In the 1980s, Roland Prout, catamaran designer and builder, reckoned that one and a half percent of sailors were ‘catamariners’. Today, looking through the DCA membership list, this figure is still about right. How catamarans originated and why people sail them (or why more people do not) became of interest while looking into buying one myself recently. (I have now increased this small percentage figure within the DCA). What follows is a potted history of the twin-hulled sailing vessel, hoping this might be of interest to some of the 98%, and some brief comments on my own, a Wharram Hitia 17.

Use of the word ‘catamaran’ to describe a twin hulled boat entered the language quite recently, within the last fifty years. It is actually a misnomer, and misspelt at that. ‘Katta‑marram’ is Tamil for ‘lashed logs’, the name applied to the pointed vessels of lashed logs evolved to penetrate the surf off the Coromandel coast of southern India. The modern catamaran has its origins in the Polynesian double canoe, developed for offshore voyaging. There are many illustrations of them dating from the 17th century — round bilged pairs of narrow hulls with planked deck between, in the middle of which was a round topped shelter cabin. There seems to have been good bridge deck clearance, woven claw sails seem to have been popular, something like a lateen, and vessels were steered from aft with paddles. Single canoes with double outriggers were common for inshore fishing from several Pacific islands; proas, single outrigger canoes, were used for long distance sailing; but the passage making travelling ships were almost invariably large versions of the double canoe. The sophisticated Hawaiian double canoe with flexibly connected hulls and single central mast is the progenitor of the modern catamaran.

Western cats

The first recorded double hulled craft outside the Pacific was designed by Sir William Petty during the reign of Charles II. It was sent in 1663 by Lord Massereene from Dublin to the Royal Society for evaluation. Designed to carry a large sail spread but with shallow draught, it was found to be fast and, encouraged by trials, a second larger one was built which set off across the Atlantic trade route. However, she foundered in a Biscay storm, possibly due to too much weight in the hulls without the necessary strength in the connecting structure, and The Experiment, as she was named, was not repeated. Meanwhile in the yachting world, the first flush of enthusiasm stimulated by the royal patronage of the Stuarts declined after the forced removal of James II, but the eighteenth century saw the foundation of the first yacht clubs and by the latter part of the century racing was not uncommon on the Thames. The prestige of royal patronage by the Prince Regent and his brothers in the early 1800s again brought yachting into widespread fashion and new clubs proliferated both at home and abroad.

Commodore Stevens, founder and first commodore of the New York Yacht Club, had built a double hulled boat in 1820 called Double Trouble. Stevens was later a member of the syndicate that funded the schooner America to cross the Atlantic to Cowes and beat the Royal Yacht Squadron’s fleet in its own round the Isle of Wight race in 1851, winning the now synonymously named 100 guinea cup presented as prize by Queen Victoria, and undermining British over-confidence in native yacht design. In 1868 John MacKenzie of Belfast had a 21ft catamaran built with a sea chest amidships to be flooded with 800 kg water as ballast in heavy weather, and H. Melling of Liverpool had a similar boat built in 1873 to sail on the River Dee. (If anyone knows anything about this vessel, I’d be interested to know, because the Dee is my local water. So far, the Liverpool Maritime Museum has been unable to help).

Back across the Atlantic, the America’s Cup winner designer Nathaniel Herreshoff produced various catamarans in the 1870s. But when these began to show a speed advantage he found that they were quickly outlawed by conventional yachtsmen who disliked being beaten by boats that cost less and went faster. Most of Herreshoff’s boats were more than 30ft in length, had elliptically shaped hull sections, hardly any rocker and depended entirely on the long hulls to prevent leeway. Not surprisingly, despite his successes, tacking was said to be difficult.

Another hiatus followed until 1937, when Frenchman Eric de Bisschop, impressed by the native boats sailing off Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, there built himself a 36ft catamaran named Kaimiloa and sailed her west about the hemisphere, rounding the Cape of Storms in winter, to Cannes in France.

Post-war cats

The seeds of modern catamaran development had been sown and, after the Second World War, they began to sprout. On Canvey Island on the Essex coast, the Prout family were in the business of making small boats and had become renown for the production of a popular canvas and mahogany folding yacht tender. They were keen sailors and the brothers Francis and Roland were also champion canoeists (representing Britain in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics). They experimented with twin hulled designs with kayaks lashed to bamboo frames rigged with a mast and dinghy sails, which went “like a scalded cat”. Encouraged, they purpose-built their first catamaran, 17ft 9in long, named Shearwater, which they sailed through the Havengore Creek to the River Crouch for the 1954 Burnham regatta week on the eve of the first race, sleeping aboard under their green canvas tent. They won every race of their handicap class easily and the series outright.

The success of Shearwater I, as she became known, led to an 18ft design, Shearwater II, with 9ft beam and more rocker to assist turning. From this mould came Ken Pearce’s Endeavour, which won the special speed trials at Cowes in 1955, clocked at over 14 knots by warship radar. She received much publicity at the time when the Duke of Edinburgh sailed her. Shearwater III (16ft 6in by 7ft 6in) was designed to be small enough conveniently to tow on a road trailer and was almost as fast. In 1956, Ken Pearce sailing Endeavour was the first onto the beach at Boulogne in the first ever cross-channel dinghy race, while the Prouts in the first Shearwater III came in ten minutes later (the latter winning on handicap), beating all other competitors, including notables such as Uffa Fox, by more than an hour. The publicity led the Shearwater III to be a huge success as the world’s first production catamaran.

Half a world away, on a beach in Hawaii, an ex-glider pilot Woodbridge Brown teamed up with local boat builder Alfred Kumalai to build a forty foot, light, Marconi-rigged, surf-riding catamaran Manu Kai. And in 1955, together with Rudi Choy, they built a second forty-footer, Waikiki Surf, which sailed the 3,000 miles to California in sixteen days, attracting a great deal of attention and marking the start of catamaran ocean racing. Warren Seaman later joined Choy and Kumalai in the design partnership known as CSK, whose ocean racers went on to hold many records.

James Wharram and his naked cats

Meanwhile, impressed by accounts of the seaworthiness of Kaimiloa and inspired by de Bisschop’s voyage, James Wharram set off from England in 1956 with two ladies, including his wife-to-be, in Tangaroa, a 23ft flat-bottomed Polynesian-style catamaran (described as “coffin-like”) of his own design. He followed the trade route to Trinidad, where he stopped to await the birth of his son. Here, he built another catamaran called Rongo, 40ft long, the first of a series of deep V-hulled boats which were to characterise all his later designs. This he sailed home across the North Atlantic (his son travelled by air) and thus became the first to sail the Atlantic by catamaran in both directions. He experienced formidable gales on the way back and was profoundly thankful that he had no solid bridge deck for the gale force winds to catch under and provoke a capsize. Seeing some of the waves that were tramping up behind he was also glad, when they broke aboard, that the deck slats let the sea through without impeding its progress. Wharram subsequently made two more transatlantic trips testing his boats in the nastiest weathers. His design feature of lashing his cross-beams to the hulls with rope, allowing some flexibility, seemed to be successful in dissipating some of the energy that might otherwise have caused his boats to founder.

The Prout brothers’ success was not limited to small racing catamarans and they soon turned their attention to larger craft. Don Robertson, then the chief test pilot for de Haviland, persuaded them to build him a 36ft catamaran in cold-moulded mahogany, which he named Snowgoose, an unusual design with the mast set well aft and a huge foresail. She had notable success in the round the Isle of Wight race. The first complete circumnavigation of the world in a catamaran was achieved by Dr. David Lewis in Rehu Moana (Maori for ‘Ocean Spray’) a vessel designed by Colin Mudie and built by the Prout brothers using Snowgoose hulls. He spent three years on the venture, starting with the 1964 transatlantic race as the first leg of his voyage. Rehu Moana, however, having passed through the Straits of Magellan, was not the first catamaran to be sailed around Cape Horn. This was achieved five years later by the Anneliese, one of the 30ft Oceanic catamarans designed by Bill O’Brien, who first had great success with his racing day-boat design, the Jumpahead, and then with his highly popular, hard chined, stable cruising boat, the 8m Bobcat.

Many new catamaran designs sprang to life in the 1960s and 70s. Notable among the small types was the Hobie 14, designed in 1969 by Hobie Alter in California to be cheap to build and easy to sail off a beach. With its distinctive, deeply curved, banana-shaped hulls and rudders that kick up in the shallows, it is a common site at beach resorts and is now easily the most popular catamaran world-wide. When pushed, it also has the dubious distinction of being capable of capsize in any direction. At a different end of the spectrum is the Tornado, 20ft long by 10ft in the beam, the only catamaran selected for Olympic competition. Designed by Rodney Marsh and built by Reg White in 1966, they deliberately made everything as light as possible, then, if it broke, made it a little bit stronger. The result was the flag-bearer of racing catamarans. The streamlined, rotating mast, high aspect, fully battened mainsail and small jib has since been copied by virtually all other production catamarans. Marsh later turned his mind to designing a less specialised production boat and so came up with the Dart 18 in 1976. The Dart has since supplanted the Shearwater as the most popular racing class catamaran in Britain.

Millennial cats

On the eve of the new millennium, the most extraordinary collection of the fastest sailing ships in history gathered in Barcelona for The Race, to sail completely around the world, passing the three great southern continental capes to port. These catamarans all have hull lengths in excess of 100ft, and their flexible, rotating, aerodynamic masts, some more than 130ft high, supported on titanium bearings, can carry more than 11,000 sq ft of sail. One, Club Med, skippered by New Zealander Grant Dalton, won The Race, circling the planet in 62 days and 7 hours, averaging 18 knots over 27,000 nautical miles. Her sister ship, Orange, skippered by Frenchman Bruno Peyron, gained the Jules Verne Trophy in 2002 for the slightly longer circumnavigation of 28,000NM in 64 days and 9 hours, starting and finishing on a line between the Lizard in Cornwall and Ushant in France. No other ship, engine-powered or not, has travelled so far, so fast, non-stop. Club Med (now renamed Maiden II, in the hands of British yachtswoman Tracy Edwards), Orange, and American Steve Fossett’s giant catamaran, Play Station, between them now hold most of the prestigious long-distance sailing speed records.

Clearly, speed has been the prime motivation behind modern catamaran development and is a large part of the attraction. To quote The Times in 1957, ‘The catamaran has strongly caught the fancy of those to whom speed is the prime satisfaction to be had from sailing.’ After all, in the words of L. Francis Herreshoff (yacht designer and son of Nathaniel), “To me the pleasure of sailing is almost in direct proportion to the speed, and wallowing around in some pot-bellied abortion, heeled over and straining under a lapping jib or some other rule-cheating windbag, seems quite ridiculous.” And anyone who has watched racing craft on a fine day slipping across the water gracefully raising and dipping one hull as in a kind of ballet can hardly fail to appreciate their beauty. But speed is not the full story. The double canoe has evolved as a stable hull form through over two thousand years of ocean passage making in Polynesia, which surely recommends it for safe cruising.

So, why don’t more people sail catamarans? I suspect partly because of false perceptions and unfamiliarity. In our hemisphere, boats have evolved with single hulls and these are what we know and trust. But just as evolution can generate animals as diverse as cattle and kangaroos on different continents, each suited to herbivorous grazing, so too with boats suited to cruising and off-shore passaging. The double canoe evolved in a different hemisphere and a different culture, and is simply somewhat untried here.

For me, who neither aspires to break records nor to win races, a catamaran, of the right sort, seemed to offer responsiveness in light airs without the need for an engine, combined with a highly stable hull form with minimum risk of capsize. I chose the James Wharram designed 17ft Hitia, like the one described by Mark Finlayson in the last Bulletin (also see the drawing with Geoffrey Whitehead’s article in Bulletin 116, autumn 1987). I like the way her double-ended, V-sectioned hulls sleekly part the water with a minimum of turbulence and wake, and how in light airs, with the tillers lightly fastened with elastic cord, she happily sails herself, allowing me to move comfortably across the trampoline and pour a full cup of coffee and then leave it perched atop one of the hulls without the slightest concern for it spilling. And she has lots of stowage space within the hulls. With her 11ft beam and appropriate rig, I suspect she is incapable of capsize in any conditions I am likely to be out in. But her beam does mean that she requires complete disassembly before transportation by road, which involves a lot of work single-handed, so I am not likely to trail her often. However, she lies quite happily on a tidal mooring, which is how I keep her. To handle, she is pleasantly light on the tiller, but does like a bit of sea-room to manoeuvre, and tacking requires a little more anticipation than in a small dinghy. As for speed, well, compared to other small catamarans, she is a real slow-poke, but I do take some pleasure from the way she completely over-hauls the club’s dinghy fleet. In a chop, her V-shaped hulls tend to ease her through the wave crests and troughs with no slamming, although some crests do tend to explode violently on the fore-cross-beam. As with all small catamarans, she is wet at speed. Her hull shape gives good directional stability and when the breeze dies she can be paddled from the side of one hull, albeit slowly, on a straight course with much the same effort as paddling a large canoe, which, after all, is what she is.

NB The Publisher (who knows about Mr. Wharram’s views on lack of clothing at sea) takes all responsibility for the subheadings in this article.