OutRig Media has announced that the official biography of Dick Newick has just been published.
Dick Newick was possibly the 20th century’s most influential multihull designer. Now aficionados of multihulls – including trimarans, catamarans and proas – can enjoy reading his official biography. This book takes readers through his early years, including kayak building and sailing, and then traveling throughout Europe in the years…
Here is 6:20 of hot proa footage from our friends at Le Prao Pétrel. Pétrel is a stitch-and-glue plywood “sharpie” proa with aluminum beams and a crab claw rig. In other words, very basic and simple. However looks are deceiving because this boat has been under steady incremental improvement since 2008, and the recent videos are proof of the fruits of slow and steady perseverance.
The blog is an excellent document of the trials and…
A few days after the start of the R2AK I was biking around Point Hudson Marina to see what I might see, and decided to duck into a grassy field behind the RV lot when I ran into a proa! I skidded to a stop and pointed at the boat, “That’s a proa!” I cleverly exclaimed. The young man who was doing something on the boat stopped what he was doing, smiled and affirmed “Yes, it is!” That’s how I met Dillon Majoros, the owner, designer and…
Rafael and Heidi Francke update us on their latest mega-trailerable multihull - this time a proa. Congratulations on a quick build and a successful first sail. -Editor
Here we go again. This time it is NOT a folding catamaran like Cat2Fold. There is a change in wind direction. It is a Pacific proa.
Last year we were playing with the idea of a “folding” (actually “demountable”) power catamaran. The playing got serious to the point of…
Gold Coast Yachts of St. Croix, USVI, have launched the new Bieker 53 performance cruising catamaran. The polarizing aesthetics aside, we are very interested in this build. The curved boards are a moderate use of hydrofoil tech that is extremely promising. Unlike the fully flying Gunboat G4, FUJIN’s foils do not lift the hulls completely free of the water’s surface. The boards augment righting moment and pitch stability, making the…
Advanced Aerodynamic Vessels of Nantes, France, aims to improve the speeds of passenger vessels by harnessing the flow of apparent wind. The catamaran employs planing stepped hulls similar to a seaplane, but the resemblance to a flying machine doesn’t stop there. The central bridgedeck is carefully shaped into a wing that creates aerodynamic lift and reduces both displacement and drag:
The operational speed of today’s small workboats…
The Race to Alaska is proving to be just as tough on boats and sailors as expected. Uncharacteristically strong winds (up to 20 knots dead on the nose) and the resulting brutal chop are discovering every weak link in the fleet, causing gear failure, DNF’s, even a dismasting. Two of the early race favorites, the 24’ carbon fiber catamaran of Team Turn Point Design, and the Paul Bieker designed proa of Team Pure and Wild, called it quits…
The R2AK starting gun goes off in less than two days: June 4, at 5:00 am. Among the fleet of 56 boats due to depart Port Townsend on Thursday morning, nearly 50% are multihulls. Point Hudson is beginning to resemble Plymouth during the OSTAR and St. Malo during the Route du Rhum! The harbor is filling up with the coolest multihulls we’ve ever seen, many purpose built for the race. Not to say that there aren’t very interesting monos as…
This is TRINE, the first trimaran design of Richard C. Newick. Still going strong as a day charter boat in St. Croix, USVI, over four decades later. Not bad at all for plywood, and a damn good first try.
Thanks to Bob W. at Boat Bits for the submission! If you have some shots of interesting historical multihulls, send them in! We’d love to post them.
The Wave Writer - Kurt Hoehne, on the R2AK and its founder, Jake Beattie, and the Brown/Bieker proa of Team Pure & Wild. -Editor
In today’s world, there are few adventures with Big Questions. It seems every adventure has been done at least once before. Somebody’s going to find a new route to the summit, win the game on a superlative performance or lucky bounce, or find that extra bit of speed around the race. Those are relatively…
