Obituary: Dick Newick, yacht designer

Dick Newick, yacht designer.  Born: 9 May, 1926, in Hackensack, New Jersey. Died: 28 August, 2013, in Sebastopol, California, aged 87.

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

In the 1960s, multi-hull sailing boats – by then even faster and lighter – re-appeared. 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.”

Newick, who died last month at the age of 87, helped advance the look of multi-hull 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 descend from concepts Newick helped develop.

“Dick Newick’s contributions to the development of multi-hull design in the second half of the 20th century simply can’t be overstated,” said Dave Gerr, director of the Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology, when Newick was inducted into the North American Boat Designers Hall of Fame in 2008.

“Not only would mult-hulls look different today without Dick’s innovations, but his designs paved the way for the universally acknowledged offshore-capable speedsters they are.”

Newick began giving serious thought to design in the late 1950s. He was living in St Croix in the US 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 fibreglass.

In 1964, Newick decided to enter the Trice in the annual race from Newport 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”.

Newick waited until the bigger traditional boats set off, then tagged along. The Trice, with its crew of four, beat all but two much larger traditional boats.

Three years later, 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, Newick entered it in a quadrennial one-person trans-Atlantic race – from Plymouth, England, to Newport – sponsored by The Observer newspaper. 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 overall, beating much larger conventional boats.

Cheers is now owned by a French couple, who restored it to its original form The French government 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 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. Weld called that boat “a breakthrough in showing how science can use wind to drive vessels”.

For the next quarter of a century, multi-hulls 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 New Jersey in 1926. At the age of ten 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 university he ran a boat shop, worked with Quakers helping disadvantaged people in Mexico, 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.

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

When asked where he got the ideas for his 140 or so designs, 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 re-imagined them. The ancient and modern multi-hull boats, he explained, shared a theme: simplicity. “It takes a good and creative person,” he said, “to do something simply.”