The first of these tragedies became known in July 1966 when wreckage from the Hedley Nicol-designed trimaran Vagabond washed ashore near Sandy Cape on Australia's Queensland coast. No trace was ever found of Vagabond's crew, Robert Garnham, 38, and Bart Jacobsen, also 38, and hence there was no certainty about what happened to her. But an earlier setback provided some hint. Soon after her launching, Designer Nicol had stripped all excess weight from his kitelike craft and set out in a gale to discover just how fast she could sail. He found out. Vagabond went so fast she soon became more airplane than boat. Airborne, the big trimaran climbed skyward for an instant, described a drunken barrel roll and plunged seaward in a dive that, by all accounts, should have mashed her beyond redemption. Unfortunately for those she later drowned, it didn't.
Soon after Vagabond went down, Nicol himself became a trimaran victim. Bent on sailing from Australia to the U.S., he left Brisbane in August 1966 aboard the 35-footer Privateer. With him were Gus Baldwin and E. van Rommell. Their first stop was meant to be Tahiti but, except for a radio message sent 500 miles out of Brisbane, they were never heard from again. Privateer simply disappeared.
Scarcely two months later a pair of Sydney men, also bound for Tahiti, died when their homemade trimaran apparently disintegrated in a Pacific squall. The death toll rose higher in early 1967 when the trimaran Outlaw capsized in the Mediterranean, drowning still another sailor.
But of all the disasters involving trimarans—including several accidents in which crews were rescued off splintered boats—the one that really ignited critics of the class was the wreck of the home-built trimaran Bandersnatch in the Tasman Sea. This 33-footer had given those who sailed her plenty of warning. Designed by a 25-year-old electrical engineer named Lock Crowther, she was built to be the world's fastest ocean-racing boat, but not necessarily its sturdiest. Skirting the Australian coast during her maiden voyage in 1966, Bandersnatch slammed into a gale. While 55-knot winds tore at her superstructure, pounding seas found their way into at least one of her outboard hulls, dragging it down until she was heeled at a 45° angle. Bandersnatch became so unmanageable that Crewman David Henry said afterward, "I thought she was going right over."
Somehow she didn't and, after a night of bitter cold during which waves continually swept her decks, the trimaran's crew managed to coax their waterlogged craft into calmer waters. They stepped ashore unscathed, but those who took Bandersnatch to sea a year later were not so lucky. Four days after she had left Melbourne bound for Sydney a mass of wreckage that was all that was left of Bandersnatch was spotted by the freighter Korauie.
Four men died with Bandersnatch. One of them was Bruce Crowther, the younger brother of the man who designed her.
The abuse that engulfed Catamaran Designer Rudy Choy when his boats foundered was mild compared to that aimed at the trimaran crowd after Bandersnatch was lost. One angry voice belonged to Australian Naval Architect Warwick Hood, designer of the unsuccessful America's Cup challenger Dame Pattie. "At the risk of bringing down the wrath of the whole trimaran fraternity on my head," said Hood, "and also admitting that I've never designed a trimaran, I think that the trimaran requires a lot more developmental work done to it before it will become, if ever, a safe, successful seagoing vessel."
The vice-commodore of the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, Stan Gibson, suggested that trimarans be forbidden to go to sea at all—a suggestion quickly echoed in cries to the Australian parliament that "there ought to be a law!" No law has yet been passed and, in arguments that followed the suggestion, many theories have been advanced to explain what happened to Bandersnatch. Most leading designers think she broke up because of poor float design that failed to provide sufficient buoyancy. Designer Crowther himself thinks his boat collided with a surfaced whale, and there is some evidence to support the belief. A dead whale was found sometime later wallowing near the wreckage with an enormous gash in its head.
Whatever its cause, the Bandersnatch tragedy got many people thinking seriously about multihulls in general, and there is a growing belief among them that the trouble plaguing both catamarans and trimarans is not basically one of design at all, but one of attitude. It may lie not in those who build, but in those who sail, multihulls.
Rudy Choy, who has never tipped over one of his own boats, blames most cat wrecks on a disease he calls "the capsize syndrome." The chief symptom of this ailment is the tendency of hot-rod sailors to let their speeding boats heel so far that they begin to fly clear of the water. There are other symptoms as well, all of which add up to a kind of seagoing euphoria that some have called "the rapture of speed," an intoxication as dangerous as that which traps skin divers who go too deep.