being built by amateurs in their own back yards, the Corinthian community still called them “anti-yachts,” and their sailors were sometimes dubbed the “Hells Angels of the Sea.”

Nevertheless, multihull designers and a few “front yard” manufacturers were beginning to enjoy some measure of commercial success, and their creations were starting to dominate the boat shows. Multihull sailors were completing significant cruising voyages, and the racers were winning all the offshore events in which they were allowed to enter. Some shellbacks who were committed to “ordinary boats” began setting double anchors against a mounting ground swell of multihull interest. Only a few suspected that this surge announced the coming of an absolute sea change in marine architecture.

Of course the early multihull achievements came at the usual costs of seafaring, including occasional fires, collisions, strandings, and shipwrecks. These are by far the most common kinds of maritime disasters, and multihulls were proving themselves to be uncommonly forgiving of such mishaps. However, multihulls were vulnerable to a new kind of calamity, offshore capsize. This was a fresh phenomenon, different from the usual, accepted-for-centuries, ultimate consequence of sailing offshore, which of course has always been sinking. Because most multihulls cannot sink, their capsize did not cause the stricken vessel and often its crew to simply disappear from the face of the earth. Instead it left the craft and its inhabitants marooned as castaways, sometimes for months, afloat on their inverted vehicle, often with no sure means of attracting attention to their plight. While the aftermath of capsize was obviously much preferred to the finality of sinking, it nonetheless was grist for a new and compelling type of survival story.

Because some early multihull promotions tended to attract wood-butcher builders and greenhorn sailors, some boats were real abominations, hard to look at and cranky to sail. Often lacking centerboards and good rudders, and sailed by neophytes, multihulls often exhibited poor performance and lubberly handling. In addition, Corporate sponsorship of daring ocean races sparked a level of competition that encouraged reckless driving of developmental boats. Inevitably, several sailors of both the cruising and the racing endeavors blundered into capsize. These crackups may or may not have been more frequent, per “passenger mile,” than the sinkings then happening in monohulls, but capsize definitely received its fair share of attention, even sensationalizing, in the yachting and the general press. The question became, “What’s The Matter With Multihulls?” This book was written to answer that question.

Re-reading it today, the author has been thrilled by its sea stories, some so wild and improbable that they are certainly the truth, but jolted by its many accounts of close calls and losses from one disaster after another. Each of them contributes to a long list of multihull dos and don’ts, some of which seem excessive but others have made their way into the accumulated wisdom of multihull seamanship and offshore racing rules.

Most of the book still seems valid, especially in light of the many succeeding incidents that support its early conclusions. Of course there is some new information pleading to be added. For example:

The notion of designing and preparing offshore multihulls to be inhabited if capsized – as opposed to the crew taking to a life raft – has been vindicated several times. Most notably, John Glennie and his companions in the trimaran ROSE NOEL survived for 120 days (yes, four months) aboard their inverted craft. Their predicament was desperate at times, but they were sustained by the contents of their well-provisioned boat, eventually even cooking their food. When they finally drifted ashore in New Zealand, the same country from which they had departed, they were in such good physical condition that the local authorities disbelieved their story.

We have learned the hard way to avoid using the water-activating feature of self-inflating life jackets. In today’s marvelously lightweight but grossly overpowered racing multihulls, the extreme level of competition makes occasional capsize inevitable. In that event, self-inflating PFDs can trap the wearer underneath the boat.

The prospect of unassisted self-righting of capsized multihulls, as espoused in Chapter 8, remains largely unfulfilled. Nevertheless, we now know that the towboat-assisted re-righting method, also detailed in Chapter 8, can be used in open sea to recover inverted multihulls at least as large as fifty feet.

Multihull seamanship remains essentially unchanged since the book was written. Anchoring, storm tactics, sail handling and stowage, as they pertain to multihulls, have been modified mainly by the introduction of new types of anchors, storm drogues and sea anchors. Of course the old stuff still works and costs less.

It is sometimes said that the best storm survival tactic is to keep the vessel running-off at speed. This is practiced by the ‘Round-The World racers, who just keep driving hard in gales, even in the Roaring Forties under spinnaker. This may be the way to win stunt races but it has no place in a small boat with a tired crew and restricted sea room. The tire drogue and the surplus parachute, as described in chapter 6, still belong in cruising multihulls.

Alternatively, several examples now indicate that the way for multihullers to survive great storms is to drop all sail, batten down and ride it out. This tactic, formerly doubted by multihullers, is supported by several incidents when the waves got big and the crew got scared enough to radio for rescue and risk life and limb to be evacuated aboard some Samaritan ship. Months – even years – later the abandoned multihull is reported drifting, sometimes in another ocean, right side up with spars standing, waiting for its doubting crew to return. These examples support the old fisherman’s quote, “A drifting boat never gets in trouble with the sea, only with the land.” They also support the old standby, newly applicable to multihulls, “Don’t leave the boat!”

In making the Case for the Cruising Trimaran again today, as compared with the cruising catamaran, the book’s old contentions weaken but still hold. The trimaran’s outer hulls still offer those large and precious airlock spaces that can float the vessel high enough for it to offer capsize habitation to the crew inside the main hull. (The catamaran has airlock spaces too, but not when ventilated for habitation.)

Of greater interest today is the contention, well founded by experience, that trimarans enjoy a somewhat smoother ride especially when driving upwind through an offshore seaway.

These trimaran advantages fade in today’s marketplace. The world has gone catamaran crazy, to the extent that many cat cohorts don’t even consider trimarans to be multihulls! The reason, of course, is that catamarans offer the condo-style accommodations so highly valued by those who naively consider boats to be less vehicle than domicile.

Many fixtures common to the early cruising multihulls are rare today: Kerosene stoves and lamps, rowing dinghies made of wood, sextants and paper charts. Instead, modern multihullers seem to want refrigerators and freezers, air conditioners and chart plotters, computers and long range radios. No doubt these marvelous inventions add comfort and convenience when they work, but the on-board power requirements have skyrocketed, adding greatly to cost.

When it comes to “comfort,” the most effective new gadget for offshore sailing surely must be the satellite telephone. If double packed in waterproof enclosures, with towels to dry the user’s hands, and spare batteries for protracted air time in emergencies – all stowed in the boat’s Calamity Pack and secured absolutely in the bilge – this wonderful device can almost eliminate the castaways’ main plight of attracting attention to their predicament. Other devices such as today’s registered EPIRBs now make offshore search and rescue far more effective. But at zero hour there is nothing more effective than long range voice communication.

The good old hand-held VHF radio, one unit dedicated to the Calamity Pack and stowed together with the Sat Phone, will provide short range conversation during actual rescue operations. As emphasized in the chapters that follow, the likelihood of cruising sailors needing such equipment is extremely low, but the very existence of a comprehensive “Calamity Pack” containing these wonders can go a long way toward relieving the crew of that nagging offshore angst that keeps so many would-be sailors on the beach.

There is much more cruising information available today, books, charts and on-line/radio services that really cover preferred cruising routes, up to the minute and area-specific weather analysis, and shore side circumstances port-by-port. Many of the old favorite cruising destinations have become sullied by development, but there is still plenty of choice cruising ground accessible to the well-found offshore voyager in a shoal draft boat.

And so we come to the book’s original premise, now corroborated by another thirty years of evidence: The single most irrefutable advantage of the modern cruising multihull is not so much its speed but its combination of splendid seakeeping properties together with shallow draft. There are many more accounts today of the multihull’s ability to withstand great gales at sea and also sneak around in thin water, even shoot the surf to slide onto a beach or snuggle in the mud, either one for refuge or for fun. This combination of features, mutually exclusive in most seagoing watercraft, is nowhere more concentrated than in these boats of many hulls. Their wide-track stability, unsinkability and inhabitability, even if stranded, burned, holed, flooded or dismembered (again, all the most common kinds of marine accidents) gives them a far wider ragged edge between mishap and tragedy, and in a far wider variety of circumstances, than in any other seagoing configuration.

Since the first edition of this book, the business aspects of multihulls also have evolved in unique ways. Until about 2005, while the world’s economy boomed, multihulls both power and sail were on the economic “up side” of the industry, about the only growth area in a frenetic boating marketplace. Five years later now, the global economic contraction has left most production boatbuilding severely depressed. Nevertheless, multihulls are still of interest to investors. New ventures in production multihulls include designs for racing, cruising, commercial chartering and excursions, open-sea ferrying and military applications.

These investments persist despite the fact that multihulls – both production-built and custom-built – have become astronomically expensive. This is partly because multihulls are simply more expensive to produce. In addition, both “greed for speed” and the lust for “modern inconveniences” have led multihulls down the primrose path of super-high tech, glitz and cost. Indeed the modern “front yard-built” multihulls are priced into an obscure corner of today’s marketplace, and the added costs of berthing, maintaining, repairing and storing the larger multihulls now further restrain their popularity. At the same time, their desirability has helped create a pent-up demand for truly modern watercraft of all types.

The monohull marketplace is being squeezed away from large boats that require in-water berthing toward small craft that will fit on a trailer. This happens to coincide with projects that can be owner-built and stored in a back yard or garage. There is an “absolute explosion” in this owner building, but it is confined mainly to small single-hulled vessels like kayaks, sailing dinghies, rowing boats and runabouts. Most are built of plywood/epoxy, and all can be either cartopped or trailered. The purveyors of boat plans drawn for amateur construction of these types, and the manufacturers of pre-cut parts kits for them, are thriving.

The multihull’s participation in trailerable boats has been restrained by their width, but several clever means of reducing beam for trailering have been developed. These too have tended to increase price, but such collapsible multihulls remain popular especially in trimarans. The outrigger platform of the trimaran is inherently easier to disassemble or articulate for trailering than that of catamarans. Consequently, the small trailerable trimarans enjoy considerable activity, and new designs of this type are emerging.

This book was written at a time when the multihull phenomenon was still driven mainly by do-it-yourselfers. Are we to see a re-emergence of this? Perhaps, but only in the smaller sizes that can be crafted in a garage and kept on a trailer… at least for now. But let’s consider that the original attraction to multihulls was not just for their promise of unprecedented speed. The small day-sailing multihulls of the 1950s were also irresistible for their remarkably low cost when owner-built. By the early 1960s their converts realized that larger models, also cheaply owner-built, made offshore adventuring accessible to anyone “for the price of an ordinary automobile.” As the 1970s approached, owner-built multihulls also offered a perceived escape from the political turmoil of the times, its antiwar mayhem, and its threat of nuclear annihilation. Throughout this progression the crews improved, the designs matured, and the multihull “movement” imparted a growing countercultural identity to its devotees. A conspicuous alternative life style resulted, and this may have driven multihull development more than anything else. One difference today is that multihulls are no longer countercultural. Their widespread acceptance, even preference, has caused the loss of their once-prized exclusiveness.

Considering the loss of this “product personality,” will we ever see a re-emergence of the owner-builder for the larger seafaring multihulls? Who can say? Perhaps a few can-do individuals will still wish to consolidate their assets in a vehicular home that can move about the earth without the need for much if any fuel. By avoiding geopolitical hot spots the cruising sailor can still savor the diversity, plurality and beauty of foreign lands and cultures, all interspersed with expeditions into this world’s last great wilderness. How to live!

A more long-range scenario is that the modern multihull will some day be regarded as just another brain child of the age of waste, but born with the paradoxical mutation of unprecedented energy efficiency. If so, let’s hope that this mutant, when propelled by either poles, paddles, sails or non-fossil fueled engines, will mature in time for serving in the green recovery.

If this book is still around by then, well… Hail to you, oh future multimariners! Please know that it was the author’s fervent hope that the notions recorded here, together with Jo Hudson’s inimitable cartoons, may at least entertain you with its seaborne shenanigans of old. Look here for evidence of how your newfound re-inventions came to be, and maybe there’s a smattering of wisdom to be gleaned from all this early soaring on the sea.

Fair Winds!

Jim Brown
Hick Neck, Virginia
March 21, 2010