James Wharram (aka Jim and Jimmy to his friends) is also sometimes described as the father of the modern multihull but that is not entirely accurate because the World was full of people developing multihulls in the 1950's and 60's and 70's and very few of the craft owed anything at all to Wharram's designs which in their unique characteristics were always very different from the mainstream of multihull design. 

The commercially successful multihull yachts that are dominant in the World today follow totally different design principles and styles to the Wharram designs which even today are unique.  Indeed James consistently criticised the designs concepts that today dominate the multihull scene; these are mainly the big roomy cruising catamarans with amazing bedrooms with ensuite showers and bathrooms, large windows and palatial saloons (or 'deck cabins' as he called them) and the double outrigger, open decked fast trimarans. According to James these were based on western design concepts whereas he advocated  entirely different types of boat with low "V" shaped hulls -, bolted and later lashed to beams that were flexibly mounted, with minimal accommodation. 

Wharram claimed the distinction of selling more than 10,000 sets of catamaran plans for home construction. This is almost certainly more than any other home build multihull plans seller has achieved. 

Some say that Wharram sold more than boat plans and his buyers instead bought into his entire philosophy rejecting "land" values of Western society. He cultivated his role as the great Jim leading his tribe of Sea People to a better place than suffering in consumption driven wage slavery of western society destroying the Planet. He believed in the 70's that modern society was doomed and that people could form homesteading self-sufficient communities living on their boats.

Today Hanneke runs the business with their son Jamie, but such is the way the boating market has changed since the Wharram heydays of the 60's and 70's the market for self-build has declined. If you want to go cruising the second hand market is awash with used production boats of all kinds. No longer is buying a pile of plywood and a set of plans the primary route to ocean cruising. Now that journey begins with advertisements and brokerage websites or bidding on E-Bay.

Anyone that chooses to build their own boat now, will do so because they have particular requirements -the desire to use the best modern design and materials that will not be present in older second hand designs, the desire to build using the latest technology and design and other specialist interests and requirements.  

The self build market is rather more sophisticated now. The levels of technology and construction have moved on a long way even since the latest Ocean Cruising Wharram catamarans (Tiki 38 and Tiki 46) were designed some 30 years ago let alone the sheathed plywood Wharrams of the 60's and 70's. Comparing for example a 70's Wharram build with someone building the latest Kit boat from Schionning  or similar is lightyears apart. 

A choice to buy Wharram plans to build your own boat is now, more than ever, a lifestyle choice. It will probably be based on sustainability and belief systems. 

Keen racers and those looking for modern high performance sailing will not choose a Wharram design, and  sophistication, and luxury do not apply to Wharram designs either.   That said particularly with smaller sizes there is no doubt still a market and great interest in Wharrams. The attraction of the Wharram designs is different to that which will draw in experienced multihull sailors or racers or dinghy racers looking for a cruising boat. They are likely to be attracted to more high tech designers and lightweight craft with high tech sails and equipment.

The first Wharram design was the 23.5 -foot Tangaroa on which the three adventurers Jim, Ruth and Jutta sailed to the West Indies. Flat bottomed box section hulls resembling coffins, a slatted platform between them and held together with chains, the craft had a tiny rig and cabins like rabbit hutches and their voyage must rank as one of the bravest in the history of modern boating. 

James was a self styled Maritime Archaeologist.  A Pathe News archive film at the time showed them before they departed from Falmouth in 1954. Conventional wisdom at that time was that the vessel would be smashed to pieces by the Atlantic waves and going to sea on it was simply suicidal. Conventional wisdom was wrong! They sailed to Spain, the Canaries and across the Atlantic to Trinidad. 

It seems to have been a very hard voyage.

The catamaran soon succumbed to Teredo worm lacking antifoul and or copper plating below the waterline. 

She was abandoned and the trio built a raft houseboat. 

Living on the raft in Trinidad where Jutta had his baby, Wharram’s next project was to design the 40-foot Rongo. 

This brilliant design is without doubt the basis for every Wharram since and if you look at her and the later Tiki 38 and 46 (1990's) the family likeliness shines out although the construction methods are now more modern ply epoxy glass sandwich and the build method evolved to be suitable for home builders but so much more sophisticated and nuanced than the designs that Wharram marketed in the 60's. 

After a tough voyage from New York to Ireland in 1959 Rongo was readied for around the world voyage in Wales and then sailed to Ireland. James married Jutta in Ireland, and they all set out around the World. Jutta had already shown signs of developing mental illness -possibly related to trauma caused by her experiences in Germany during the War. Jutta’s death by suicide in Las Palmas ended the voyage and although Ruth and James still crossed the Atlantic to Trinidad they decided they could not go on without Jutta. They  sailed back to Ireland and then Wales in 1962. They had now sailed Rongo three times across the Atlantic covering over 12000 miles in her. 

After his abandoned World voyage James and Ruth lived with James' son on Rongo on a beach in North Wales. It must have been a very hard life indeed in a cramped and spartan plywood catamaran without any modern facilities whatsoever.  James had clearly been traumatised by Jutta's death. In his book he cited excerpts from his diary showing how deeply depressed he became in 1962. His dad encouraged him to design him a small cabin catamaran that could be towed behind a car. James had built this but father and son then capsized on its first sail. Clearly at that stage James did not understand the relationship between beam and stability properly. He had to widen the boat to make it stable.

In 1964 James designed the 34 foot Tangaroa for a friend. This was followed by a 22 foot Hina and this led him to start publishing a design brochure and advertising in Yachting Magazines. 

Both designs were really quite crude and simplistic with spritsail rigs that were not a concept that could achieve the fast sailing performance sought by most multihull designers. 

He followed this with the 46-foot Oro Ocean cruiser and replaced Rongo with the 40 foot Narai. Above the Hina he designed a 27 foot two berth ocean cruiser the Tane. He published articles in yachting magazines and his self-build design catalogue started to achieve sales and boats were built, and others sailed the Oceans in them. Some found these designs to be slow in stays or difficult to sail to windward at all. The rigs were not optimised for performance and the V shaped hull without any external keels or dagger or centre boards were poor performers up wind and indeed high wetted surface made them sluggish and often difficult to manoeuvre. However James had developed a simple building method so someone with no boatbuilding experience could build a catamaran.

In 1965 James had built a trimaran called "Tiki Roa" and entered the 1966 Round Britain Race. Writing to AYRS and Multihull International, his ambitions for the double outrigger were rather optimistic - he was carried away by his ideas and thought it would be competitive against the sponsored 40 foot Mirrorcat entered by Rod McAlpine Downie and Kelsall's Toria in the Round Britain Race of 1966. 

It's small spritsail ketch rig and V shaped hulls meant it was not going to succeed as a racer, and it had almost no accommodation either. A commentator in the press likened it to a fishing boat and noted how poorly it pointed compared with the relatively sophisticated yachts it was racing. The boat had arrived at the start unprepared and untested. For James the race was over quickly when the daggerboard broke.

Post race James abandoned the concept and indeed became very much against double outrigger trimarans as designed by Kelsall, Crowther and Newick in particular. James rather simplistically argued that wave capsizes only happened to what he called double outrigger trimarans.

Kelsall sarcastically told the audience at the 1976 Multihull Conference* in Toronto, Canada that the Tiki Roa trimaran had established that James was definitely not a trimaran designer. Looking at it objectively it was a a poor design but James seems to have used his bad experience with it to be critical of double outrigger trimarans in general. By this he meant  those built in the new Toria style of open decks and outrigger floats riding high sailing on only the main hull and the lee outrigger. He distinguished these from the older style of cruising trimaran of Jim Brown, Norman Cross and others that had  large floats  and were designed to sail with all three in the water. 

The issues about trimaran wave stability are far more complex and the capsizes in the mid 70's when trimarans were running off or overwhelmed by large breaking seas had more to do with the design in terms of the float buoyancy - many designers had adopted the concept of having floats that supported no more than the weight of the main hull and windward outrigger which can be measured in terms of being 100% or less. 

This was intended to enable the boat to submerge the lee outrigger rather than capsize over it. In theory and practice it produced some very good boats that were great to sail and very forgiving to being driven hard. Many were successful but what made a very fast and exhilarating boat was not necessarily the right model for a craft able to survive in huge seas and storms. New techniques and seamanship were necessary. It was clear in the 70's that there was a lot still to learn about and the size and placement of outrigger floats on trimarans. There were a lot of experiments to develop the optimal outrigger shape, buoyancy and placement which eventually resulted in a consensus by the 1980's in favour of 150% buoyancy floats.

James wrote a seminal article published in the UK and possibly other yachting magazines in 1977 arguing the case for stable multihulls and on wind stability where he distinguished between static and dynamic stability. By the latter he meant that the calculated wind speed that would capsize a multihull had to allow for gusts. Effectively for example a catamaran that was calculated to be stable up to a tipping point of 30 knots should be treated as being only stable up to 20 knots because a 20 knot wind could contain 30 knot gusts. His thesis was always that a safe multihull must be stable to a Force 7 wind (ie 28-33 knots). Using his dynamic theory this mean the boat would have to be stable to over 42 knots of wind. 

But in the article he then attacked double outrigger trimarans that sailed on the main and the lee hull were dangerous because of the way they heeled more than a catamaran. He suggested that the width between the two catamaran hulls and the width between main and lee trimaran hulls made the latter less stable causing them to capsize. The analysis however appears to be flawed in the sense that the righting arm only takes into account half the overall width of a catamaran and a similar length trimaran will usually have a wider righting arm than a similar length catamaran as long as the floats have high enough buoyancy to support the total displacement of the boat.  In fact the main problem causing the capsizes James referred to was almost certainly the trend toward lower buoyancy outriggers at that time.  This has been demonstrated by tank testing and mathematical analysis. In a sense James was right that some trimarans with low buoyancy floats were less stable in waves but the causes of the problem were not quite correctly analysed in his article. The number of voyages made by trimarans with either 100% buoyancy floats or less also shows that with good seamanship these vessels were not always unseaworthy. 

By 1968 when he designed and started to build his dream ship, the 52 foot Tehini James was established as a notable figure in the growing multihull scene in the UK and Worldwide. His boats were being built in astonishing numbers. He designed supposed racing variations -the 45 foot Ariki and 36 foot Raka.

The building of a 52-foot Tehini in 1968 to 1969 appealed to a lot of people's imagination. The film of this enterprise made by Ruth Wharram is now available on You Tube. Establishing a commune like existence of men and women around him was an alternative lifestyle which is now branded as being a hippy one and certainly the image of Wharram catamarans was one of hippy boats for alternative people and life styles. Even before it was built James was advertising that he and his "staff" were going to sail Tehini around the World.

Originally Tehini featured a Chinese junk rig - not a recipe for good performance and after James had written in Yachting Monthly of how brilliantly it performed and was so easy to handle it was, he abandoned use of  it on Tehini for a more conventional Bermudan schooner and later a cutter/ketch rig. The entry of Tehini in the 1970 Round Britain Race revealed that the boat was not capable of racing - James had concluded after the race that  the Junk rig was unsuited to the fast hull forms. He wrote  of being unable to slow the boat down in the race and he only recommended the junk rig for the slower designs. Tehini was not able to sail well to windward with such a rig although later with the Bermudan cutter /ketch she reportedly sailed well and tacked positively.

It took four years for James and his crew to set off around the World but then unforeseen design and construction faults sent then running for shelter in Spain and hastily improving the design building in stronger supports for the beams and the hull sides that were flexing. The circumnavigation was again abandoned with Tehini sailing to the West Indies reliving the successful voyages of the Rongo. In 1975 they were back in Wales. Tehini was to sail across the Atlantic twice more and James and his extended family moved to Ireland in what turned out to be  another disaster.

James wrote a lot about his view that the modern consumer society was doomed in the 70's. His philosophy of escape to live on sea communities fitted into the whole self-sufficiency movement of the 70's and Wharram was still preaching it and the pleasures of multiple relationships, sexual freedom and nudity into the 21st century. He was always seen with his entourage of women and was open about their nudity in his books and later littered his design catalogues and study plans with naked women figures. Even after James had moved ashore to his home in Cornwall there were stories of visitors to James' home being shocked to discover the man himself and various women wandering around naked!

His personal life was very unconventional  as he was married to Ruth, and openly in sexual relationships with at least three other young women who also lived with him and were soon joined on Tehini by young Hanneke Boon who was still a school girl when she first met him. Apparently he continued to have multiple relationships all his life. 

Between the 70's and 80's the Pahi range was evolved too with hull shapes chosen to resemble genuine Polynesian concepts something they took further in the voyaging canoes they built for the 2008 Lapita voyage which was the antithesis of Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki expedition and proved the viability of double canoes with hulls based on examples of native canoes with traditional Polynesian style sails migrating East to West to Polynesia. 

In the 1990's Wharram and his wives (he always lived polygamously although married first to Jutta, then Ruth and lastly after Ruth passed away to Hanneke) sailed around the World in the 63 foot Spirit of Gaia. They attended a Polynesian voyaging rally of canoe replicas in 1995. They were not made as welcome as they would have wished. Manchester's own Polynesian had called his business "Polynesian Catamarans" for many years (until he decided to call his boats "double canoes" rejecting the western term "catamaran") but a white Englishman was not as recognised as the great pioneer as he would have expected even after sailing half way round the World at the invitation of the organisers. 

Wharram lived his entire life fighting the "establishment" on behalf of ancient Polynesian peoples and their sailing boat concepts and to suffer  exclusion by those same people was an awful experience for such an enlightened man.  It was a reaction to colonialism that the reawakened sense of their history, cultural and traditional skills were celebrated by the Polynesians and that the intervention of Westerners like Ben Finney and Dr David Lewis in the formation of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and its replica canoe Hōkūleʻa was resented by some of the people rediscovering their navigational skills and their history who wanted the voyages to be carried out by genuine Polynesians and not Westerners. That they did not appreciate James Wharram's contribution to proving that the double canoe concept was seaworthy was ironic given how James had lived his life dedicated to reviving this traditional form of vessel. 

There is a lot of written material available now about the sea people of the pacific and their double canoes and navigation revival in Polynesia. This and the work of the Polynesian Voyaging Society is wonderful to see but it is a travesty that they fail to credit James Wharram's early voyages with the efforts he made to establish the seaworthiness of double canoes. 

However generally James' work as a historian and pioneer of craft related to native craft and their evolution was recognised by other marine historians and those who study ancient seagoing history. He was a speaker at many conferences and contributed articles to debates about the development of ancient boats and the evolution of seaworthy modern multihulls from their native origins. 

It is true that by the 1990's and since people have finally started to appreciate Wharram and acknowledge his achievements. 

While the UK yachting community bought the grp catamarans from Bill O'Brian, Prouts and Sailcraft with their comfortable bridge deck cabins, Bermudan rigs, keels and centreboards and the trimarans of Piver, Kelsall and Crowther, Wharram railed against these concepts arguing the superiority of his plywood V shaped hulls, open slatted decks and lack of any protruding boards or keels. When he could not claim superior seaworthiness, he could say his designs were cheap and easy to build and he promised ordinary people the ability to build boats and live a fantasy-like lifestyle as "sea people".  

The books "Two Girls, Two Catamarans, in 1969 and "People of The Sea" in 2020 tell the story.

However back in 1968 James sold designs like Hina, Tangaroa, Narai and Oro were very simple designs with low rigs, and tiny cabins. Many were built by inexperienced “wana be” sailors, and they did not always have the seamanship skills to sail the boats resulting in some disasters. However, many of the builders were able to achieve long ocean voyages all around the World. From the early 1980s after his life in Ireland with five women in a commune failed and he broke up with all but Ruth and Hanneke, James moved to Cornwall for the last 40 years of his life and designed small day sailing catamarans starting with the Tiki 21. He marketed the idea of holiday escapes and weekend sailing for people who did not wholly reject land-based lives with jobs designing the Tiki 21 and 26, and producing the Tiki 28 and 36 from his boatbuilding business in Cornwall.  

Throughout his life James pitted himself against the mainstream and was critical of luxury catamarans which dominate the multihull market saying they were for western "land" people who wanted a boat that was like their apartments.  He was very critical of designs that could capsize easily because they were over canvassed, but the reality was that his designs could capsize too when the owners owners or builders enlarged their rigs from those designed and added centreboards or dagger boards or other keels to improve speed and windward performance. 

The Wharram tenets of flexibly connected hulls, low multi masted (most were ketches or schooners) and often gaff rigged or at times junk rigged or using a version of a Polynesian sprit sail (and in his earlier designs using the spritsail itself). The lightweight Tiki 21 and 26 models were both capsized in the hands of crews that did not appreciate that they had limits; this is true of most multihulls that inexperienced sailors or contrarily experienced mono hull sailors fail to detect that they are on their stability limit because they do not heel over. 

Wharram never changed his opinion that multihulls had to be sold as safe family boats and freedom from capsize was an essential starting point of his marketing. 

He blamed the capsizes on his competitors saying he had to design lighter faster boats to be competitive and older versions (Hina 22, Hinamoa 23 and Tane 27) did not capsize. However this was simplistic because I know because a man in Burnham on Crouch in Essex fitted the rig off a Dragon to a Hina and capsized it (he claimed he told James about this)  and a New Zealand Tane had a big rig designed by Grainger and that capsized in a squall too. It may well be that had the boats had James' smaller designed rigs they would not have capsized.

James was clearly not a man to suffer fools gladly particularly when those fools were in his mind his competitors like Arthur Piver, Derek Kelsall, John Shuttleworth, Roger Simpson, Richard Woods and Ian Farrier  and many others all of whom he criticised for being "city men" and that he thought put speed over safety from capsize to sell designs.  In literature of the AYRS, the PCA and articles and letters he wrote to the yachting press in the 70's, and 80's he shines out as a very opinionated character who seemed to be determined to pitch himself against convention at every level in his designs, his personal life and his confrontational approach to the establishment and yachting scene in general. 

James dismissed the arguments by Kelsall and Shuttleworth that multihull development was to be found in test tanks and computer programs and preferred to look to principles he derived from study of books on Polynesian designs and his own empirical sailing experience for all the answers. Relying upon his own experience and voyages he claimed to know what made multihulls seaworthy because of his sailing - a view which of course did not  give credit to the experience and ocean voyaging of other designers particularly Piver, Kelsall, Newick, Crowther and Shuttleworth all of whom had a great deal of sailing experience, and had also done trans-Atlantic's and had other sailing experience that distinguished them as men whose designs reflected their own views gained in learning how to sail a multihull in a range of conditions. 

James always established his credentials based on talking about his Atlantic crossings and his "sales pitch" implied he had more Ocean experience than others. His "design book" sets out his history in away that suggests that other designers were all copying him and failing to improve on his work. This was not entirely accurate because in fact certainly in 1966 Derek Kelsall had not only crossed the Atlantic in a multihull three times (compared to James' four at that time) but also won the 2000 mile RBR arguably a race requiring a lot of seamanship in the treacherous waters around the course. Piver, Crowther, Newick, Choy, Patterson, Shuttleworth, Roger and Andrew Simpson, Nigel Irens and many, many others who were building and designing multihulls in the 60's and 70's were also Ocean crossing sailors who navigated storms and learned a lot about the design and handling of multihulls that they incorporated in their own approach to design. As with James' designs many pioneering successful Ocean voyages were made in other designers' multihulls in the 60's and 70's  building the modern knowledgebase that supports multihull seamanship today.

Perhaps other experienced multihull designers chose to be more modest about their seagoing experience because they were also aware that their knowledge, expertise and multihull design was very much an evolving process and that their state of the Art designs would be evolved and improved in the future. 

It is evident particularly in the writing of Kelsall, Shuttleworth and Newick in the 70's and 80's that they were aware that they still had a lot to learn and that they knew that they were at the Dawn of a new age in terms of developing multihulls. Pat Patterson for example was famous for his bestselling Heavenly Twins family cruising catamarans, but he had sailed extensively with two circumnavigations and several Atlantic crossings to his credit in his own designs about which he was incredibly modest. 

Comparing the state of the art in multihull design in the 60's with what is being designed and built now shows that the view that multihull design development had a long way to go in the 70's was quite correct. 

But throughout his long career James clung to his design principles established in the 50's of V shaped hulls, open slatted decks and canoe sterns with flexible beam connections. He argued against statements by Shuttleworth and Woods that racing would help to develop multihull design and practically suggested that the lessons had all been learned and were represented by his designs. He also believed he had solved the design problems in his own designs.

That said James’ sales success, the number of boats built to his plans and above all the number of voyages made in his designs are his epitaph. Many people empathised with James' values and his political, philosophical and lifestyle ideas teamed with his devotion to Nature and learning lessons from Stone Age sailors to build boats that owed nothing to modern mainstream yacht design.  

The early journals of the  Polynesian Catamaran Association that James had created around his designs and the people that built and sailed them are available online and are an interesting read. They tell the story of how James gathered many aspiring catamaran sailors and builders to his designs. He had a vision of a great body of people all over the World sharing their experiences and building catamarans, voyaging and sharing the results. 

Sadly it did not quite work as he so inspirationally wrote. Some sailors of his designs lacked skills and experience. Unlike many designers he seems to have encouraged his early builders to be creative with the designs too which produced some odd interpretations of the plans -some more successful that others which caused breakups at worst and ugly aberrations of the designs. 

The film about the building of Tehini (see link below)shows that the craft was rather roughly built with tar all over the hulls and roofing felt and tar used on the decks -not something you would see at Camper & Nicolson! The strange triangular cabin tops made her look very homemade and indicate that she was indeed built to a very tight budget. It is no surprise that the vessel was very short lived launched in 1969 she was deemed too rotten and unsafe to sail by 1985 and in about 1990 she was burned. Wharram's Rongo had been built in 1957 and was effectively a houseboat on a beach ten years later. In 1969 James gave her away to the Sea Scouts who sank her. when they tried to take her to sea. But some builders assembled beautiful craft to his plans and the Spirit of Gaia was built to professional standards in 1994 and sails in Portugal now under Hanneke's command.   

The PCA eventually came a stage where it was not functioning well  and there was a  disagreement between James and the association because of its starting to align with other Multihull Interest groups and other designers. 

After the collapse of "James Wharram Associates" in Ireland James, Ruth and Hanneke went back to Cornwall and had to start out again to rebuild their lives.  By the time he wrote his final book in 2020 he or Hanneke who co-wrote it, was able to see where a lot of the blame lay in James himself and his arrogance and a mistaken belief that taking part in the Round Britain Race courting publicity (in 1966, 70, 74 and 78) would give him the credibility and recognition he obviously wanted.

In fact all these racing adventures just showed up the shortcomings of the Wharram designs, the disastrous trimaran in 1966; Tehini would not go to windward with her junk rig in 1970 and abandoned the race again on the first stage; in 1978, Maggie Oliver one of his closest female companions sailed her with his friend Bob Evans and suffered the structural failure of the main beams and retired from the race. The reason for her retirement was said to be blown out sails;  in 1978 a grp foam sandwich Tane Nui started to fall apart with major structural problems  and the 35 foot Pahi prototype proved so wet and exposed her crew had a terrible time and finished well down the fleet as one would expect for a boat with no keels and just small ineffective dagger boards and a relatively small rig. 

In fact racing was an anathema to Wharram's designs and the people that built them and sailed them. Most owners either accepted the lack of luxury and high performance and loved the boats because they were so different to others. It was part of the appeal that these were not racing boats beloved of associations and yacht clubs and the "establishment".  Wharram's owed nothing to fashion, or trends or ratings. 

It is interesting that writing about Tehini's retirement from the 1970 RBR James explained that he was doing 14 knots and the problem was that when he reduced sail the Junk rig would then not sail to windward and that he wanted to sail at a "workmanlike" 6 knots rather than 14! This suggests that he simply was not a racer at all as no one racing a boat would rather do 6 knots than 14. However lots of sailors did not want to race and were atrrcated to his designs because they were simple. easy to build and to repair and not "high tech"lacking the winches and equipment that racing yachts have. The cost of your whole Wharram might be less than the mast, sails and equipment of a high tech  yacht from other multihull designers and this and the fact they were a combination of prehistoric design principles and old tech trad-boat technology that attracts people to buy or build a Wharram design. 

Other designers were also influential in the home build market like Kelsall, Simpsons, Shuttleworth and Wharram's former protégé Richard Woods who had started up in competition (as James saw it)  marketing their own range of self-build designs in plywood and in GRP foam sandwich. In fact the market for all designs were different and Wharram's appealed to people who were not after luxury or high performance sailing and all the associated costs that came to achieve that. That is not to say that Wharram designs like the Tiki's are not fast boats if well built but this is not high performance in the established sense. 

The PCA was revived in 1982 as James and Hanneke took over editing the magazine "Sea People" before they encouraged more like minded people to take over but certainly for a few years the strong influence of James in the magazine was apparent and articles published followed the views that James had on boats, the interaction of people and Dolphins and water birth (yes his son with Hanneke)  and it was apparent that James and Hanneke and their young son were enjoying a great life together while Ruth co parented and kept the Worldwide group of Wharram friends focussed.  The magazines are still available on a website: 

http://pca.colegarner.com/sea.people.html.  

Well worth reading.

James became very  busy throughout the 1980's and 90's both designing, running his own professional boatbuilding business, building his 63 foot flagship "Spirit of Gaia" and sailing her around the World in stages, while also developing new building methods using epoxy ply sandwich construction, and the Tiki range of designs which were much more sophisticated than his older designs. 

The original designs are now referred to as "classic designs" by James and Hanneke. Most are still available in plan form. However it has to be said that they were often poor to sail, slow due to the high wetted area, prone to pitching because of the hull shapes, very wet due to waves washing up through the open slatted decks, as well as spray; not always easy to tack or manoeuvre, very basic and uncomfortable in their accommodation and with open unprotected decks and no shelter for the crew.

It must be said that Wharram's early wooden catamarans suffered extensively from rot due to what was essentially poor design with metal fittings and bolts being breeding points for water ingress and rot. Later designs tried to address this with careful epoxy sealing of all the holes and lashing to avoid the metal bolts and fitting that caused rot.

By no means were they the only plywood multihulls to suffer rot because this type of construction especially back in the 70's before epoxy resin took over, is afflicted with rot when water ingress occurs. But also, the primitive low aspect ratio rigs and lack of keels meant that close winded sailing and powerful windward ability were never really attainable by Wharram catamarans. James later wrote that he was never a designer who drew his own designs. He would imagine what he wanted and was a boat builder, but he relied upon his associates and later Hanneke to do all the drawing of the plans. The designs were always a collaboration.

The designs were very basic and James encouraged builders to find their own creativity in much of the detail this was not a great idea and many people's ideas resulted in craft that were ugly or unsafe. Not only did builders change the designs and fail  to follow the plans but they often restyled the boat, expanded the accommodation to improve perceived comfort, changes the rig, built solid decks and cabins and new structures so much so that the resulting vessel was a long way from what the designer intended. Sometimes failure to build specified beams and fastenings resulted in boats that broke up and sank. 

Others built boats that they lacked the experience to sail and immediately piled the vessel up on a sand or rocks resulting in disaster or break up. However some good sailors built fine craft from Wharram plans and achieved great things with them sailing all over the World.

The PCA flourished and with the arrival of the Internet went online as well as publishing a magazine. 

However James concluded that others in the PCA had started to build their online own brokerage and design business about the Sea People community  of the PCA and also "improved" the designs creating their own rigidly monocoque versions some with the deck cabins he so loathed. 

The establishment by one chap in the PCA of  his own "World of Wharram Catamarans" website with pages about the PCA but also his own business of a specialist Wharram catamaran brokerage and so James felt he was forced to take action to protect his business identity and his intellectual property rights to 'Wharram Catamarans'. 

The basic issue was that a voluntary association independent from James Wharram created a conflict between the interests of the Association and James' business interests and the intellectual property rights to his own brand and his names. Wharram Catamarans were not an independent generic type of boats-they were the creation of James and his business associates and lately the team of James and his two wives, Ruth and Hanneke. 

The naïve and idealistic concept of an association of owners and builders of those designs and collectively creating developments of those designs while it seemed a ideal dream the way James had promoted it in the 60's and 70's did not work once others were seeing the designs in a different way to the designer or interested in other multihull designs and concepts. 

This dispute that then arose between James and his former friends was very unpleasant and bitter on both sides and it effectively killed off the PCA.   It was really a collision between the idealistic dreamer community concept that James had championed for so long and the hard reality of business and commercial rights. As a boatbuilder and professional designer, marketing his personal name and brand James was no longer the hippy outside the conventional restraints of Society but a business man protecting his livelihood. Protecting the Western society values he had preached against all his life!

The relationship between James and other professional builders that franchised his designs and modifying them was not always as smooth running as they would hope either and one well known franchise arrangement ended in tears even though the builder had completed some very nice examples of the Wharram designs which really showed them off - a far cry from some of the worst aberrations of home building that were seen badly completed and finished that brought James' brand ridicule in the eyes of the establishment. 

However what has grown up in place of the PCA over the past 25 years is a big community of people sharing stories of their Wharram Catamarans, their experiences building them and sailing them, on several social media and websites. It seems that the spirit of what James intended when he formed the PCA in the 60's is alive and well in a thriving Wharram interest community like nothing else in the multihull world. James and Hanneke built a fantastic web presence of their own that she continues now in 2025. 

On Facebook a wonderful site dedicated to Wharram Catamarans contains a mine of information and an incredible photo archive from which many of the pictures on this website are drawn. 

James wrote copious articles and papers with the help of his associates which with his books leaves a great record of his ideas. By the mid 1990's he and Hanneke produced their best designs after the Pahi 63; the home build Tiki 30, Tiki 38 and 46 and the Islander professional designs. these featured cockpits and crew cabins on the slatted decks and superior accommodation lay outs that were designed to be comfortable and even had showers and toilets in the cabins rather than the "bucket and chuck it" approach of past Wharram designs that had a bucket in a locker in the end of the hulls  as the toilets.

The imaginative features of the Tiki 38 and 46 designs in particular really show the limitations of the original classic designs. But they are also complex and relatively expensive to build but are still not either luxurious or high performance in the way that this is defined in the wider World of yacht design. To the end James drew a huge distinction between wasteful Western design and his basic double canoes.

Later they developed especially "ethnic" designs like the Wanderer and Mana 24 a kit boat. They developed a new concept of a gaff wing sail that was more effective to windward. Their boats had shallow keels for improved windward ability. The hulls were sharper and faster in shape. 

His final book People of the Sea is a fabulously produced gallop through his eventful life which encompassed great self-belief, courage, and the consequences of human flaws too.

Sadly, as old age and dementia caught up with him, he was brave enough take his own life which in the context of Assisted Dying coming into UK law in 2025 shows that James was in many things a man well ahead of his peers.

So, while James may not have invented the modern catamaran or the idea of cruising in multihulls, but his story is a heroic and unique one in history of World multihull development. What he did was brilliantly promote his types of multihulls (he designed catamarans, at least two proas and a trimaran) and his personal design concepts that are still unlike any others. Apart from his books and articles I have referred to Hanneke and James  published a celebratory photo-book and plan set of Rongo on the 60th anniversary of her 1959 Atlantic voyage. It contains some fascinating photographs and Newspaper articles. It was wonderfully evocative of the age and really brings home the pioneering spirit of the Rongo's adventures. 

But above all James personified the spirit of adventure, self-sufficiency, and striving to live the life you desire unfettered by conventions of society. 

His individuality made him stand out as a "one-off" and without doubt the fact that he was quite different to everyone else on the multihull scene (let alone the world of yachting generally) clearly struck a note that many people were attracted to. He was without doubt a most influential and inspiring character. He probably inspired as many dreams as people actually following his path but there were a lot of those too. Hundreds of his designs were built and went ocean voyaging. Many people did follow his path and used his designs to become "Sea People" and that is the Wharram legacy that exists now as a fascinating concept of lifestyle, catamaran design, seaworthiness and voyaging to sea.  

Below I have assembled a gallery of some photo's of James and his wives and their personal boats: Tangaroa, Rongo, Tehini and Spirit of Gaia. The following sections are a vast array of Wharram catamaran photographs  collected over many years. Then there are drawings of the boats from Wharram design brochures over the years or published online or in articles. 

* see "The Symposium Book" by Charles Chiodi June 1976 is a transcript of the Symposium attended by James together with Derek Kelsall, Jim Brown, Rudy Choy, Dick Newick, Norman Cross and many others. A fascinating insight!