Among The Multihulls: Volume One

Thrill to this genuine 20th century
saga, complete with incredible stories
and historical insights from a
masterful "multihull storyteller" ...

A young schooner bum, thrilled by the ways of a windjammer, resolves to acquire his own boat and follow the sea in search of pals and gals and utopian freedom.

It is the mid 1950s, he is in his early twenties, and while building his own boat he rather suddenly finds himself to be a family man. Undeterred, he and his bride, now five and a half months pregnant, sail out through the Golden Gate in an experimental contraption and turn left for Mexico.

They don't know it at the time, and they wouldn't have cared, but their tiny boat is the first three-hulled watercraft to go to sea in modern times. Soon the author becomes an unintended "instant expert" in what would become, fifty years later, an absolute sea change in marine architecture.

This work in two volumes tells of those fifty years, of the people, the boats, the foibles and the fables, the history and lore that - despite a sometimes fierce resistance from the Corinthian community - comprise the origins of today's modern catamarans, trimarans and proas.

Told as the memoir of a septuagenarian sea dog whose failing eyesight causes him to "see" his memories, Jim Brown recounts the multihull milestones of the 1950s to the 70s (Volume One) and the 1970s into the new millennium (Volume Two). He highlights the pivotal multihull pioneers, and relates the controversial advent and eventual ascendance of multihulls today, with their implications for tomorrow.

However, this rich nautical heritage runs as but a thread through the fabric of how the multihull phenomenon shapes the lives of the writer and his family and friends. His obsession is fulfilled in ways far different from his youthful promise to himself.