By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Staff Writer
Catamaran pioneers Woody Brown on Maui and Rudy Choy in Our Honolulu probably won’t be mentioned when the 110-foot Club Med sails into Marseilles, France, this weekend after circling the globe.
Today, the Club Med is in mid-Atlantic, barreling toward home. Unless the world falls in on her, she will complete the voyage in a little over 60 days.
The state-of-the-art catamaran traveled 655 nautical miles in 24 hours while sailing through the Roaring Westerlies below Australia. That’s an average of 27 knots, or more than 30 mph. Nuclear aircraft carriers don’t go much faster.
So it is fitting, while France celebrates, that we pay tribute to the pioneers who invented and launched the catamaran on Waikiki Beach a little more than 50 years ago.
We should not forget, either, those ancient Polynesians who designed the double-hulled voyaging canoe that inspired the catamaran.
Go back to a July 29, 1947, headline in The Advertiser: "Youths Design Sleek Canoe." There’s a picture of a skinny Woody Brown, now pushing 90, with his friend, Alfred Kumalae, sitting on a strange, double-hulled contraption with a mast.
The word "catamaran" doesn’t appear in the story because it hadn’t yet been coined. Brown designed after studying books on Polynesian canoes.
At first, catamarans were considered little more than curiosities on Waikiki Beach.
But Brown had dreams of revolutionizing yacht racing. So did sailor Rudy Choy, who went off to the Air Force and won a Distinguished Flying Cross before he came back to build catamarans.
In 1954, Choy and Brown built the 40-foot Ali‘i Kai in the hope of winning the Trans-Pacific Yacht Race from San Pedro, Calif., to Honolulu.
Then they built the Waikiki Surf for one Ernie Nowell, who agreed to enter his boat in the world-famous contest in July 1955. That raised all kinds of hackles.
On demand of the race committee, the Coast Guard promised to tow the Waikiki Surf away if it tried to start.
Without Brown and Choy, the boat set out anyway in an attempt to beat the field. But fluky winds slowed the Waikiki Surf to a lazy dog trot, and she finished ignominiously behind an old-fashioned monohull, Morning Star, by 25 hours.
Brown, a complicated person, went to Maui and dropped out of the catamaran world, but Choy started his own company and pursued his dream. His catamarans were beset by bad luck.
Acknowledged as the world’s foremost catamaran designer and builder, Choy still couldn’t break the Trans-Pac monohull record. Finally, in 1989, his dream came true in the Aikane x-5 with a rotating wing mast and a Kevlar mainsail.
Meanwhile, Frenchmen had taken to the catamaran like jelly to bread. One was Bruno Peron, who dreamed up the around-the-world race that will probably end in the granddaddy of all sailing records.
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