Tag: dick newick

122 PROFESSIONAL BOATBUILDER Newick Multihulls • Long-Term Layup • Niche-Market Diesels • Web-Assisted Manufacturing DECEMBER/JANUARY 2010

Intuitive Dynamics

The venerable Dick Newick, a pioneer in sailing multihulls, continues to deliver designs whose simplicity and grace, even at rest, are evocative of seabirds. His fast, safe, ocean-proven multihulls can truly be said to have been “ahead of their time.”

by Steve Callahan With circumnavigating sailboat races now capturing more press than the Super Bowl; with mul- tihull speedsters as plastered with multinational corporate logos as any Daytona 500 racecar; with multihull workboats proliferating like eels; and now, with 90′ (27.4m) multihulls lined up to race for the America’s Cup—it’s hard to recall just how reviled multihulls were as recently

as the 1980s.
Like most art that has reconfigured

the future, designer Richard “Dick” Newick’s creations threatened some as much as they enlightened others.

At times, his trimarans’ simplicity, structural reliability, and astounding speed seemed like grenades tossed into yacht clubs. One sailing maga- zine editorial, titled “Unsafe on Any Sea,” took all multihulls to task, and featured a photo of Newick’s Trice — despite the fact she never suffered a structural failure or other mishap until destroyed by hurricane Hugo in 1989. Indeed, many of the concepts and design features that arose from Newick’s explorations have so shaped the norm of all sailboats over time, that we now might wonder why there was such a fuss in the first place.

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From an early age, Newick discov- Holland, Germany, and Denmark,

ered the joy of crossing water in slim, lightweight craft. He embraced the simple life that required keeping a vessel light, and the close touch with the sea it provides, leading him to explore cruising frontiers long before their value became obvious.

Newick’s first boat was a kayak he built at age 10 with his father and brothers in the family’s garage in Ruth- erford, New Jersey. “I was a skinny kid who was lousy at team sports,” he recalls. His father, a skilled craftsman, rightly thought the project would also build young Dick’s self-confidence. At 11, Newick built another kayak with family. At 12 he thought, “I can do this,” so designed and built two, one for a friend. At 14, he sold his first plans to a schoolmate for five bucks.

In the early 1950s—after a hitch in the U.S. Navy, after earning a college degree, after running a boatshop in eureka, California, and then work- ing with Quakers in Mexico to help prison inmates and schoolchildren— he loaded an 18′ (5.4m) kayak on a ship and headed for postwar europe.

there, Newick cruised 600 miles through the canals of Belgium,

decades before kayaking would become a global middle-class sport.

Newick’s design philosophy is firmly rooted in that trip. He reveled in living simply, sleeping under bridges or in haylofts or a small tent or youth hostels. Sailing a third of the way, paddling a third, and riding on work- ing canal craft a third, he became increasingly conscious of how every pound of gear added drag to the kayak.

wintering over in Denmark, living in a minesweeper’s discarded wheel- house lit by kerosene lamps, Newick fed a woodstove with bits of beached, dead commercial-fishing boats and, he recalls, “learned how to build a strong boat by attacking nearby hulks with an eight-pound [3.6-kg] maul and axe.” Once things thawed, he bought sev- eral Folkboats, the most expensive of them for $2,300, and shipped the sail- boats to San Francisco for resale.

Hitching rides down europe’s coast and across the Atlantic on a variety of watercraft, Newick extended his cruise to 22 months and 10,000 miles through 11 countries. He noted the sparkling performance of Uffa Fox’s Flying Fifteen and other small, fast

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english sailboats. He admired the practical arrangements of the numerous working sailing craft he encountered throughout.

Along the way, he met surprising numbers of early long-distance cruis- ers and singlehanded sailors follow- ing the lead of tom Crichton, “whose book Sailboat Tramp had helped to start my wanderings,” Newick wrote in a series of articles for The Rudder magazine in 1956. Crichton voyaged from Sweden to Israel in a 25-footer (7.6m).

Notably, many of the sailors Newick met also sailed quite small craft. Arne Christiansen, for example, sailed a 23-footer (7m); John Goodwin’s boat in Barbados was 25′ ; and tom Follett sailed a 23-footer to the United States from the United kingdom, accom- panied by Newick for the last 1,200 miles. the size of the boat seemed to be in inverse proportion to the adventure one could capture with it. “New friendships and ideas could not be numbered, much less evaluated, in ordinary terms,” Newick wrote. And all for a couple of thousand dollars.

After joining Follett on his passage to the mainland, Newick headed back to the Caribbean for St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands, where he met and sub- sequently married Pat, whom he now refers to affectionately as “that girl I used to go with.” together they built a day-charter business over the next 17 years with a native sloop and, signifi- cantly, multihulls Newick designed and built. “I had only one design customer, and he was easy to please,” he recalls, though others soon followed.

Crossing the Atlantic in a narrow 40′ (12.1m) monohull racer with long over- hangs had the effect of literally rolling catamarans into Dick’s considerations. So he built the 40′ catamaran Ay-Ay for $8,000, which proved to be an ideal charter platform for the next 42 years,

16 of them under Newick’s ownership. Soon, though, he turned to trimarans.

Caribbean-based designer-builder Peter Spronk (see Professional Boat- Builder No. 119, page 30) worked with Newick and went on to create some of the world’s most beautiful catamarans, primarily because, as Newick observes, Spronk never tried to cram too much accommodation and other “modern inconveniences” into them. Spronk’s low wing-decks slammed a good deal, though. Newick’s trimarans seemed more complex, provided a stiffer staying platform for the rig, greater wing clearance, and better maneuverability and upwind performance. Newick started out with 24′ and 32′ (7.3m and 9.7m) daysailers, then created the 36′, 2-ton (10.9m, 1,814-kg) Trice, a boat that signaled future developments.

So-called “first generation” mod- ern multihulls, such as Piver-designed trimarans, had capitalized on rela- tively new plywood; the results, how- ever, were boxy cabins, hard angles, and flat-sided V hulls. By contrast, Newick’s strip-planked bottoms and tortured plywood yielded hullforms with more curved V-sections. Also, the rounded edges on the bottoms of his connective platforms began to suggest gull wings. In addition, Newick raised the amas (known then as “floats” or “outriggers”) until they danced lightly on the sea with the boat at rest. when sailing, the weather hull lifted well clear of the water, reducing drag. the centers of volume on the amas also moved forward, in order to counteract the real direction of sail forces, espe- cially downwind.

Subsequently, designers would strug- gle for decades to really appreciate the huge loads on a multihull—owing to

its enormous righting moment and power to carry sail. But Newick him- self didn’t hesitate to employ substan- tial beam structures that made up a large percentage of the boat’s weight.

At a time when conventional boat design was substantially oriented around stock hydrostatic formulas, Newick established himself as a wiz- ard of intuitive dynamics.

So in 1964 and 1965 he set off on Trice, with her spartan accommoda- tions, and sailed round-trips of 3,200 miles to New england. “Newick gave the impression it was all in a day’s work,” later wrote designer Robert Harris. eager for a performance yard- stick, Newick sailed Trice alongside the 1964 Newport–Bermuda Race, with a crew of four. She was beaten only by the big monohull racers in the fleet, Niña and Stormvogel.

to the small cadre of multihull affi- cionados, Dick Newick was already regarded as an innovative designer, builder, and sailor. But it took the 1968 Observer Singlehanded trans- atlantic Race, or OStAR—at the time the premier event for singlehanded sailors and their no-holds-barred boats—to telegraph Newick’s talent around the world.

In 1968, it was impossible to put the Newick-designed Cheers into context, except that she’d finished third. She looked extracted from a sci-fi novel. Curvaceous hulls and the

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ewick’s structurally reliable

boats, unrestrained by conven- tional hull speeds, were racing and winning—routinely, locally. But, says Newick, “I was living in the boon- docks and had no real competition. I wanted to see how my boats stacked up against the big boys.”

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occasional rounded form on deck OStAR, and Cheers the first multihull

In 1972, Newick would offer similar innovation in a 46′ (14m) trimaran called Three Cheers, also to be raced by Follett and also commissioned by Cheers’ original owners, Jim and “tootie” Morris—the first in a series of multiple-boat clients. Freed of con- ventional forms, thanks to laminated wood veneers (and later, compos- ites), Newick created an entirely new aesthetic.

A “wing aka” spanned Three Cheers’ now-trademark Newick canoe hulls; with ends aimed upward, the vaka bow was elegantly flared to shed water. Previously, even other multihulls had largely clung to a traditional monohull for- mat, wearing angular cabin trunks spread onto flat-topped wing decks; or installed trussed or cantilevered beams bolted to amas.

By contrast, Newick’s aka smoothly bent its wings over the whole struc- ture. He had effectively eliminated angles where stresses might concen- trate, and added generous fairings to corner joints forward. In so doing, the deck and wing-bottom became widely separated webs for a large, super-stiff, yet lightweight beam spanning a third of the boat’s length, integrating and stiffening the entire boat’s structure while providing headroom and vol- ume below. though primarily stream- lined for reducing wave resistance, the wing aka also reduced wind resistance. Three Cheers’ wing aka

might beautify other boats, but on Cheers there was nary a straight line or angle in sight. two needle-thin 40′ canoe hulls, with spoon bows and rounded decks, were spanned by highly arched beams. On the weather hull, a reserve-buoyancy pod bulged from the streamlined cabintop. Amidships and to leeward, the ama’s freeboard rested just inches above the water. the boat didn’t tack; she changed ends, like Pacific proas with which islanders had explored the Pacific basin centuries before euro- peans found the nerve to sail monohulls to the Americas.

Prior to Newick, proas had been nearly forgotten, even in parts of the Pacific, and were virtually unknown to western eyes. Furthermore, his Cheers was abnormal even for a proa. what he referred to as an “Atlantic proa” kept the vaka (main hull), with accommodations, to weather, rather than to leeward as in the Pacific tra- dition, giving her even more stabil- ity per pound than a catamaran of equal beam. She had no keel or cen- terboard as such; instead, there was a pair of dagger-rudders. the crew would lower the aft rudder to steer while swinging the mainsails around on their unstayed masts.

Such a departure from all traditions usually is destined to face scores of fundamental problems. But after get- ting caught aback and knocked down to weather in trials, and then gaining her pod, Cheers went on to be sailed by the capable tom Follett across the Atlantic twice. In an upwind race in conditions so foul that half the fleet retired and two badly conceived tri- marans fell apart, Cheers finished right behind purpose-built 57′ and 50′ (17.3m and 15.2m) monohulls honed to race to weather. Avoiding the worst storms by sailing a course nearly a thousand miles longer, Follett became the first American to finish the

to place.
Newick boats would finish in

the top five in all three of the next OStAR races as well, including a win in 1980, thereby launching not only Newick’s career as a preeminent multihull raceboat designer, but also the golden age of multihulls generally.

“the Cheers project will stand as a perfect example of the sort of thing the OStAR was designed to encour- age. I don’t know which to admire most: the extreme unorthodoxy of the boat’s conception; or the strength and simplicity of her construction; or perhaps her wild good looks; or tom Follett’s impeccable seaman- ship,” wrote Blondie Hasler, famed adventurer and one of the OStAR’s originators.

“Carry substantial liability insurance with you when you take Cheers out for a sail,” wrote Follett the follow- ing winter. “this goes for anything like her at the present (experimental) stage of the design,” he added—a sentiment echoed by Newick, who attributes much of the boat’s success to Follett. though Newick and oth- ers later created other Atlantic proas, none ever achieved Cheers ’ success.

Ironically, this American boat, after decades in a museum, was bought by doctors Vincent and Nélie Besin in France, where she has been made a French national monument. And sails again.

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presaged a continuing trend toward: monocoque construction, the elimina- tion of point loadings, and streamlin- ing to reduce both wave and wind drag. even today, few designers have exceeded the sublime form of Three Cheers.

Three Cheers clocked 20 knots with a dozen people on board the day of her launch, and later hit up to 27. Follett sailed her to fifth in the OStAR. then Mike McMullen bought her, and helmed her to second in the doublehanded 1974 Round Brit- ain Race, 49 minutes behind the 70′ (21.3m) cat British Oxygen and ahead of Phil weld’s new Newick-designed 60′ (18.2m) tri Gulfstreamer and the French 70′ OStAR winner Manureva (ex–Pen Duick IV), among many other multihull entries.

In 1976, Newick achieved a seem- ingly unreachable pinnacle of racing- multihull design with a humble 31-footer (9.4m): his stock Val-class trimaran. By then, the OStAR had become carnage. Boats broke. Skip- pers disappeared. yet Newick’s diminutive Third Turtle, skippered by Mike Birch, beat three cats, 14 tri- marans, and 106 monohulls, finish- ing right behind Pen Duick VI —a uranium-ballasted monohull maxi, skippered by one of the most success- ful singlehanded sailors and design innovators of all time, eric tabarly, and ahead of the 236′ (71.9m) four- masted schooner Club Med, which

was penalized for outside assistance. Newick’s Val was a conventional oceangoing trimaran in all respects, except she was designed as a day- sailer/camper, with canvas seats and cuddy cabins fore and aft just big enough to squeeze in a berth. Racers walter Greene, placing eighth with a modified Val, and Rory Nugent (46th) reinforced a Val’s capabilities. Until then, efforts to win had concentrated on facilitating the handling of ever- larger craft, leading to the absurdly oversized Club Med. From now on, designers would focus more on effi- ciency. Newick proved that small, simple boats are easier for skippers to handle and drive closer to speed

potential, more often.
Ultimately, over 30 Vals would be

built whose evolved models (includ- ing a recent Val II) would enjoy expanded cabins in wing akas.

the year 1976, however, also ended tragically. en route to that edition of the OStAR, a huge wave capsized Phil weld’s 60′ Gulfstreamer. worse, Mike McMullen’s wife was electro- cuted prior to the start while prepar- ing Three Cheers. And in the race itself, McMullen and the boat disap- peared without a trace, presumed vic- tims of a ship or iceberg collision.

Nevertheless, from those grim cir- cumstances arose another lasting and productive relationship. Phil weld—a blue-blooded publisher, writer, and adventurer—soon employed the Gou-

geon Brothers boatshop (Bay City, Michigan) to build a lighter sister to Gulfstreamer, which weld’s wife, Ann, sug- gested he name Rogue Wave. when size lim- its were imposed for OStAR 1980, weld built a Newick 50-footer named Moxie. At age 65, even though

handicapped by what he called his “geriatric rig” (an in-mast roller-furling mainsail), weld captured the first American win.

For another quarter-century, multihulls would win all offshore shorthanded events in which they were allowed to enter.

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to facilitate construction while generating beautifully balanced hull shapes, Newick began drawing boats using a “master curve” body- section pattern. Moving a point on the curve along a reference diagonal or waterline, he would join sheer to fairbody at each station. By exploit- ing this technique, he could lay up the amas for Gulfstreamer in the main hull mold, and for a later boat, generate all hull parts by means of a half-hull mold.

years later, multihull builder- designer Jim Brown would be inspired by Newick’s master curve system to develop Brown’s Constant Camber method of cold-molded con- struction, which allows builders to stack-cut veneers, rather than spiling them individually. Subsequently, Brown would follow Newick’s lead of employing variable curves athwart- ships to create more sophisticated “Camberwood” molds that still allow builders to efficiently cold-mold hulls with fine bows, but with fuller hull shapes and transom sterns.

“keep it simple, keep it light,” Newick advises. “you have to be pretty sure what you’ve drawn is going to work, to have faith in the original concept and math, but don’t get beguiled by thinking: ‘If this fails, the whole thing is going to fall apart, so I’ll just make it 10% heavier.’ Beginners think: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, or maybe my designer doesn’t know what he’s doing, so I should make it stronger.’ Before

o discipline the theoretical with

the workable, Newick tried to balance his time: a third of it sail- ing, a third in the shop, and a third at the drafting board. this approach led him to innovations in construc- tion that complemented those in design. His shapes were far from easy to build, but conceptually, the extra effort to build the basic package was well worth the reduction in com- plex and expensive gear and boat size that were otherwise required to achieve speed.

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you know it, the whole boat is 10% heavier—and not a success.”

with Newick boats formalized in style and consistently winning races worldwide, other designers would naturally push the envelope and explore new concepts to win. Says Newick, “Sitting with some of the world’s best designers looking at my boats, I thought I could see inside their heads: ‘How can I beat this guy’s boat?’ Lo and behold, they’d come out a year later with something a half-ton lighter with 20 square meters [215 sq ft] more sail, and more beam to carry the sail. If you start with my conserva- tive design, you might pull off that iteration once, but then somebody else will try to do it again. Neptune and Aeolus are drinking buddies up in heaven, and they look down and say, ‘Let’s teach that S.O.B. a lesson.’ the world’s oceans are scattered with lessons.”

Just as monohulls have become more specialized as pure racers or cruisers since the early 1980s, so have multihulls. ever more highly engi- neered, wider and more powerful

racers are designed and driven to the very edge. you win, or you crash and burn—a philosophy engendered by what became a fully professional, high-stakes, mostly ocean-racing game in the late 1980s.

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since moved away from these amas because they require speed to work properly.

to keep the noses up at slower speeds, especially downwind when hit with a gust, he’s reverted to fuller amas with almond-shaped sections. early on, he also employed wing masts, and even tried a canting rig on the 1988 OStAR racer Ocean Surfer. In recent years he’s put revolving unstayed rigs on cruisers like White Wings and Damfino. Following hull- design trends from the up-and-coming Nigel Irens, Adrian thompson, et al., Newick expanded his boats’ overall beams and ama volumes for his newer racer/cruisers like Echo II and Traveler (his personal favorite, not to be confused with Traveller, the first of that model). Ama decks also became routinely rounded to facilitate reemergence when nosing through a wave. though the first Traveller ’s amas are notably flat in profile, Newick typically chooses more rocker and easier sections than are found in today’s Open-class multihull racers, to provide a softer ride in waves and more rounded performance.

ewick never stopped innovat-

ing and adapting—within lim- its. In the early 1980s, in his amas near the forward beam, he employed asymmetrical daggerboards (dagger- foils), canted to provide dynamic lift and more stability with the boat at speed, a feature that eventually became the norm in racing trima- rans. He later introduced “new moon” amas, with convex outboard sides to produce similar dynamic lift, but has

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COURteSy ANDRew BARtHOLOMew

teRRy FONG

As must be evident by now, Newick has never been one to follow any pack closely. “I admire the savvy that goes into the newest racing machines, but it’s just not my way of doing things. I’m no longer involved with OStAR, or its recent iterations, because I’m not interested in racing against somebody who’s able to buy first place with an unlimited bud- get. From 1960 into the 1980s, OStAR

was about the only race that allowed all kinds of boats to race together. we could quickly estab- lish what works and what doesn’t. that was a great challenge. I really enjoyed it,” he says. But that was then.

while he respects the engineering prowess and design skills of Irens, Morelli & Melvin, and others, Newick rarely cites other multihull designers as major influences. Instead, he peri- odically rereads The Common Sense of Yacht Design by L. Francis Herreshoff and applauds designer Dave Gerr’s The Nature of Boats, which provided him with essential aid designing

monohulls. He most admires the design work of william Garden, Olin Stephens, Robert Harris, C. Raymond Hunt, and others with distinctive styles and affable characters. He says, “If I had to go to sea and stay out awhile, my favorite boat is Agantyr,” a hefty cruising monohull from MacLear & Harris’s diverse portfolio. “Speed is one thing we can live with- out when we go to sea. you can’t live without accommodation. you can’t live without safety. you don’t need to go 30 knots,” he confesses, adding, “but it’s fun to try.”

every man has his limits, how- ever. even as the racing world has turned toward new kids on the block, Newick’s clients still want to sail fast, but on reliable structures aboard which one can live reasonably well at sea. “the boats I have evolved fall between hot racers and comfy cruis- ers,” he says. “I’m pushing 30 knots with my racers”; a Newick cruiser, on the other hand, “may be a 20-knot design, or even a 15-knot design. Below 15, I get antsy…. On Rogue Wave, if we weren’t doing 15, I was bored.

“I can give you 20 knots and a snug place to eat and sleep, but I can’t give you luxury and performance and low cost at the same time; nobody can” is a realistic axiom he relates to clients.

Rogue Wave’s study plans: the fore-and-aft views strongly suggest Newick’s characteristic seabird-like shapes. 46 Professional BoatBuilder

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that is, you can have a fast, inexpensive boat with limited accommodation; a roomy, fast boat that is expensive; or an inexpensive, roomy boat that is comparatively slow.

“Forty years ago when I was start- ing out with multihulls, we finished an hour or two ahead of big, fancy, well-sailed monohulls in ocean races,” he recalls. Right now, the more com- petitive “60′ [18.2m], twin-rudder, canting-keel, daggerboard monohulls are fine if you want to go fast, but they’re impossible to live aboard.” In contrast, Naga, a stock 38′ (11.5m) Native-model design of Newick’s has not only raced competitively trans- oceanic and throughout the Caribbean, she has also served as a liveaboard

for her owner, Jack Petith, for decades. At this writing, Naga is halfway through a world cruise.

tremolino—a small camp-cruiser that at first utilized Hobie Cat 16 (4.8m) hulls for amas—the Sum- mersault 26 (7.9m), and the Val are models that have all been in limited production, but Newick has not enjoyed the financial success of designers whose work is widely mass- produced. Still, he says, “I do what interests me. Pearson and others have already turned out 300 models of Clorox-bottle sloops. I’m not going to do that. I’d much rather find a small vacuum to fill. I never give a pro- spective client a hard sell, but always question: ‘Do you really want this? I’m

not sure you do.’ I lose design work that way, but I accept that.

“Pat has been telling me for years to stop telling people what they want and give them what they want, or what they think they want. My response is: If they have enough faith in me to hire me, they should lis- ten to me rather than tell me how to do my job, which is to make them happy and safe on the water. If I don’t do that, I’ve failed. My favorite client comes with, say, a one-page list of the attributes he wants in a boat. He may tell me the number of berths, but doesn’t tell me color or go into great detail. then I feel I have a free hand to give him my best work. Ifhetellsmeithastolooklikea

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temporary frames spaced 24″ /61cm

apart (full-sized patterns are supplied with the plans). Akas and wing mast are similarly built, but with the addi- tion of carbon fiber. to save weight and money, the rudder does not swing up if struck, as in most of my designs; rather, the board has the usual Newick “crash box” to minim- ize damage from grounding or col- lision with a whale. the board will usually be carried deep enough to protect the rudder.

Accommodations: a sheltered steering station, a dry place to sleep with sitting headroom, a single- burner stove, and two buckets.

Electronics: autopilot, GPS, hand- held VHF radio, log, speedometer,

and depthsounder, plus whatever is required by the race rules.

No motor will be carried for rac- ing; a 5-hp (3.7-kw) four-stroke out- board would serve well when not racing. Plans do not include elec- trical or cabin-ventilation details, which will depend on the skipper’s needs. two or more large photo- voltaic panels with either a small wind generator or towed propeller will supply the autopilot and running lights. there is no room for a cap- size escape-hatch; however, sealed compartments would float her high enough to leave a large air bubble in the main hull that would permit a wet exit through the cockpit. No thought has been given to complying

with national or european Union regulations. Buyers should assure themselves that, as racers, they will be able to live with their own bureaucracies.

there are only three sails, all eas- ily handled. the original Vals do 20 knots occasionally. the latest ver- sion will do more than that, and do it more often. After the race, a Val III can daysail several people and cruise one or two spartan types.

Finally, Val III is for sailors who would rather actually race a 30-footer (9.1m) than dream about racing a 60-footer (18.2m). Plans cost $2,000. they are in english units, easily converted to their metric equivalents with an inexpensive calculator.

—Dick Newick