Dick Newick, Sailboat Design Visionary, Dies at 87

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/sports/dick-newick-sailboat-design-visionary-dies-at-87.html

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Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, one of the greatest yacht designers, shocked the genteel sailing world in 1876 by entering a catamaran in the Centennial Regatta off Staten Island. He won easily. The New York Yacht Club gave him a certificate declaring his Amaryllis the world’s fastest boat, then it banned boats like it — with more than one hull — from competitions.

The club said safety, not the members’ fear of losing, was the reason.

In the 1960s, multihull sailboats — by then even faster and lighter — reappeared. Old salts called them “anti-yachts” and spoke of their designers, builders and sailors as “the Hells Angels of the Sea.”

At the forefront was a mild-mannered man named Dick Newick, who designed boats with two and three hulls that showed up larger, costlier — and slower — conventional yachts in major races. He contended that old-fashioned vessels had one advantage: they made nice floating decks for cocktail parties.

“People sail for fun,” he once said, “and no one has convinced me it’s more fun to go slow than to go fast.”

Mr. Newick, who died at 87 on Aug. 28 in Sebastopol, Calif., helped advance the look of multihull boats — which fly along with at least one hull out of the water — from unattractive and boxlike to sleek and contoured. The AC72 catamarans with 130-foot-tall wing sails now competing for the America’s Cup in San Francisco Bay descend from concepts Mr. Newick helped develop.

“Dick Newick’s contributions to the development of multihull design in the second half of the 20th century simply can’t be overstated,” said Dave Gerr, the director of the Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology, when Mr. Newick was inducted into the North American Boat Designers Hall of Fame in 2008. “Not only would multihulls look different today without Dick’s innovations, but his designs paved the way for the universally acknowledged offshore-capable speedsters they are.”

Mr. Newick began giving serious thought to design in the late 1950s. He was living in St. Croix in the United States Virgin Islands, where he had ended up after he had caught a barracuda in nearby seas and needed a place to cook it. He started chartering boats, and designed some of them himself. An early creation was the Trice, a 36-foot trimaran, or three-hulled boat, built of plywood and fiberglass.

In 1964, Mr. Newick decided to enter the Trice in the annual race from Newport, R.I., to Bermuda, “to see how my boats stacked up against the big boys.” Skeptics abounded: an editorial in a sailing magazine called it “unsafe on any sea.” Mr. Newick waited until the bigger traditional boats set off, and then tagged along. The Trice, with its crew of four, beat all but two much larger traditional boats.

Three years later, Mr. Newick designed his version of an ancient Polynesian outrigger canoe known as a proa. Like the traditional boats, it had no bow or stern and could sail with either end forward. People said his boat, Cheers, seemed to have emerged from a science fiction novel.

In 1968, Mr. Newick entered it in a quadrennial one-person trans-Atlantic race — from Plymouth, England, to Newport — sponsored by the British newspaper The Observer. The race, known as the Observer Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race, or Ostar, imposed no restrictions on size or design. Skippered by Tom Follett, Cheers finished third over all, beating much larger conventional boats. Mr. Follett was the first American to finish the race.

Cheers is now owned by a French couple, who restored it to its original form. The government of France, where long-distance sail competition is a major sport, declared the boat a historical monument.

“I think it was not just the speed but also the beauty of Newick’s boats that so strongly stimulated the aesthetic sensibilities of the French,” wrote Richard Boehmer, a nautical historian.

In 1976, a 31-foot trimaran that Mr. Newick designed, Third Turtle, finished third in the trans-Atlantic race, losing to two French boats, a 73-foot monohull and a 236-foot juggernaut. In 1980, Philip Weld, a 65-year-old retired newspaper publisher, skippered Moxie, another Newick trimaran, to victory in the solo Atlantic race. Mr. Weld called that boat “a breakthrough in showing how science can use wind to drive vessels.”

For the next quarter-century, multihulls won almost every long-distance offshore event they were allowed to enter.

Richard Cooper Newick, who his family said died of heart failure, was born in Hackensack, N.J., on May 9, 1926. He grew up in Rutherford, N.J., where at age 10 he built two kayaks with his father and brother. At 12, he designed and built two kayaks by himself. At 14, he sold plans for a kayak to a schoolmate for $5.

After a hitch in the Navy, he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He ran a boat shop, worked with Quakers helping disadvantaged people in Mexico, and then roamed hundreds of miles on Europe’s rivers and canals in a kayak. He sailed the oceans until he landed in St. Croix, where he met and married Patricia Ann Moe. They later lived in Martha’s Vineyard and Kittery Point, Me.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Newick is survived by his daughters, Lark Blair and Val Wright, both of whom have boat designs named after them; his brother, Bob; and six grandchildren.

When asked where he had gotten the ideas for the 140 or so designs he completed, Mr. Newick, who believed in reincarnation, said he had been a Polynesian boat builder in a previous life. He called the Polynesians’ 4,000-year-old canoes “the wave of the future,” especially as he reimagined them.

The ancient and modern multihull boats, he explained, shared a theme: simplicity. “It takes a good and creative person,” he said, “to do something simply.”