Do you know someone with motion sickness? Someone who cannot be in a car even when it is standing still? That was me - not for cars, but for boats. Just spotting a boat would be enough to make me green, but not with envy. Even the very thought of being on a boat would make me nauseous and sick to my stomach. Growing up, I was that guy.
       It must have been 1964, during the Summer when I was introduced to Russ and Gina Garcia.  Russ was a well-known composer who specialized in TV and movie music scores. Having just graduated highschool, I had just come to LA some 3 months earlier and I was still looking for steady employment when a neighbor of mine introduced me to the Garcias.

      In that first meeting with Russ, it came out that I had experience as a green house horticulturist and landscaper. He asked me if I would be willing to clean up and replant the area around and under that house, limited to whatever I could accomplish with about a week's worth of work. 
      When I was finished with that project, he indicated that he was very pleased with the result, and then asked me if I was any good with painting and "brightwork" (varnishing)....because he had a small boat down in Marina del Rey that needed a complete makeover. He asked if I would like to move onto the boat for a week or so to do the required work. I simply said: "Sure". So he went into his kitchen pantry, filled a couple of cardboard boxes with provisions, we jumped into his Porsche, and off we went.

      A week of living and working on the trimaran was an amazing experience in and of itself. The rhythm of sights, sounds, and gentle movement, days and nights, cooking in a compact (tiny!) but well organized “galley” (kitchen), being visited by curious cormorants when I was painting the underside of the wings while lying on my back in the rowboat. And then there were new friends discovered among the otherwise anonymous neighbors, who were lifeboards on their own boat. All of these experiences, together, were a bit overwhelming, in quite a wonderful way.

     The following Saturday, when I was busy cleaning up and tossing paint cans, used sand paper, and brushes into the dumpster, Russ returned to the boat and busied himself, putting a new set of sails on the boat.

        It felt like magic. This way and that.... streaking across the water, hardly any heal, wake surfing on passing power cruisers..... "Hell! I could get used to this!" I thought.

        At the end of the day, in the waters off Los Angeles, like clockwork, just before dusk, as if somebody threw switch, the wind simply dies. All across the water, you can hear all the sailing auxiliary engines chug-chugging to life... but we just sailed on!

        With not a breath of wind across the deck, we were silently passing the monohull putt-putts on the way back to the marina, where we sailed right into our slip, dropped the sails and coasted to a stop.

        When I stepped off the boat and on to the floating dock, suddenly I noticed the dock's motion. And then it hit me... I hadn't been sick or nauseous even once, on the boat, for the whole day!

        It rocked my world, and changed the direction of my life, from then on...

       Of course, in those days, there were no commercially made multihulls, of any kind! If you wanted one you had to build it yourself, or buy one secondhand from someone who had built it himself. I have always been the kind of guy who, once starting something new, goes all in. So I moved to Newport Beach to find a job in the yacht-building industry and, while learning my trade, out of the blue, my life got interrupted by being drafted into the army.

      Well... over the years, my thinking about the pros and cons for tris vs. cats has changed over the years...

     The building materials, building technology, equipment, electronics, and design have all gone through truly revolutionary changes over the years! From plywood sheathed in fiberglass, with hard chined hulls and "box on top" cabins, to soft chined, epoxy infusion molded hulls and superstructure.... the use of nonmetallic rigging and SatNav systems, internet based weather reporting systems…. To be sure, it’s a whole new world out there. Which brings us to the reason why this website is about catamarans and not about trimarans.

      Except for the designs in racing boats, trimarans have not gone through the same rapid evolution as catamarans. Cats, as we call them, have evolved in many different ways.

...the water is always bluer on the other side of the ocean...