Arthur Piver: Pioneer Trimaran Designer-Sailor

Arthur Piver (1910–1968) was a World War II pilot, and a legendary sailor, author,  and boat builder who lived in Mill Valley on San Francisco Bay. In the late 1950s, Piver (rhymes with “diver”) owned a print shop, and designed and built a series of simple three-hulled, plywood yachts in his spare time, starting with a simple 16 footer. He quickly developed his ideas into a seaworthy 21 footer capable of sailing out of SF Bay and down the California coast. This was the Nugget sailed by Jim Brown and his girl friend to Mexico, which jump-started the multihull movement.

Piver created his first design for an ocean-going cruiser, the modern-looking, demountable 30 foot Nimble. In 1960, he trucked it across the USA, assembled it in New England and departed from Swansee, Mass., on a voyage to England with two crew. After a stop in the Azores he successfully reached Plymouth—the first recorded crossing of the North Atlantic by a trimaran. Piver had hoped to enter the first Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR) in 1960, but arrived well after the start. It appears that he tried to do some marketing of his plans, and must have sold the boat rather than ship it home.

(Note that the word “trimaran” was coined by Viktor Tchetchet, a Ukrainian emigrant to the US who built a couple of impractical, heavy boats and tested them on Long Island Sound in the late 1940s. They were featured in Popular Mechanics as suitable for beginners to construct and sail, but had some very odd and impractical features.)

Back on the US west coast, Rich Gerling, built and sailed a Piver Nugget from Los Angeles to Honolulu in 1961, possibly the first solo ocean crossing on a small trimaran. Piver wrote the book “Trans-Atlantic Trimaran,” and drew up a series of tris, each with a wide cabin extending over the wingdecks, beginning with a 30 foot design also called the Nimble. This gave the boats far more accommodation, which attracted a lot more interest and helped sell his do-it-yourself plans. He did not believe in using motors and only allowed for the inclusion upon insistence from home builders.

In a remarkably short time, Piver also built himself a 35-foot ketch-rigged solid-wing cruising trimaran named Lodestar. He set off In 1962 to sail it around the Pacific Ocean and reached New Zealand without any mishaps. Sailing east in the roaring forties, he experienced the ability of a lightweight multihull to surf in strong winds and big seas. This convinced him that a big trimaran racer could easily beat all the old sailing ship records that the finest 70’ offshore yachts of the time were unable to match.

From this modest start, Arthur Piver quickly built this experience into a popular movement that led to him being hailed as “the father of the modern multihull.” In his next book, “Trans-Pacific Trimaran,” he made the outrageous prediction that a racing trimaran should be able to cover 1,000 miles a day in the right surfing conditions. This was an outrageous claim that showed his tendency to exaggeration, since he was only covering 200-300 miles in a day. But it was almost achieved early in the 21^st century when the 100’+ Ultimate” trimarans were launched in France.

It seemed that Piver truly believed that anyone could build one of his boats even if they had no experience and very little money–or at least that was the way he promoted his plans. Doing business as Pi-Craft, he began his one-man crusade preaching the gospel of his fast, cheap, easy-to build trimarans. In England, Cox Marine started building his boats in Sufflok and found a ready market, often with Americans   who would sail them home.

In 1964, British sailor Derek Kelsall bought a 35′ Lodestar bare hull, named it Folatre. and completed it with a flush deck, and entered the second OSTAR. After ten days, he was close to Frenchman Eric Tabarly when he struck some flotsam and broke his dagger board and rudder. He returned to SW England, restarted and still finished in a respectable time of 64 days. (See Derek’s comment at bottom of page.)

Piver’s range of trimarans now extended to the 64-foot Empress. The first was built in Wadebridge, Cornwall in SW England for charter in the Caribbean. (I worked there in the spring of 1965 and went out on the trials for a Piver 45′ Trident-class.) Kelsall took over the yard the next year and was the first designer to build a multihull in foam and fiberglass “sandwich” construction—the prototype 42’ Toria–and win the first round Britain Race in 1966. He gave Eric Tabarly his first trimaran ride on a passage to the London Boat Show late in the year, and changed the course of sailing history!

But that did nothing to dampen Piver’s fame among his many fans. People who met him say he was a social man who enjoyed being the center of attention in his circle of boating friends and felt that the trimaran was his own personal invention. His confidence, some would say arrogance, was unsinkable, and he was quick to criticize any one who dared  suggest they could improve on his designs.

Literally hundreds of them were begun at this time, many of them were completed satisfactorily, and some did indeed fulfill their owners’ dreams. But many more were overweight, flimsy and poorly rigged, which led to less-than-spectacular performance. A few deteriorated into floating junk heaps that brought the whole DIY concept into disrepute.

Piver was endlessly optimistic. To stay ahead of the game, he refined the shape of his new range (the Advanced Amateur) with multiple chines and some very stylish cabin lines. Piver’s next personal yacht was the AA 33′ Stiletto, which looked fast and sailed quite well. He wanted to enter club races in San Francisco Bay but the local yacht clubs fiercely resisted all his attempts to compete. In southern California, there was offshore racing for big expensive catamarans, most designed CSK (Choy, Seaman, Kumulae) and they were also determined not to let the upstart trimarans challenge their supremacy.

So Piver looked to Europe, where there was already a competitive racing circuit on the English south coast, and his designs were selling well. He became obsessed by the Trans-Atlantic scene happening 6,000 miles away because it was the only long-distance race in the world in the 1960’s open to all types of boat without handicap. To redeem his failure in 1960, and maintain his position as the world’s top multihull designer, he sailed the North Atlantic a second time in 1967 in the Stiletto.

He was finally able to compete with the growing fleet of modern multihulls that was based on the south coast of England.  But Stiletto was no match for the sleek molded fiberglass cats from Prout and Sailcraft and Kelsall’s sandwich tris. He left his boat in England over the winter of 1967, and returned home. To any other sailor this would have been enough of a triumph, but Piver was not satisfied. That winter, he very publicly announced from California that he would enter the next OSTAR in 1968, although he was definitely not the “singlehander” type, and had never made a long solo passage.

Having no time left for a solo qualification passage in English waters, he still had to complete a 500-mile solo qualification voyage, which he elected to do from San Francisco. He borrowed one of his 25′ tris  from a local home-builder and casually set off into the Pacific. He was never seen again. Ironically, this did nothing to damp down the personality cult he had built. His one-man publicity machine had such a profound impact that his death did not affect his fans.

The designs became incredibly popular and inspired many novices to believe they could build their own boats and set off for the tropics. Despite the other tragedies encountered on Piver vessels around the time of his death, his concept had broadened the public perception of seaworthiness to include trimarans. Many properly-built Pivers did made long, hard voyages. One was Quen Cultra who built a Lodestar on his farm in Illinois, and sailed it around the world with no prior experience. He wrote a book about the voyage titled “Queequeg’s Odyssey”

Dream voyages like this inspired many non-sailors to think Piver boats had some intangible (magic) ability. Thus Arthur Piver was often said to be the man most responsible for popularizing this nautical phenomenon long after his death. The truth was this: without sufficient lateral resistance, his boxy cruising designs could never sail well upwind and they were out sailed by most of the newer boats.

His fans often wrote apologies like this: “A well built Piver, while not as “modern” as new tris, will still hold their own and are quite suitable for cruising, especially when modified with a Norm Cross design “fin keel and large area spade rudder.” But many did carry their owners to the tropics and allowed them to fulfill their cruising dreams. Actually some did a lot more than that—they remain in use to 50 years later!.

1985 Yachting magazine by Randy Thomas: “It was Arthur Piver’s bang-’em-together, sheet-plywood boats that launched the modern multihull movement in the early sixties, and simultaneously set its advancement back a dozen years. It wasn’t Piver’s fault that so many backyard builders erected condominiums atop his slender hulls, giving multihulls an ugly duckling reputation.” Piver’s collected papers are preserved at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, VA.

The next year, 1969, the Golden Globe solo non-stop round-the-world race was announced; two of the entrants set off in 40-foot Piver Victress trimarans that were already looking out of date. Nigel Tetley was sailing a full-cabin version, Donald Crowhurst was in a Cox Marine flush-decker similar to Kelsall’s 35′ “Folatre.” Both these voyages ended disastrously and their failures marked the end of attempts to race Piver tris across oceans.

 However, it wasn’t long before other designers began developing trimaran designs. By the mid-60s, these included one of his young fans, Jim Brown with the Searunner series that are still sailing today, Norman A. Cross Designs of San Diego, California who had some 1,400 handsome boats building or sailing by the 1980s. Other early west coast designers were Kristofferson from British Columbia whose boats seemed very similar to the Hedley Nichol type from Australia, and Louis Macouillard of San Francisco whose work I admired. (Among his many accomplishments, this WW II navy lieutenant also designed two U.S. postage stamps,  and had successful shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.)

If you liked this story, type “OSTAR” into my blog search box and you’ll find a lot more interesting reading on multihulls and solo racing in the early years.

 Author’s note: I wrote this Piver biography for wikipedia around 2010, and watched as it was amended and rendered un-readable by people with little or no writing ability or real-life experience with this subject.  (I sailed on 45′ and 64′ Pivers built in Cornwall in 1965, worked with Derek Kelsall on his famous 42′ Toria, met Nigel Tetley when he gave a lecture at the AYRS in London, and sat down with Jim Brown and his son Russell in Port Townsend around 2006. )

It wasn’t until January, 2017 that I realized I could retrieve my story from Wikipedia, delete the additions, add some pictures, edit it properly, and re-publish it on my website. I am pleased to see the number of comments from sailors who were much closer to Piver boats than I ever was! I intend to incorporate some of these comments into the story as time allows……I