Summary
Date happened: 1947>75 Date posted: 2010/3/1
Profiles of five pivotal pioneers from the early-modern multihull advent. From WoodenBoat magazine, May-June 1998.

ANNOTATION:

This article was commissioned by WoodenBoat magazine editor Mat Murphy for publication in the May-June 2008 issue, which appeared just prior to the WoodenBoat Show of that year. Held at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, this show features a yearly tribute to individuals or groups who have figured in some way into the development of wooden boats. That year’s tribute went to “The Multihull Pioneers,”

The occasion sparked a sail-in for about a dozen wooden multihulls, all docked along the Museum’s 17 acre riverfront park. This is the site where many of America’s most historic vessels were built, and where many of the most representative now reside on exhibit. The place is the very seat of American maritime tradition.

To see the bulkhead lined with multihulls was both jarring and enlightening, for it suggested that multihulls have finally arrived. The ceremonial dinner, held on that first Saturday in June, attracted about two hundred paying guests, with many of the core members of the New England Multihull Association in attendance. Speakers included James Wharram, Barry Choy, Dick Newick, John Marples, Meade Gougeon and Jim Brown, with proceedings moderated by Steven Callahan. WoodenBoat’s publisher Carl Cremer paid more-than-adequate tribute to the “multihull heroes” in attendance and those who have sailed away, and a great deal of camaraderie was enjoyed. Skull cessions continued until very late, and the show had its best attendance to that time.

This event, being staged by perhaps the most traditionally respected voice in the recreational marine industry, seemed to put the finish on the multihull’s long awaited legitimacy. It seemed also to mark the end of the multihull as anti-yacht, and the end of multihull creators and crews as The Hell’s Angels of the Sea. It also marked the end of the multihull’s delightfully maverick, wildly enthusiastic, and proudly countercultural exclusiveness. It is something of that delight, that enthusiasm, that pride and, yes, that exclusiveness, which The OutRig! Project now endeavors to preserve.

SEA CHANGE
The Barnstorming Aquabats Who Created
The Modern Catamarans and Trimarans

The Multihull Tradition
Stone Age multihulls were the first real seafaring vessels known to mankind. Conceived in part as vehicles of escape from overcrowding and persecution in ancient Asia, they served on voyages of exploration and colonization in the oldest tradition of all, survival. In these respects they may be considered the most “traditional” of all offshore watercraft. Thanks to a few trail-blazing pioneers, tradition survives in these futuristic multihulls today, and the story of their modern re-invention contains a rich nautical heritage for tomorrow.

Five Pivotal Pioneers

Woody Brown – Creator of the first truly modern (light weight) seafaring multihull, 1947

Rudy Choy – Creator of the first yacht-quality seafaring multihuls, 1958

Arthur Piver – Creator of the first seafaring trimarans for owner-building, 1959

James Wharram – Creator of the first seafaring catamarans for owner-building, 1960

Dick Newick – Creator of the most widely influential ocean racing multihulls, 1972

[Illustrations for this article appear in its video counterpart on the OUTRIG VIDEOS PAGE]

Introduction:

In the can-do years after World War II, a scattering of inventive watermen devised light weight sailing rafts that looked like spiders but were built like gliders for soaring on the sea. After much aquabatic barnstorming, many structural failures, and often learning seamanship the hard way, these inventors evolved their mutant vessels into a new genus of boat – the modern catamarans and trimarans.

As early as 1662 there had been efforts to update this ancient concept. So what, really, makes a modern multihull modern? Not until the decade beginning with 1945 did the essential ingredient appear. Inventors in such far-flung locations as Hawaii, Britain, California, Australia and the Caribbean 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 structures. Often untrained and unfettered by the traditions of marine architecture, and unhampered by bureaucratic regulations, the pioneers began to apply these new materials to multihulls, and combined them with their knowledge of flying, sailing, surfing and engineering. The outrigger concept had been around for millennia, but now the modern multihull was finally ready to happen.

As these boats emerged in the 1940s through 70s it became increasingly clear that they were not replicas, reconstructions, adaptations or imitations of ancient implements. Instead they progressed quickly through thousands of prototypes, some of them rather unsuccessful, to finally evolve into something hauntingly traditional yet totally new. In certain iterations today multihulls are the world’s fastest, safest, roomiest, costliest to build but cheapest to run, most shoal draft yet,most smooth riding of all seafaring watercraft

Despite fifty years of resistance from the nautical establishment, much of the maritime world – recreational, commercial and military – is now embracing the multihull concept. The impending energy crunch, when coupled with the multihull’s potential for unprecedented energy efficiency, suggests that most lightweight, valuable cargoes (like people) could soon sail (and/or motor) in vessels having two or three hulls. Many individuals have invested substantial portions of their lives, some life itself, in creating this phenomenon, but few of today’s mariners – even multihull aficionados – know much about the origins of this fast-breaking sea change in marine architecture. What follows are thumbnail profiles of just five of the many pioneers who – while working in wood, mostly alone and at their own expense – made pivotal advances in the evolution of modern multihulls.
The Profiles:

Woodridge P. Brown, 1912 – 2008

Hail and hearty today at age 96, Woody Brown is the Orville Wright of multihulls. He brought modern wooden aircraft-type construction into seafaring right after the close of World War II. A New Yorker transplanted to Hawaii, he is better known as a record-setting glider pilot and a pioneering big wave surf rider than as a boat designer, but it was his soaring and surfing that led directly to the first truly modern, light weight, high performance, offshore multihull.

Working as a beach boy at Waikiki, Woody noticed that tourists, then a growing throng, soon tired of sun and sand. Here was a business opportunity, so he and his island-boatbuilder friend Alfred Kumilae undertook to develop a sailboat that could carry paying passengers out beyond Diamond Head into the real wind and sea of the mid-Pacific. To do this from Waikiki Beach would require a very shoal-draft vessel with no appendages, and this implied something like a raft, but Woody had sailed in the asymmetric-hulled outrigger canoes of Christmas Island during the War. “They were so fast!” he says today. “We even sailed past the Navy’s motor launches! I told the natives, ‘no white man’s boat can do that. When I get home I’m gonna build me one!’” But to carry tourists into open ocean he needed something more than an outrigger canoe. It would still have to operate under wind power alone, be light enough to manhandle in the swash, shoal enough to slide over the reef, seaworthy enough to climb over breakers going out and ride the surf coming in. It would even have to contend joyfully with high-island williwaws, mature ocean waves, and a cargo of six tourists who would on occasion experience the most stimulating, even terrifying, thrill-ride on this planet. This had to be quite some bucket! What about a twin-hulled outrigger?

Woody had designed and built his own record-setting sail planes and spearheaded the development of the modern surf board, and Alfred was a gifted woodworker, so together they researched the vessels of the ancient Pacific people, built a 3’ model and then a 16’ prototype. This R&D foretold the coming Hobie Cat phenomenon, but Woody and Alfred wanted a seagoing crowd pleaser. They learned a lot from their experiments and pushed on into virgin territory.

Working with their beach boy colleague Rudy Choy, and using only hand tools at their uncovered, non-electrified worksite they began construction of a 38’er. Very lean, lightweight and asymmetric hulled, this catamaran was built literally as if to fly. They prepared frequent-but spidery plywood ring frames and frequent-but-delicate lumber stringers, all of Sitka spruce. With these they crafted 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” Douglas fir veneers on their “fat” inboard sides – all converging at a robust laminated mahogany 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. She was fitted with twin rudders drawing no more than the hulls, their tillers connected by a long cross bar, and she was rigged as a simple sloop with club jib and spruce spars. At 38’ long and 14’ wide, she was hand carried to the water by Woody’s many friends. “Hawaiians love to clown around,” he says. “As the boat was moving toward the water, two of the guys got underneath the wing and made like they were carrying the whole thing on the tips of their fingers.” They christened her Manu Kai (Sea Bird) and slid her into the sea. Thus began, in 1947, what another multihull pioneer named Victor Tchetchet (see below), would later call “The Global Multihull Era.” (back to pioneers list)

Rudy C. Choy, 1923 –

Operating boats like Manu Kai in the tourist trade would become Woody Brown’s vocation for the next forty years. He and Rudy Choy, a Korean-Hawaiian with aspirations in design, also raced Manu Kai in Hawaii’s very demanding conditions against local monohull boats. While she was a bit reluctant to tack, sometimes bore-off uncontrollably at very high speeds, and made noticeable leeway when strapped to windward, it soon became clear that she was not just a moneymaking, beachable workboat but – when given her head — was also a startling performer offshore.

By the early 1950s Woody and Rudy continued on in the design and construction of their next beachable-but-seagoing catamaran, the 40’ Waikiki Surf. Similar to Manu Kai but with minimal accommodations for passagemaking, wider overall beam and more sail area, Surf was sailed from Honolulu to Los Angeles, 2,800 miles mostly to windward and through a mid-ocean gale, in under sixteen days. This was a daily average of about 180 miles, and their speedometer had registered 33 knots in brief bursts. For 1955 these feats seemed supernatural. The purpose of this voyage was to enter Surf in the trans-Pacific yacht race, but her crew was greeted in Los Angeles with derision and entry was denied.

Derision didn’t stop Rudy Choy. He became committed to designing catamarans. He moved to Los Angeles where he and builder Hisao Murakami produced the 44’ Aikane (Friend in Hawaiian), the vessel that Rudy considered to be the first real ocean racing catamaran. In both 1957 and ’59 Aikane resoundingly – if unofficially – defeated the monohull “TransPac” fleet, thus demonstrating the speed and safety of catamarans but reviving the mono/multi schism that began with Nathaniel Herreshoff’s catamarans in the 1870s. On both occasions the Corinthian community apparently considered that it was under assault by “renegades.”

Nevertheless, Rudy’s achievements did not go entirely unnoticed. The June 6, 1960 issue of Sports Illustrated carried a six-page article by the respected yachting writer Carleton Mitchell titled “The Cats Squelch the Catcalls.” In those pages Mitchell, whose traditional yawl Finesterre was widely known for its beauty and performance at the time, quoted Rudy Choy’s remarks about why he had tried to enter the TransPac race in the first place: “All Woody and I hoped for was recognition, to be set up on a probationary basis so we could prove ourselves. If anything happened to show cats unseaworthy, then legislate against us, but at least give us a chance. We hoped to establish a precedent so that in future the cats might become a separate class.” Mitchell then describes the sensations of sailing in Rudy’s boats and concludes, “Perhaps the hardest thing for a conventional sailor to accept is the appearance of a larger cat. They look weird and box-like, breaking all the accepted rules of nautical beauty. (Nevertheless) I admit having come to agree with the basic premise of Woody Brown and Rudy Choy that ‘Catamarans are good honest boats. Despite my devotion to a small yawl named Finesterre, a new dream is forming in my mind, this time a catamaran, able to go anywhere… A sportsman’s home afloat.”

Today’s production-built cruising and chartering catamarans may well mark their own birth at that statement made by Carleton Mitchell almost fifty years ago, but some yachting pundits remained generally hostile toward multihulls. However, Rudy’s achievements now attracted the attention of some well-moneyed clients and some talented partners. Californian Warren Seaman, designer of the pre-Hobie Malibu Outriggers joined with Rudy, and again the master builder Alfred Kumilae came aboard. Together they formed C/S/K Catamarans, and began to produce an impressive series of splendid wooden cats for ocean racing and cruising. Soon they were joined by Vince Bartelone, a gifted draftsman and artist, and by Gilbert Iwamoto, another expert builder, and now the C/S/K boats became beautifully built and quite lovely to behold. Today they may be considered the first true yacht-quality multihulls. Among them were the 36’ Polycon for TV star Buddy Ebson, the 43’ World Cat, first lightweight multihull to circumnavigate, and the 58’ racer Seasmoke, for TV star James Arness.

Rudy’s son Barry Choy, who was raised around the action, later joined his father to design, construct and campaign several ocean racing cats including Aikane X5, a sterling thoroughbred in which they set a record for the 2,225-mile “downhill pull” from Los Angeles to Honolulu in 1989. Rudy and Barry also designed, built and operated several large tourist catamarans, and they have been instrumental in the Hokulea project, which seeks to preserve the seafaring heritage of Polynesia through educational voyages made in re-creations of ancient Pacific watercraft. Barry still performs multihull design services in Hawaii, and at this writing Rudy is still living at age 84 but he is sadly indisposed from a stroke suffered in 2003. While it is fair to say that he was a protégé of Woody Brown, we all stand on the shoulders of others, and Rudy Choy certainly blazed the trail to cultural acceptance from where Woody Brown left off at inventive genius. This path was extended by many others to today’s eruption of both racing and cruising catamarans. If Woody Brown is the Orville Wright of multihulls, then Rudy Choy is the Glenn Curtis of Curtis-Wright. (back to pioneers list)

James Wharram, 1928 –

Like the old barnstormer William Piper, who made private aviation accessible to the common man, James Wharram has made multihull seafaring affordable to anyone with the pluck to start from a set of plans. In the almost fifty years that Wharram designs have been available, some ten thousand aspiring seafarers have exhibited that pluck. Even with no real data on completion, there are probably more Wharram cats “out there “doing it,” than for the rest of all owner-built multihull designs combined. Furthermore, some of his designs are now being professionally built.

Wharram was one of the first to test his craft by crossing oceans. Among the others is Frenchman Eric de Bischop who sailed all three oceans in a plank-built catamaran in the 1930s, and as mentioned above Woody Brown and Rudy Choy crossed the Pacific in their 40’ Waikiki Surf in 1955. Weeks later a young German named Wolfgang Kraker von Schwartzenfeld crossed the Atlantic east-to-west in his 30’ catamaran Gerumpel, and days after that Wharram crossed the Atlantic, alsoe east-to-west, in his 23’ 6” catamaran Tangaroa, the smallest one yet. James was accompanied by two adventurous German girls, Ruth and Jutta, who believed in Wharram’s claim: “If the Polynesians could sail the oceans in a double Canoe, so can I.”

The threesome returned to England in 1959 aboard another catamaran, the 40’ Rongo which they had built on the beach in Trinidad. This was the first west-to-east crossing of the northern Atlantic in a multihull. Jutta drew plans for this Rongo design and four sets were sold starting in 1960. Nine years later, after more cats and more cruising, Wharram’s book “Two Girls, Two Catamarans,” was published. It emphasized adventure and romance. By now James had developed his easy “backbone and bulkhead” building system for his designs, and together with his book it catalyzed their plans business. Working with several other lady friends – all equal partners in this venture – he designed more boats, sold more plans, built more catamarans and did more cruising.

A nautical historian of considerable depth, Wharram postulates that early humans dispersed themselves around the planet more by sea than by land, and his interest in what is now called “experimental archeology” has pervaded his voyaging. “I would have been happy with a Viking ship,” he says today. “Or I could have had a small dhow, or a junk-type craft, but I didn’t have the skills or the wherewithal to build such vessels. As a result of my studies of Pacific sea craft, and of the voyages of Eric De Bischop, I realized that a canoe-type vessel such as the catamaran offered the most boat for the least materials and was the least demanding of the builder’s skills.”

So it is that James Wharram’s lineup of “Polynesian Catamarans” purposely resemble their ancient counterparts. They exhibit neither the towering rigs and round bilges nor the fixed keels and centerboards of most modern multihulls, and they are absent the large bridge cabins of most contemporary cruising or charter cats. Instead they have V-section hull forms, flexibly mounted cross beams and slatted bridge platforms between the hulls, all of which make them relatively simple and inexpensive to build. And they have low sail plans, high underwings, long overhangs and minimal top hamper to make them very stable.

The writer has recently been privileged to cruise for a week in the Greek Islands with the Wharrams on their 63’ cat Spirit of Gaia, a spellbinding craft in which they have cruised around the world. Because the Wharram configuration features an open bridge between the hulls, we lived as in a village instead of a cave. All communal activities – sailing, lounging, dining, and even washing up, were performed on the bridge deck, and all the private habitations were arranged around this commons. Indeed the privacy of separate cabins in separate hulls, each watertight from the other and all accessed only through the deck, was unprecedented. The absence of a main saloon is countered by Wharram’s minimalism. As he says, “You either adapt nature at vast expense, or you adapt your own body at minimum expense.” So the life of a Wharramesque “sea nomad” is definitely different, but I can attest that once embraced it is quite engaging. All at once I was there, exploring the old world in the next Stone Age.

At age 80 James now lives and works with his original shipmate Ruth and his Dutch partner Hanneke Boon. Hanneke has proved to be a boon all right. Her shellback savvy, her expressive hand-drawn builder’s plans, and her artistic renderings – complete with lots of sun and fun and skin – have elevated her to full co-designer status with James. When sailing their big cat Hanneke runs the ship. James proclaims, “I’m not the captain here, I’m only the Admiral.”

So here’s to you Admiral, to your crew and to your cats! Like Piper Cubs and DC-3s, they are the most enduring of modern multihulls.
(back to pioneers list)

Arthur L. Piver, 1910 – 1968

Enter the “trimaran.” The word was coined by Victor Tchetchet, an eccentric Russian artist living in New York who designed and built several small, plywood, day sailing double-outrigger craft starting in the mid 1940s. Tchetchet’s boats were fun on Long Island Sound but they had small, short-bowed outboard floats and so tended to dive the lee bow in gusts. They were cranky in stays and did not sail well to windward. Art Piver (“rhymes with diver”), a San Francisco publisher with soaring, surfing and seafaring in his background, was experiencing the same problems with a small kit-built catamaran at about the same time. The two men communicated through the Amateur Yacht Research Society (AYRS), a London-based grapevine for the world’s profusion of boat nuts tinkering with design. With encouragement from John Moorwood, publisher of the AYRS bulletins, Piver imagineered a 16’ trimaran that had long, buoyant float bows. It also had shallow ends on the main hull, and its floats were mounted high so as to barely skim the water while the craft was in stays; these features were to encourage tacking. This boat also had a deep, dinghy-style dagger board and rudder, these to improve upwind performance and allow the helmsman to keep the vessel going straight when running down steep waves. In trials the little boat proved quite responsive. It sailed well upwind, changed tacks dependably even in steep chop without backing the jib, and surfed downwind under firm control. Several were built locally (including one by the author) and were tested rodeo-style in the boisterous conditions of The Golden Gate. Some suffered dramatic-but-instructional failures of rudders, dagger boards, and masts, but in time the problems were resolved so that the 16’ Piver-designed Frolic trimaran did everything that the catamarans of the day did not. It was arguably the first “perfect” modern multihull, 1957.

Piver soon designed a 24’ version he called Nugget. Intended as a four-place open daysailer, the author built the first one fitted with a tiny cuddy cabin. My bride and I named her Juana and promptly sailed coastwise into Mexico, this despite the fact that Jo Anna was five and a half months pregnant when we cleared the Golden Gate. Like our son Steven, the seafaring trimaran also was born in 1959.

By the time we returned from Mexico Art Piver was building for himself a thirty-foot trimaran, enormous compared to JUANA. He trailered it in pieces to Massachusetts, assembled it there and sailed, with the help of two crew, to England via the Azores. It was the first trans-ocean voyage in a modern trimaran, 1961. As mentioned, the Hawaiian catamarans of Woody Brown and Rudy Choy had made Pacific crossings in the 1950’s, but Arthur Piver’s self published book “Trans Atlantic Trimaran” was timed perfectly to appeal to the counterculture of the sixties. It bombastically extolled the virtues of seafaring in trimarans, and the craze of building three-hulled anti-yachts took off.

Piver’s original 30’er was to become a prototype for the popular Nimble class of which many hundreds were eventually built of plywood. Then came his 35’ Lodestar design, in which he and his Viking-like crewman Rich Gerling doubled the Pacific. In other designs they redoubled the Atlantic and Pacific, Piver wrote three more books, and with the help of then-fledgling designer Lauren Williams a crowded stable of new trimaran designs was drawn; they sold like hot cakes. This soon led Arthur to exhort in his advertisements, “Discover WHY there are thousands of Piver trimarans.” He referred to monohulls as “ordinary boats,” to the ballast keel as “a technical absurdity,” often joked “we have more solutions than we have problems,” and rightly claimed that his cruising boats could be built “for the price of an ordinary automobile.” For a while in the middle sixties it is likely that he had the most active yacht design office of the time.

As might be expected, his boats and his promotions were controversial. Due in part to his largely neophyte builders and the sparse how-to information furnished with his plans, many of his boats were crudely modified during construction, often with grotesque top hamper and excessive weight. To simplify construction and increase interior space the vital centerboards, featured in his original Frolic, Nugget and Nimble designs, were eliminated from later plans. The resulting vessels, often sailed by greenhorns, justified the claims of the traditional sailor – “Those trimarans won’t go to windward, won’t come about and won’t track downwind.” Even Piver’s competitors-colleagues sometimes protested that he was doing more harm than good. In some iterations, however, when built by real craftsmen and sailed by real sailors, these early trimarans exhibited truly splendid properties of speed, sea kindliness and safety.

The potential was there for Arthur Piver to become a kingpin in American yachting, but his tenure was brief. Hoping to qualify for racing single handed across the Atlantic, in 1968, he set sail alone in a borrowed 25’ trimaran bound from San Francisco to San Diego. Sadly he and his boat were never seen again. Besides his devastated family he left a jolted multihull movement and a large stable of offshoot trimaran designers (the author among them) wondering what would happen now that “The Skipper” was gone. It would be many years before the trimaran would show itself to be not so good a load carrier as the cat; but it is debatably faster, safer, smoother riding, more maneuverable and weatherly under sail, more energy-efficient under power and the dominant ocean speedster of today. Arthur Piver crossed oceans in the early prototypes. He was the Charles Lindberg of trimarans. (back to pioneers list)

Richard C. Newick, 1927 –

Like most pioneering multihull designers, Dick Newick began his work using flat-sheet plywood and strip planking in his strongly performance-oriented designs. He broke with the “plywood box” norm in 1971 when his trimaran Three Cheers was launched. This vessel utilized the cold molded construction method in her hulls and a one-piece, totally integrated crosswise bridge or “wing aka” to connect the three hulls. Three Cheers had not only the sleekest, most sea kindly hulls imaginable but the wing aka, which resembled the top of a big boomerang, comprised the superstructure of the cabin and contained the bunks, galley and stowage areas. It was sculpted beneath to either deflect or decapitate onrushing wave crests, and was integrated with the hulls to achieve a strikingly organic anatomy that seemed evolved by nature over eons.

This boat was almost shocking to behold. Looking both avian and pelagic, she also had a vaguely reptilian purposefulness about her. Whether roosting at the dock or streaking through the waves she just looked right for the job of showing the world how a small sailing craft could sustain very high speed in extremely rough water and awfully hard wind. She had demonstrated her ability in some races, but while competing in the 1976 Observer Single-handed TransAtlantic Race (OSTAR), skipper Mike McMullen set her on the risky northern route to America and may have encountered ice. Fragments of the boat were found years later in a fishing trawl but Mike McMullen was never seen again. Newick, visibly distraught from the incident, said, “If you’re going to play these rough games, somebody is going to get hurt.” As with many revolutionaries Three Cheers led a checkered life and met a tragic demise, but her ongoing influence was pivotal.

Sailboat racing had by now become a major sport in France. The 1976 OSTAR was won officially by the venerated French superstar Eric Tabarly sailing his 73-foot monohull Pen Duick VI. Tabarley was actually beaten to the finish by the huge French monohull Club Med, a 236-foot juggernaut sailed – yes, single-handed – by Alain Colas. Colas was penalized into 5th place but both vessels had taken about twenty four days to cross from France. There was a large contingent of French journalists at the finish in Newport, Rhode Island, and this generated a lot of tricolor hoopla in the quiet harbor town. To everyone’s great surprise, only one day after celebrating the French achievements another boat appeared at the finish. It was a tiny Newick trimaran. Called the Third Turtle, she was in some ways the baby sister of Three Cheers. At only 31feet-long this VAL class production boat, essentially a daysailer, was sailed by the modest Canadian Mike Birch. At less than half the length of the official winner and about one-eighth the size of the juggernaut, she literally stole the show in the milestone event. Birch’s tiny trimaran was described by at least one French journalist as, “Zee reeal winnaire.” In a sense, the real winner was Dick Newick.

The French now began to stage their own transoceanic racing events. The first Route Du Rum race was run in 1978 from Saint Malo, France to the island of Guadaloup in the Caribbean. Another French superstar sailor Michael Malinofski was sailing his Kriter V (sponsored by the French Champaign producer), a 68-foot monohull. As Malanofski approached the finish line, apparently far ahead of the fleet, again the redoubtable Mike Birch was seen also approaching in a very Newick-like 38-foot cold molded trimaran designed by Walter Greene named for this race Olympus Photo. Kriter, at almost twice the length of Olympus, was holding a substantial lead but Birch surveyed his position and realized that the local conditions favored his trimaran. He also, recalled that the race sponsors had put up a generous cash prize for the winner and he resolved to give it a go. Sailing in breezy head winds he overhauled the big monohull and – after twenty three days at sea – finished first by ninety eight seconds! The event demonstrated that in order to win in such competition one must be sailing in something other than a monohull. Then, when Phil Weld won the 1980 OSTAR, sailing at age 65 against twenty five younger men in the 50’ Newick-designed, cold molded trimaran Moxie, France went multihull crazy.

In trying to identify the root cause of the French enthusiasm, nautical historian Richard Boehmer has drawn attention back to Dick Newick and his Three Cheers. In Boehmer’s words, “I think it was not just the speed but also the beauty of Newick’s boats that so strongly stimulated the aesthetic sensibilities of the French. After Three Cheers and Moxie they jumped into multihulls with an investment of talent and commercial sponsorship that has led to their three-decade dominance in both ocean racing and production multihulls.”

As a measure of the advances in modern sailing technology – made recently by French multihulls, consider these trans-Atlantic records: The first OSTAR, held in 1960, was won by Englishman Sir Francis Chichester who crossed by monohull in 40 days 13 hours. The present single handed record for this east-west course was set in 2004 by Frenchman Michael Desjoyeaux sailing a trimaran at 8 days 8 hours. The west-east record set in 1905 by Captain Charlie Barr in the schooner Atlantic – a record which stood for 75 years – was 12 days 4 hours, and the current record set in 2007 by the French trimaran GroupAMA3 stands at 4days four hours.

While this may be stretching the point, the writer believes that the influence of Dick Newick’s wooden boats, Tree Cheers in particular, was so far-reaching that nothing in the sailing world will ever be the same again. Even the next Americas Cup will be sailed in multihulls!. By breaking the barriers of both performance and acceptance, Dick Newick can be called the Chuck Yeager of multihulls.

Additional notes for the Video version of this article:

Multihull Survival

Multihulls can capsize, monohulls can sink, and six decades of both have shown that one is about as unlikely as the other. How unlikely is that? Capsize and sinking are each very rare in cruisers but relatively common in racers. The prudent seaman must prepare for one or the other. The preparations are different – the crews of capsized multihulls have survived for as long as four months aboard the mother ship, whereas the survivors of sinking are forced to take to a life raft., Consequently, the aftermath of capsize is much preferred to the aftermath of sinking.

There is a more pervasive issue of survival today, that of “life as we know it.” The modern multihull emerged at a time of great buoyancy and optimism. The despots in Europe and Asia had been subdued, and the victors felt they were a special people, ready to make the world a better place, able to accomplish anything with wealth and will. By the early seventies, however, there had arisen the threat of nuclear annihilation, the losses in Vietnam, and the decline from Peace and Love to defiance and confrontation. Many chose to opt out of the hip and the political at home for freedom and adventure at sea. That option explains, to some extent at least, the explosive growth of inexpensive, owner-built, cruising-type multihulls in that time. It is easy to call this escapism or paranoia but more insightful to view it as survival. Conversely, today’s expensive, production built multihull charter boats and opulent cruisers are evidence of independence and leisure, and the racing multihulls suggest the quest for corporate recognition and national pride. These comparisons describe succinctly the pendulum swing in cultural trends – and multihull development – since World War Two. It’s been a great ride, but it appears to this writer that the old pendulum is nearing its counter swing.

In no way does the above suggest that multihulls can save the world. They are mere examples (albeit good examples) of how modern technology – including modern wood technology – can be applied to ancient concepts and thereby indicate one way ahead for humankind. In the long view looking back multihulls might be seen as just another brainchild of the age of waste, but born just in time to mature for serving in the green recovery. In whatever numbers, these boats of many hulls are likely to be with us for another two or three millennia; they’ve been around at least that long so far.

Note: The video counterpart to this article is a brief overview of multihull history from the 1040s to the present including their engine-powered, commercial and military applications. To see it, click PIONEERS VIDEO