CAT CRAZY, TRI FI and Other Multihull Comparisons by Jim Brown
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CAT CRAZY, TRI FI And Other Multihull Comparisons By Jim Brown “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so much worth doing as simply messing about in…” Multihulls! That paraphrased quote is pilfered for the most part from Ratty, the revered rodent in Kenneth Grahame’s venerated tale “The Wind in the Willows.” Of course, Grahame and Ratty said it of ordinary boats, and neither would have, even could have, said it of multihulls. But if Brown had been the author instead of Grahame, his character Ratty might have said something like, “There is nothing, absolutely nothing quite so creative as screwing around with multihulls.” By “screwing around,” Ratty would have spoken literally, meaning to conceive, gestate, whelp, wean and release upon the Earth’s fluid interface one’s very own flesh and blood multihulls. And that’, impatient reader, is what this appendix is about, so like most appendices reading it is strictly optional. In that you are reading on, please be prepared for some sacrilege. Suggesting there is something divine about boat design and construction I will try to trace multihull origins by expanding on the theorem expressed by my late friend Walt Glaser who said (in Chapter 1 of my memoir, “Among the Multihulls,”), “A man builds a boat to make up for the fact that he can’t build a baby… What else can a guy produce with his own body that so closely simulates a living thing?” It took me many years of both messing about in and screwing around with boats to apprehend this aspect of watercraft, and I admit that it still takes quite a stretch for me to accept the notion. But look at it this way: A boat, and especially a sailing boat, is unlike any living creature ever known. Its domain is confined to the boundary between Earth’s two great fluids, water and air. This realm is of course inhabited by many living things. There are fish that swim and birds that fly, and even birds that swim and fish that fly, but there is nothing alive that thrives on immersion in both fluids simultaneously and even takes its motive power from the relative movements of atmosphere across its interface with hydrosphere. In particular there are no beings that can work with the wind and water to proceed in a direction contrary to the movements of both. Perhaps this peculiar void of life exists because the environment of this realm, which envelopes more than two thirds of Earth, is perverse. The velocity of the moving fluids and the amplitude of resulting perturbations in the interface can at times be extreme (to be convinced of that extremism just go to sea in a sailboat). Nevertheless the sailing vessel – unlike any living creature – can glean an almost life-like world-girdling mobility from this environment and so enjoys free access to a wider realm of Earth than any protoplasmic thing evolved to live there. No, God never made a true sailing creature; I like to think he left that up to man. And by clinging to the backs of, or hiding in the thorax of, our sailing creatures – no matter how deviant such behavior may be – we get to go wherever they can go! Isn’t that just too totally marsupial? So ladies, you come too. But if you find that boats are pretty much a guy thing, please consider this waterborne excuse for our machismo. Boats can make us feel, if only feel, immortal. Just thank your lucky chromosomes for the fact that you simply do not need such relatively lame creative outlets. The Old Tradeoff… To assure that men undertake to gestate boats, their design and construction seems purposely fraught with cosmic obstacles that are great fun for boys to work around. Principle among them is the old compromise between stability and performance. It seems this compromise pervades many facets of life: Institutions, economies, personalities, relationships... With boats – at least with single-hulled boats – great stability seems to come only at the cost of great performance. The wider one makes an independent hull the more stable it becomes but the harder it is to push through the water. Conversely, the narrower the boat the easier the stroke but the tippier the ride. If it weren’t for the enormous difference in density between water and air (a gallon of water is some six hundred times more dense than a gallon of air) there wouldn’t be much stability to a boat at all. Plowing through the water when propelled only by the wind blowing over mast and sails creates pervasive overturning forces and so requires a high level of stability in a sailing creature. Surely it has ever been so. Sailing boats have been around longer than civilization, the realm in which they operate hasn’t changed much, and the old tradeoff between gliding along and tipping over seems never fully resolved. The ancient marine architects faced the same tradeoffs as we do today, and I find it quite engaging to consider their original solutions. My own investigations into this matter are amateur and casual, but in this quest I have been aided by my friend James Wharram. James is one of the few originators of modern multihulls who relates his work directly to the achievements of ancient people. I recently enjoyed a cruise through the Greek Islands with James and his crew aboard their 63-foot catamaran SPIRIT OF GAIA. (The term Gaia is taken from the Steven Lovelock concept of Earth as a single organism, a “living ball” wherein humanity is but one organ of the integrated smear that is the Earthly biosphere.) The captain of this grand vessel is Ms. Hanneke Boon who is co-designer in Wharram’s longstanding multihull design business. With Hanneke in complete control (James was sometimes heard to mumble, “I’m not the captain here, I’m only the Admiral”) we cruised from one idyllic anchorage to another, each surrounded by mountainous islands and crystal water. We moored off ancient towns with walled harbors and castles on the hills. James is an amateur historian of considerable depth, and as we 2 sailed a string of easy day-hops through the Ionian Sea and Gulf of Corinth he told us much about the waves of humanity that have pulsed through these islands since Etruscan times. Much of the ebb and flow of early Mediterranean empires was water-borne, but as far as is known none of it was borne by multihulls. GAIA has sailed around the world and looks like a giant twin canoe from out of Pacific antiquity but her Siamese ghost-ship form was completely out of context in these waters. She did, however, serve admirably as the stimulus for our discussions, even our disagreements, of sea nomads and multihull origins. Our conversations tended to mosey but they frequently return to the roles played by watercraft in the distant saga of early man. James explained that the first cross-water movements of humanity can be postulated only from weak anthropological evidence, so a fair bit of conjecture is implied when speculating on the design of the earliest seafaring vessels and the motivation of their sailors. Very little physical evidence has survived to tell of the boats themselves, and even less is known for sure of why their creators put to sea in them. How, James and I asked each other, did the early seafaring boats come into being? Perhaps, we agreed, the better question is why? And how far back in time did we care to take this inquiry? As our discussions progressed to PHD status (Piled Higher and Deeper) our friend Scott Brown captured something of this exchange with his video camera, and it is from that footage that the following quotes are loosely taken: “One starting point,” James said, “might be the migration of the first Austronesian people to cross from mainland Asia to Australia. Recent evidence says this could have occurred as early as fifty thousand years ago. Common sense says these aboriginal people probably made their passages across the Torres Strait in rafts, but no one really knows what sort of craft they used or why they wanted to migrate to Australia anyway.” “Maybe they had to move for some reason,” I said, “pushed out to sea by other people or famine or some such.” “I think they were just nomads,” said James. "Sea nomads. And I think there were sea nomads long before there were land nomads.” “Really! Why do you think that?” “Simple,” he said. “The wheel was invented only six thousand years ago, and before that it was just a lot easier to move around on the planet by water than by land. After the last ice age of course there were nomadic peoples wandering on foot in Eurasia and elsewhere, but to populate the whole planet they faced not only oceans but thick forest, mountains, jungles, swamps and deserts. On foot they were lucky to make five or ten miles per day. When they came to lakes and rivers they had to have a boat anyway. Let’s say they started with rafts. Now, rafts are great if you’re just 3 going to float along downstream with the current, but to cross wide water a raft has tremendous drag. You can’t really paddle a raft, it has to be sailed and even then it is very slow going. But if you’re already into paddling and sailing, how about a dugout canoe? They are vastly easier to push through the water than a raft because their hulls are narrow; their breadth is limited by the diameter of the log from which they are made.