gougeon 35 trimaran

THE GOUGEON BROTHERS BOATS

Cold molded boat construction.

The Gougeon Brothers began experimenting with boat building while they were kids growing up near the Saginaw Bay. As young adults, they developed a novel boat construction technique based on laminating wood veneers with their proprietary epoxy formulation. Their strong, fast sailboat started winning regattas, leading other competitive sailors to commission them to build a number of high-profile racing sailboats, both monohulls and multihulls.

Let’s take a look at some of the boats the Gougeon Brothers have built over the years.

Sailing Barge

It is no exaggeration to say that the Gougeon brothers engaged in building experimental sailboats their entire lives. In the summer of 1947, Meade adjusts the (literal) sheet while younger brothers Jan and Joel look on.

DN Iceboats

Living in Michigan, “hard-water sailing” is one way to extend the season. The narrow fuselage, rigging, reduced friction, and sailing angles of DN iceboats (designed by Arrol, Lodge, and Jarret for the Detroit News) would heavily influence all of Meade and Jan Gougeon’s boat designs.

The Gougeons’ first commercial enterprise was building DN iceboats.

DN 1195 Photo credit: Henry Bosset

Meade was living in Erie, PA when he built his first trimaran. He called it E1 for “Experiment number one.” He considered this 1963 multihull “a disaster” and didn’t have a lot to say about it, other than it had “too many moving parts.”

Meade’s constructed his second experimental trimaran, Pencil , under an apartment carport in 1964. Built much too light, Pencil broke under her own weight shortly after her launched.

Wee Three II

This was Jan’s second version of his Wee Three design (not pictured). The lee ama broke clean off of the original . In 1965, Jan built Wee Three II to be sturdier, and to meet IYRU Class-C rules. Note that she is rigged with a wingmast, much like a DN iceboat.

Omega , a 25′ trimaran built in 1965, was the first boat the brothers designed with articulating amas. This experimental trimaran performed very well at Yachting magazine’s One-of-a-Kind Regatta in 1965. This success on the racecourse brought notoriety to the Gougeon name in multihull circles.

Meade Gougeon designed and built Victor T, which he launched in 1969. At just 320 lbs, she earned the distinction of being the lightest Class C competitor in the 1969 Nationals in Hamilton, Ontario. There,  Victor T  took home the win against a strong field of wingmast-powered catamarans.

Back in the day, budgets were tight so Meade repurposed the sails he’d used on Omega (above).

Launched in 1970 and pictured here in 2018, Meade Gougeon’s 35′ trimaran Adagio was the first large, all epoxy bonded and sealed wooden boat built without the use of fasteners. Meade and Jan Gougeon constructed her in just six months. She’s been sailing on the Great Lakes ever since and continues to be a serious contender in the Mackinac races.

Adagio is proof that epoxy-bonded monocoque structures can last for generations.

Golden Dazy

Another notable cold-molded boat: the Ron Holland-designed  Golden Dazy . Launched in 1973, she won the 1975 Canada’s Cup . The success of these wood/epoxy composite boats led to a “mini-revolution” amongst builders and designers. They realized that they could build stiffer and stronger hulls with wood and epoxy than they could with fiberglass, and do so without increasing the weight. Many custom builders continue to choose wood and epoxy as their construction materials today.

Built in 1976, Hot Flash was a cold-molded, fast, half-ton racing monohull designed by Gary Mull. The Usnis brothers, who sailed out of Detroit’s Bayview Yacht Club, commissioned the Gougeons to construct her with wood and WEST SYSTEM Epoxy. The boat was later rechristened Boomerang .

In 1977, the Brothers built  Rogue Wave , a Dick Newick-designed trimaran, for Phil Weld to race in the 1980 OSTAR challenge. Unfortunately, a rule change meant Weld never got the opportunity. This impressive 60′ cold-molded trimaran was among the larger boats the Gougeon brothers built.

Photo credit (right): Polly Brown

The Gougeons launched the 60′ proa Slingshot  in June 1978. Commissioned by Georg and Carl Thomas,  Slingshot  competed in the 1979 speed trials in Weymouth, England, recording the second-fastest speed. Racing the ditch in Texas City, Texas in 1980, the crew posted a speed of 38 knots.

Unfortunately, Slingshot came loose from her mooring during a storm and got destroyed when the waves dashed her against the rocks. A salvaged section of her bow still hangs in the Gougeon boatshop

Slingshot’s crew included Jan Gougeon, Mike Zutek, Ron Sherry, and Olaf and Peter Harken.

This 1979 Gougeon-designed and built wooden cruising trimaran capsized in the Atlantic in 1980 during a qualifier for the OSTAR challenge. Sailing solo, Jan Gougeon spent four long days in Flicka’s capsized hull. He had plenty of time to think about rightable trimaran designs before a passing freighter rescued him.  Flicka  had to be abandoned at sea.

Read more about Flicka’s capsize at Epoxyworks.com.

Jim Brown designed this 27′ freshwater trimaran and longtime GBI Technical Advisor, Captain James R. Watson built her in 1979. Watson elaborates:

This boat sports an experimental wingmast constructed of 1/16″ thick aircraft birch plywood outer skin, 1/64″ thick plywood inner skin separated with 1/2″ Tricell H™ (resin impregnated paper) honeycomb. It was fitted to the boat five years after initial launching. With some reinforcing stringers, this laminate stack was lightly vacuumed while flat, then folded and placed into a form to establish an airfoil until all cured.  James R. Watson, Wood/Epoxy Longevity , Epoxyworks 17

Photo credit (left): Janet Townley

In 1980, Jan began building  Splinter . Following his terrifying experience aboard Flicka , he designed this developed plywood trimaran to be rightable if capsized. Splinter was the second boat, after Adagio, the Brothers launched with a wingmast. Pictured (at right) in 2019, she still competes on the Saginaw Bay against other noteworthy Gougeon-built multihulls including Adagio and  Ollie.

Named after the Gougeons’ grandmother,  Ollie  was started in 1984 using the Gougeon brother’s developed plywood technology. The design was trademarked as a Stressform™ 35 along with Stressform wingmast plans.  Ollie’ s design further advanced Jan’s ideas for self-righting multihulls.

Jan was always thinking of the next boat and had an appetite for solo sailing. After the Atlantic capsized of Flicka , every boat he designed was self-righting. Ollie (right) acing on the Saginaw Bay in 2019.

Adrenalin is a Formula 40 Trimaran with articulating amas. GBI built her for Bill Piper of Ossineke, Michigan in 1987. This boat amazed the sailboat racing world by taking an extremely close second place during her first regatta: the Formula 40 Grand Prix circuit in Brest, France, in April of 1988.

A Formula 40 rule change later legislated Adrenalin  out of contention.

The G-32 is an innovative 32’catamaran designed and built by the Gougeons in the early 1990s. These production boats feature a water-ballast system, are self-righting, and are trailerable. The masthead float doubles as a wind vane and prevents the boat from going completely upside down if capsized.

The Gougeons conceived the G-32 as an affordable cruising and racing vessel but it didn’t achieve market success in the short time that it was produced. The fourteen that they built are still racing and sailing today.

Meade and Jan’s first powerboats were these 32′ Gougmarans launched in 2007. Based on Dick Newick-designed hulls, the brothers conceived these comfortable shallow-water cruisers for stability, low wetted surface, minimal wake, and excellent fuel efficiency.

Read more in Birth of the Gougmarans at Epoxyworks.com.

Chris Beckwith designed the i550, an 18′ stitch-and-glue sportboat. The Gougeon Brothers built Hot Canary in 2011 and raced in the Everglades Challenge.

She is now under new ownership and has been renamed Vivacious . Read the story about how her new owners refit her for camping/cruising .

Jan Gougeon’s final boat project was Strings , a 39’7′ “folding cat with a fuselage. He launched her in 2011. She has long, narrow hulls and a center cabin that rides above the water. An elaborate network of lines (aka strings ) makes this ingenious boat perfect for solo sailing.

Although Jan passed away in 2012, Strings sails on, competing in regattas on the Great Lakes.

Elderly Care

This was the last of several boats Meade designed and built for competing in the grueling, 300-mile Everglades Challenge. An outrigger sailing canoe, Elderly Care provided accommodations for Meade to sleep at night and race during the day. His tactic worked: He place first in his class in the 2017 Everglades Challenge just five months before he passed away at age 78.

The Gougeon Brothers’ experiments in boat design

World of Trimaran Enthusiasts

Multihull sailing, racing trimarans, cruising tris, foiling, sciences & research… and little bit more..

A legend within the World of Trimaran Enthusiasts (WTE): 35 Feet Trimaran ADAGIO…

Its impressive, that “ old trimarans ” with more than 30-40 years of living can be competitive so long…. wowh .

Trimaran Adagio

The 35 Feet Trimaran ADAGIO is a legend within the World of Trimaran Enthusiasts (WTE) and a “pioneer of speed”. This powerful boat was built in 1969/70 (wood-epoxy) and designed by Meade and Jan Gougeon …well known in the world of boat building as Gougeon brothers who invented the WEST SYSTEM® epoxy (being used as standard method for building canoes, kayaks, kit boats or super yachts .)

Tri Adagio made many excellent places in Port Huron-to-Mackinac race: 1998 second, 1999 first, 2000 first, 2002 first, 2003 fifth, 2004 fifth, 2005 first, 2006 first, 2007 fifth, 2008 fifth, 2009 second. – Same in the Chicago-to-Mackinac race: 1998 first, 2000 first to finish, 2002 first to finish, 2006 first to finish.

Why we see very often such “old Trimarans” battling successfully on the regatta courses, and still participate competitively in single-handed and  short handed races ?

There are some very few reasons as I see it… and the answers seem simple:

• An excellent design by one of the extra ordinary designers (e.g. Kurt Hughes (USA), Nigel Irens (U.K.), Dick Newick (USA, 1926-2013), Ian Farrier (New Zealand), Chris White (USA),  Renaud Bañuls (France),  Marc Van Peteghem (France), Vincent Lauriot-Prévost (France), Tony Grainger (Australia) and some few others) is of high substance and timeless …
• … and follows the same rules again and again with every new model: simplicity (handling) – strength (of construction) = safetyness – fast (light displacement)

French Skipper Loick Peiron’s 60 foot Tri Fujifilm (1987, Nigel Irens Design)

• Light displacement construction, materials (marine plywood-epoxy, carbon, kevlar) and methods (vacuum infusion, vacuum high temperature autoclaves) keep the boats light weighted, fast and competitive.

Elder Trimarans easily (but costly) can be modernized by refitting, new wardrobe with modern sails (e.g. 3D head square main sail) and cutter rig (jib, genaker) plus trimming units like central daggerboard , T-rudders , lifting Foils and wing rotation mast . Some even have canting masts and water ballast (e.g. ORMA open 60 ).

Other aspects come into account to keep old Trimarans over decades alive:

• To build three hulls is a complexe process, time intensive and costly. Such investments look for longer caring.
• The owners and sailors of Trimarans have an extra ordinary passion for their boats and never stop to progress the potentials of their racing mashines … to sail with average speeds nowadays of 18-19 knots, in peak >35 knots.
• Its a small community of extreme sailors around the world. Most skippers and crew members know each other and with the Internet nowadays they keep connected to learn quickly from each other.
• The characters of Tri sailors have the spirit taking (higher) risks and experiments (compared to monohull sailors) and therefore are willing to implement new technologies more quickly into their “old boats”.

In my understanding Trimarans can fulfill the ecological aspect of sustainability in best form.

Vids with Trimaran ADAGIO in action… it’s 38 years old in the clip. 🙂

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Gougeon’s Everlasting Experiment

• By Dave Reed
• Updated: October 6, 2020

It’s a December night in 2015, and Matt Scharl is restless in the “guest room” set up for him in an office inside Gougeon Brothers boat shop on the bank of the Saginaw River in Bay City, Michigan. Out on the shop floor is the unmistakable white trimaran Adagio , designed and built in 1969 by the Gougeon ­brothers, Meade and Jan.

Earlier in the day, Scharl stood alongside Meade and Gougeon Brothers’ president and CEO, Alan Gurski, assessing Adagio ’s winter worklist. Meade’s primary concern was a 3-foot section of track that kept separating from the mast. Now, late at night and alone, Scharl can’t resist “popping a few screws,” and before long, he’s extracted the entire track. When he finally stops, the track is on the shop floor among chunks of epoxy and bits of wire.

“It’s wasn’t what they had in mind,” Scharl says, recounting the story with a chuckle, “but I did it anyway.”

He finally turned in at 3 a.m., and when he heard voices inside the shop a few hours later, he got up and walked out to the boat to find Gurski and Gougeon bewildered. “With my toothbrush hanging from my mouth,” he says, “I lean in between them and say: “Huh. That was on there when I went to bed.”

That night was the beginning of a transformation for Adagio , the most legendary craft among the tight-knit Great Lakes multihull crowd. Over 50 years of racing this unique and experimental trimaran, the Gougeons amassed a trove of trophies and accolades, but with Meade’s health declining in the years before his passing in 2017, he had handed the responsibility to son Ben and son-in-law Gurski, both of whom seized the opportunity to ensure that the boat remained competitive. Work on boats is what they do at Gougeon, especially in the winter, and they were honored to continue Meade’s great experiment.

“I knew then the boat was famous and unique and had quite a history to it,” Gurski says. “That being said, she was getting old and showing her age. Meade had a philosophy that the boat needed to last only as long as he would last. As he got older, some things on the boat went undone—or got done quickly for another day of sailing.”

For Ben Gougeon, one of 10 children, the boat was never really more than another vessel used for family outings and weeknight races in the ­once-thriving Bay City racing scene. As a kid, he says, he was more or less ballast. “Sailing came so naturally to my father, it was hard for him to teach others how to sail. It was more like, pull on that red line until I tell you to stop,” Gougeon says. “At the time, I never appreciated her for what she was. To me, as a kid, it was normal. I didn’t realize the vast differences between Adagio and all the other multihulls.”

Nor did he realize how fast the boat was, and still is today: “It used to drive me crazy because whenever we’d finish a race, my dad would hove to, and we’d sit there and wait for every boat to finish. We’d be around the course in like 20 minutes and then wait for what felt like hours. It wasn’t that he wanted to show everyone that he’d won; he was too humble for that. He just thought it was customary to wait for all the boats to come in, and that’s what he would do. He would talk to people as they came by and congratulate them on a good race and that kind of thing.”

Only once Gougeon, who now works for the company, and Gurski, who also considers himself a late-comer to competitive sailing, started learning how to sail the boat under the tutelage of the Gougeon brothers did they realize what they’d been bestowed. “We fell in love with it,” Gurski says. “Then came the caretaking part of it, which comes from building a relationship with the boat, sailing it and racing. It’s like your dad’s old Chevy; you develop an affection for it, and then find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time maintaining and repairing it. Part of what makes us unique as a crew—and as a family, and us as a company—is that we really like to work with our hands. It’s therapy for us in the boat shop; it keeps us closer to our customers, using our products to constantly maintain and repair our own boats.”

Initially they didn’t really know what the boat needed, but by the second season, they started to have a long-term vision of what its restoration would look like over the next 10 years, being realistic about what was most important—and ­having the budget to do it right.

“For example, a few years ago, a crack developed in the centerboard trunk, and every time we went over a wave, the boat would fill up with water,” Gurski says. “That winter’s job was to tear the boat in half, tear out the centerboard trunk, and then put it back in. That wasn’t fun.”

It was Meade who eventually enlisted Scharl to assist his son and Gurski himself with updating and racing the boat. “He said he was getting too old to sail Adagio , and he asked me to come to Bay City to help with the boat,” Scharl says. “I said, ‘Sure, but I’d like to sail it once to get an idea of what is involved.’ What I realized right away was that her sails were unforgiving, the lead positions were not optimal, and the hardware was aging on the boat.”

So began Adagio ’s transformation at the hands of Gougeon, Gurski and Scharl.

“Over the years, Meade would try stuff, put it on the boat, but then never take it off if it didn’t work. There was a lot of unnecessary stuff on the boat,” Scharl says. “So the primary thing was to simplify it and get a good set of modern sails. It was about making the boat easier to sail. It weighs only 2,600 pounds to begin with, so there wasn’t much room to take much weight out.”

Roughly 300 hours of labor went into the boat in the first year, 200 the next, and by the third, the work list was much smaller. That was when they finally added a traveler, engineered by Gurski and built in-house by the company’s craftsmen. “We had to do quite a bit of reinforcing to support the traveler on the transom,” Gougeon says. “It’s sort of odd the way it’s laid out because there’s a back cabin with a hatch. The traveler currently sits over that hatch, but no one goes back there anyway. It has made a huge difference on the boat. Before, we’d be blowing the sails in the gusts and have to reset them. The traveler greatly ­simplified the sailing of the boat.”

Adagio ’s sail number is E5, Gurski explains. The E stands for experiment: “ Adagio is Meade’s fifth experiment in boat design and construction, so I like to say there were four failures before it. It took until 1969 to get to Meade’s E5. And it just so happens that Adagio , for what she’s built do to—which is light-air sailing in the Great Lakes—holds true. She’s a light-air machine, and when it’s 8 to 10 knots, any boat in any fleet can’t hold up to her. We could make her stronger, sure, but we’d be hard-pressed to build her stronger at the same weight, or lighter. He got it right, so why change a good thing?”

Gougeon says his father was never really attached to any one particular idea, and that’s why the boat was forever evolving: “He was all for making changes for a tenth more speed and open to any changes that might allow for that. He would try to reduce the weight to make something work better, pushing it lighter and lighter until it broke, and then he’d go back to that point so it didn’t break again.”

Today, not much of his father’s tinkering remains, Gougeon says. Most of the original tiller is there, but ­everything’s been pretty much replaced on the boat, except the main center hull.

Scharl says Adagio is now close to perfect. “It’s crazy how fast the boat is,” he says, “but the number one thing is how quiet it is. It doesn’t make any noise going through the water. Up to 18 knots downwind, it’s absolutely quiet. Meade’s vision in 1969 is so spot-on today. I look at a lot of designs today, and I’m like, ‘Meh…they’re good, but they’re all condition-based.’ What Adagio does in all conditions is incredible. In winds less than 10 knots, no one is touching that boat. In the right conditions, Adagio would beat every boat by 15 miles—I guarantee that. It destroys TP52s and Great Lakes 70s because it’s ­incredibly slippery.”

Scharl’s boasts, of course, are backed by results, including a multihull division win in the 2020 Port Huron to Mackinac Race, a brutal upwind slog that saw most of its competitors retire. The previous year, the team of Scharl, Gurski and Gougeon finished second—by 14 seconds—to the 60-foot trimaran Earth Voyager . In 2016, 2017 and 2018 Adagio took home first-place honors. Countless victories beforehand with Meade and Jan and many others on board stand as a ­testament to its prowess.

Adagio ’s results reflect its proof of design, and its construction technique as well, Gougeon says. “It’s been around since the very beginning of the company,” he says, “so, after so many years, it stands out as a longevity thing. This boat was built with no mechanical fasteners in it—other than the stays that hold down the amas. It’s a testament to the epoxy, and certainly as she got faster in the earlier days and won a lot of races, it certainly helped promote West System to what it is today.”

As a sort of ­sailing shrine to the Gougeon family and the company it built more than 50 years ago, Adagio is an everlasting experiment that continues what they started when they put glue to wood. While nobody has ever tried to buy the boat, Gougeon says, it’s never been for sale anyway. Some things are not for sale, especially something this unique. There’s just not a better experience on a sailboat than Adagio going downwind, surfing waves, Gurski says. The sensation under spinnaker on this boat is magical. The quiet, the speed and the stillness are fantastic—just as Meade knew it would be.

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Professional BoatBuilder Magazine

Game changer: meade gougeon, 1938–2017.

By Dan Spurr , Dec 11, 2017

Meade Gougeon works on a piece of rigging for a 32 ‘ (9.8m) catamaran designed by brother Jan. In the 1960s Meade and his brothers, Joel and Jan, built DN iceboats, raced them on Michigan’s Saginaw Bay…and never really stopped.

One of the most remarkable and influential people in boatbuilding passed away last August 27 from skin cancer at the age of 78. With brothers Joel and Jan, Meade formed Gougeon Brothers Inc. in 1969 to formulate and market WEST System epoxy resins and accessories. The name WEST stands for Wood Epoxy Saturation Technique, a process he developed to improve on traditional cold-molded hulls, in which multiple layers of thin wood veneers are diag onally stapled over frames and coated with low-viscosity epoxy resin to lock the pieces into a stiff monocoque structure. Living as the boys did on Saginaw Bay, inside Michigan’s thumb, racing iceboats was a popular winter activity. Soon they began building them—200 between 1969 and 1974.

From the beginning the Gougeons were true believers in wood; its excellent physical properties confirmed their conclusions in numerous lab tests they performed. But noting that just 25% of the strength of a good mechanically fastened joint is transferred, they began an intensive search for a means to join wood parts without fasteners. As any carpenter knows, wood and glue go together like a horse and saddle. Popular glues such as resorcinol required high clamping pressures in the order of 125 psi (862 kPa), and they were not suitable as coatings. With the aid of Herbert Dow, grandson of Dow Chemical Company’s founder and an avid iceboater, the Gougeons were introduced to a chemist who helped formulate an epoxy resin that functioned as a glue and as a coating to seal in desired moisture content of the wood used in construction.

Confident of their direction, Meade quit his job as an industrial salesman, and Joel, who flew 131 combat missions in the Vietnam War, contributed some of his savings. Along with younger brother Jan they bought a building on the Saginaw River and continued building boats—more DN iceboats and then the first all-WEST System boat, the 35 ‘ (10.7m) Adagio trimaran. The year was 1970. No metal fasteners were employed in the boat’s basic structures.

In the early days all three brothers worked in the boat­shop, commencing an impressive build list: the trimaran Vic tor T , which won the C-class Nationals in 1969; the Ron Holland–designed Golden Dazy , which won the 1975 Canada’s Cup; the 60 ‘ (18.3m) proa/sloop Slingshot , intended to break the world’s speed record under sail; the 60 ‘ Rogue Wave that newspaperman Phil Weld commissioned to compete in the OSTAR from Plymouth, England, to Newport, Rhode Island; and the Gary Mull–designed Hot Flash Half Tonner. All were cold-molded: lightweight, stiff, and strong. The boatbuilding world took note—not so much for the cold-molding construction process, but for their epoxy.

Word traveled locally at first, and eventually across the U.S. and to Europe and elsewhere. And not just among boat people. J.R. Watson, an early employee who spent a lot of time in customer service, recalls people calling and wanting to know if WEST System epoxy could repair a toilet tank. Indeed, GBI’s newsletter, Epoxyworks , advises readers on a very wide range of applications, many of which can be classified as home improvement.

Yellow Thing was one of Gougeon’s many small boats devised for his sailing pleasure.

By the late 1970s it was only natural that someone of Meade’s intellect desired to gather the company’s collective knowledge and share it via publication of a book. As it happened, Meade advertised for a writer/editor to join the GBI team, and I answered. My “interview” consisted of three visits to meet the brothers in Bay City, where I was given the assignment to read the book manuscript for The Gougeons on Boat Construction   and offer my thoughts on how it could be improved. The last of the three visits was to the family’s Fourth of July picnic, I guess to see if I was a good fit. Meade offered me the position, which for a variety of reasons I regretfully declined. But we became friends, perhaps in a way not possible if I’d become an employee.

While GBI became a profitable business, developing new product lines such as custom PRO-SET epoxies for other industries, including aerospace, Meade was always a boatbuilder at heart. It became customary for new employees to build a boat in the shop, where there was plenty of guidance available. Current CEO Alan Gurski, Meade’s son-in-law, built a Gougeon 12.3 when he came on board in 2007.

Meade (left) and Jan Gougeon sail the first WEST System boat, the trimaran Adagio , on Saginaw Bay, in 2009, for a 40th-anniversary story in this magazine.

Meade loved to sail and he liked to keep things simple, though on my last sail aboard Adagio he admitted there were no more control lines left to add. The boat had been totally tricked out. He developed a keen interest in small wind-driven boats. He and pal Hugh Horton used to get away in the Whalesback Channel area of Lake Huron’s North Channel. Horton says Meade was always well aware that his father had died of a heart attack (on Christmas morning) when Meade was still a teenager. Taking control of his diet and fitness regime, Meade always stayed in great shape; indeed, he won the North American DN iceboat championship at age 58—a remarkable feat. And just this year he won his class in the 300-mile Everglades Challenge from Tampa to Key Largo—competing in a sailing canoe. (In his feature “First Encounter,” on page 48, Jim Brown shares Randy Smyth’s account of sailing past Meade in that race.)

Few figures in boatbuilding were more admired than Meade—for his intellect, passion, dignity, and generosity.

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OLD DOG, NEW TRICKS: ADAGIO

A 46 year old trimaran wins the 2016 Bayview-Mackinac Race with a new custom sail package.

On July 17, 2016, Adagio won her class in the Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac Race—thanks to her latest upgrades and a new set of North Sails.

“Old Adagio has taken on a new life,” said designer and builder Meade Gougeon. The 35 foot trimaran, built in 1970, was the first to be constructed entirely with WEST SYSTEM epoxy, which Meade and his brother Jan developed. Adagio won her first Bayview-Mac in 1999. In 2000, she celebrated her thirtieth birthday by winning the race again—and then also took both line honors and first overall in that year’s race from Chicago to Mackinac Island. The crew was Meade and Jan Gougeon, Butch Babcock and JR Watson. “In 2000 the crew was at the peak of their sailing wisdom and in excellent physical condition,” reported project manager and 2016 Bayview-Mac crew member Matt Scharl. “ Adagio was also at the peak of technology for that era.”

Adagio was again the first multihull to finish both races to Mackinac Island in 2006. But despite several upgrades to appendages and rigging, she couldn’t produce another race win. “In recent years she had gone downhill,” Meade Gougeon explained, “with both the boat and crew aging out. This year we decided to tackle the problem.” Toward the end of the 2015 sailing season, Meade asked Matt Scharl to oversee the upgrades needed to bring the boat back up to race-winning speed before the 2016 race. Matt grew up sailing locally on his grandfather’s Tartan 41 Naiad, and to him the project felt like “coming back home.”

“We only got one opportunity to sail Adagio before it came out of the water ,” Matt explained, “but that sail was telling.”

The boat’s sails, which were only a year old, made it so difficult to stay in the groove that only Meade, with his forty-five years of experience driving the boat, could keep things rolling. “The sails weren’t right for the boat at all,” Matt said, adding that the genoa’s entry was too fine. The spinnaker was “simply what I describe as a beach ball—too deep to promote any flow across the sail.” In contrast, the mainsail was so flat it was hard to trim properly. The result was very little overlap between sails, and very little forgiveness on any point of sail. “The old suit had very definitive wind and angle ranges,” Matt continued. “It was hard to obtain and maintain optimal trim. Getting the boat up and running was achievable, but keeping it there was very finicky.”

So in addition to helping his race teammates, brothers-in-law Ben Gougeon and Alan Gurski, with their ongoing modernization of Adagio , Matt brought in North Sails designer Magnus Doole to work up a new sail inventory. “Matt agreed to help us do a makeover of Adagio ,” Meade explained, “but only if we included Magnus to consult on the rig, and design a new set of sails.”

“The Gougeon organization could not be happier with the North Sails effort, which has helped our beloved Adagio to carry on a competitive effort for more years to come.” And those designs, Matt says, were “spot on.” Magnus came up to Bay City from New Zealand to help Matt accurately measure the boat. Then the sailmaker created a 3D model from the measurements using Desman, which is part of the North Design Suite. Back home again, Magnus designed a sail package that would maximize crossover and make the boat easier to sail fast. The sails included a North Sails 3Di ENDURANCE mainsail, solent genoa and trinquette staysail, a North Panel Laminate (NPL) code zero and North Paneled Cloth (NPC) yellow gennaker. They were built at two separate North facilities according to strict manufacturing standards, and then shipped directly to Michigan.

Meade Gougeon was impressed with both the seamless process and North’s attention to detail. “The sails were delivered on time and fit like a glove, due to the careful job of measuring. The collaboration between Matt and Magnus was like magic, and Magnus went beyond the call of just being a sail designer, engaging with both Matt and us on any number of related sail handling issues.”

As for performance, Matt noticed one key difference as soon as they raised the new sails: a wider groove. “The boat was lively, responsive and accelerated fast.”

Adagio’s crew for the 2016 Bayview-Mac (Matt, Ben, and Alan) wasn’t able to practice as much as they would’ve liked before the start, so it wasn’t until they had already started the 259-mile course that they realized just how much range each of the new sails had.

“The race started out as a one-sided beat on starboard,” Matt said, “so we started with the genoa, with great boat speed on the other boats. When we got lifted we switched to the Code 0, an hour late.” They were still learning the crossovers for the new sails. When the wind lifted them even more, they switched to the spinnaker—”again an hour too late,” Matt said. “Clearly the new sails had larger ranges than we had expected.”

The thirty-five footer was able to keep pace with the Santa Cruz 70s, though until Adagio rounded the Cove Island mark, they lost some distance to the multihulls behind them that were sailing in better breeze.

“After rounding,” Matt explained, “we sailed with the genoa and jib on a beam reach.” It was here that the boat (with Ben Gougeon on the helm) reached her top speed of the race, which Matt described as “17-ish” knots. He believes it was on this leg of the course where the team gained enough distance on the boats behind to secure the class win. “I’ve never sailed a small trimaran that is able to hold apparent wind so well.”

“We were passing lots of the Santa Cruz 70s along the way,” Alan Gurski added, “so we had a good feeling that we were near the front of the fleet.” Adagio won the multihull division with an elapsed time of 28:46:04. “It was a hoot!” said Alan afterward.

Having sails that were easy to trim and fast to sail also made it easier for the three man team to gel so quickly. Alan and Ben had sailed Adagio with Meade for the past five years, but this was Matt’s first season on board. “We all can do every job on the boat,” Matt said, “so roles are interchangeable.” As for sleep, “we all got about two hours.”

This winter, Adagio has one more major upgrade scheduled. And then, Matt says, “she is good to go for the next fifty years, we think.”

Meade Gougeon agrees. “The Gougeon organization could not be happier with the North Sails effort, which has helped our beloved Adagio to carry on a competitive effort for more years to come.”

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News: Meade A. Gougeon: September 25, 1938–August 27, 2017

“The wind is coming up. Tell the boys they can commence with the race.” Fittingly, these would be the last words of Meade A. Gougeon as he watched a fleet of sailboats, including his trimaran  Adagio , assembling for the Great Lakes Multihull Regatta in front of his home on the Saginaw Bay. Gougeon died Sunday, August 27, 2017, peacefully at home surrounded by his family. He was 78 years old.

Meade, along with his brothers Jan and Joel, founded Gougeon Brothers, Inc. in 1969. Their employee-owned, ISO 9001 registered company is a world renowned formulator and manufacturer of WEST SYSTEM® and PRO-SET® epoxies. The brothers pioneered the use of epoxy in boat construction and repair. They got their start building DN class iceboats with wood and epoxy. Initially, the brothers obtained access to Dow Chemical’s nearby laboratories to develop an epoxy that could be used for coating and bonding.

By 1973, the brothers’ small boat shop in Bay City, Michigan was the largest builder of iceboats in the United States. Even so, in 1974 they sold the DN portion of their business to focus on soft water boats and their burgeoning epoxy business.

In 1971, Meade launched  Adagio —the first large, all epoxy bonded and sealed wooden boat built without the use of fasteners. He’d built her with his brother Jan in just six months. She’s been sailing on the Great Lakes ever since, winning the Bayview Mackinac Race in 2000, 2002, 2006, 2016 and 2017.  Adagio  is proof that fully bonded monocoque structures can be built not just to last, but to be serious competitors for generations.

NASA’s Wind Energy Project Office had Gougeon Brothers manufacture epoxy-laminated wood specimens for testing the strength of an epoxy bond between a threaded steel rod and a laminated wood specimen. The company’s samples were so strong that they broke NASA’s testing machine. GBI would go on to manufacture wood/epoxy wind turbine blades for several years.

In 1979, Meade wrote  The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction . This famous boatbuilding guide details composite construction techniques using wood and epoxy. It remains a favourite resource for professionals and first-time boat builders, and is often used as a textbook in boat building programs.

A few of the notable wood-epoxy boats built by GBI. include the Ron Holland-designed half-ton monohull Golden Dazy  which won the 1975 Canada’s Cup; the 60′ Dick Newick designed trimaran  Rogue Wave ; the Georg Thomas-designed proa  Slingshot  which was clocked at speeds of over 40 MPH;  Adrenalin , a Formula 40 trimaran of wood, epoxy, and carbon fiber; the Gougeon 32 production catamarans including  Incognito , which, skippered by Russell Brown, finished first in the solo class in this year’s Race to Alaska.

Meade was an avid multihull sailor, ice boater, and cyclist. Aboard the outrigger canoes  Voyager  and  Elderly Care  respectively, he placed first in his class in the grueling, 300-mile Everglades Challenge in 2014 and 2017. He raced iceboats with the International DN Ice Yacht Racing Association for several decades, winning the US Championship in 1981 and 1997. He was inducted, along with his brother Jan, into to National Sailing Hall of Fame in 2015.

Always a positive force in his community, Meade served on Delta College Board of Trustees, the Kantzler Foundation Board of Trustees, the Bay Arenac Community High School Board of Directors, and the Bay County Library System Board of Trustees. In 2015, he was honoured with the Peggy Rowley Community Enrichment Award at the Bay Area Community Foundation’s Faces of Philanthropy event.

Adamant that GBI should remain a robust corporation in his absence, Meade went to great lengths to assure that the next generation of management and employees were smart, hardworking, and forward-looking individuals. Because he laid the groundwork for his succession, the company remains strong as the leader in the epoxy industry.

The oldest of four children, he was born September 25, 1938 to Meade and Elizabeth “Betty” Gougeon. After graduating from T.L. Handy High School, Meade earned a degree in Industrial Management from Western Michigan University in 1960. He served honourably in the U.S. Army.

Meade is survived by his beloved wife of 46 years, Janet Gougeon and their children and spouses, Glenn Kirkland; Anne Michelle and Randy Mortensen; M. Ryan and Janice Gougeon; Benjamin and Logan Gougeon; Renee and Alan Gurski; Mia and Kwafo Adarkwa; Jae Gougeon; and Laura Gougeon, as well as 14 grandchildren. He is also survived by his brother Joel (Kaye) Gougeon.

He was predeceased by his parents, sister Pamela (John) Thomas, brother Jan Gougeon, and son Gary (Michele Baltus) Kirkland.

An open house celebration of Meade’s life begins at 12:00 noon, with farewell tributes from 2:00-4:00 PM, on Saturday, September 9 at the Gougeon Brothers Boat Shop. All whom Meade would call friend and family are invited to attend.

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GBI History

How west system got its start, through the eyes of meade gougeon, the early years.

My brothers and I were avid DN iceboat racers growing up on Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. Post-World War II was a period when boats were hard to come by. In order to compete, we built our own boats. The DN iceboat, with its highly loaded components continually operating at strain rates just short of failure, proved to be an excellent testbed and contributed greatly to GBI history.

In 1959, my youngest brother, Jan, began an apprenticeship as a boat builder for Victor Carpenter. Jan was 14 and spent his time after school and on weekends helping Vic build boats. Vic had been a patternmaker in the Detroit auto industry. He had seen the switch from using resorcinol glues to epoxy adhesives for laminating pattern stock. Because the epoxy required less clamping pressure, it was now possible to bond large structures efficiently and at low costs. Vic became enamored with this technology and was the first professional boat builder to use epoxy and traditional fasteners to assemble wooden boats.

The things Jan learned from Vic at an early age proved crucial to our later work in boat construction and epoxy development. This technology challenged our imaginations and led us down a path of trial and error over the next ten years. In this time, we built a series of five racing trimarans and numerous DN iceboats. Our goal for each of these projects was to build the lightest structures possible while minimizing the use of fasteners. We wanted to produce race-winning boats. Our emerging, lightweight wood/epoxy technology quickly developed as an advantage over the best fiberglass technology of that time. By continuously working to innovate and push the limit of material performance, our knowledge and skills grew. We learned from both success and failure.

In 1969, we began building DN iceboats as our first commercial product. Over the course of five years, we would sell more than 200 iceboats.

The epoxy system we were using worked well as an adhesive but was difficult to apply as a coating. Lucky for us, Herbert Dow, the grandson of The Dow Chemical Company’s founder, was an avid sailor who we introduced to iceboating. After seeing what we were up to, Herb made it possible for us to work with several chemists in Dow’s epoxy lab to help us refine our epoxy resin and hardener formulations to be used as both an adhesive and a coating.

It was well known within the industry that epoxy-based technology had the potential to create a formidable moisture barrier, and now we were able to both bond and seal the wood of our racing trimarans and DN iceboats with epoxy. We had developed the formulations that were the basis of WEST SYSTEM.

GBI historic moments

Part 1: chasing speed, dn iceboats.

Brothers Meade and Jan Gougeon begin building DN class iceboats with wood and epoxy, selling 200 iceboats between 1969 and 1974. “Where we got really lucky in our quest for epoxy technology was to be located 17 miles east of Dow Chemical Co. We introduced Herbert Dow (an avid sailor and the grandson of Dow Chemical’s founder) to iceboating. Herb made it possible for us to work with chemists in Dow’s epoxy lab, helping us to develop resins and hardeners we could use as both an adhesive and a coating,” company founder Meade Gougeon says. With Dow’s help, the Gougeon brothers develop the formulations WEST SYSTEM epoxy products are based on.

The trimaran ADAGIO is launched. She’s the first large, all epoxy bonded and sealed wooden boat built without the use of fasteners. Meade and Jan Gougeon built her in just six months. She’s been sailing on the Great Lakes ever since and continues to be a serious contender in the Mackinac races. ADAGIO is proof that fully bonded monocoque structures can be built to last for generations.

January, 1971

WEST SYSTEM is Born

Word travels fast about the high-strength composites the Gougeon brothers were building with wood and epoxy. Local boat builders flocked to Gougeon Brothers Boatworks—located on the west side of the Saginaw River in Bay City, Michigan—seeking epoxy for their own projects. With an investment from middle brother Joel Gougeon, who had saved his earnings over four years of flying combat missions for the airforce in Vietnam, the brothers begin packaging their special epoxy formulation to satisfy increasing demand.

Part 2: A legacy in the Making

March, 1972

The Technical Manual

The first WEST SYSTEM Technical Manual is published. It helps customers understand WEST SYSTEM epoxy products, which are like nothing else on the market at that time. The manual will be expanded over the next several years and is the first in a long line of informative publications for epoxy users.

January, 1973

Iceboat Production

Gougeon Brothers Boatworks improves the performance of DN Iceboats by building them with wood and epoxy. Their boats win races due to the added stiffness and durability the epoxy provides. By 1973, the brothers’ small boat shop on Martin St. in Bay City, Michigan becomes the largest builder of iceboats in the United States. Even so, in 1974 they sell it to focus on epoxy.

Golden Dazy

Construction begins on GOLDEN DAZY, the Ron Holland-designed monohull. She goes on to win the 1975 Canada’s Cup and is still sailing today in upstate New York. The success of these wood/epoxy composite boat is revolutionary to builders and designers. They’re building stiffer, stronger hulls without increasing boat weight.

February, 1975

DN World Cup

Jan Gougeon takes 1st Place in the DN Iceboat Gold Cup World Championships, beating the fierce sailing Russians, Poles, Dutch, and Swiss. His DN iceboat is a plywood/spruce structure that is highly loaded and a great test of epoxy under stress. Jan goes on to win many more iceboat championships over the coming decades.

The Gougeon crew uses cold-molded construction methods to build HOT FLASH, a 32′ half-ton monohull designed by Gary Mull and built on commission for the Usnis brothers of the Bayview Yacht Club in Detroit.

March, 1977

The brothers began building ROGUE WAVE, a Dick Newick designed 60′ trimaran for Phil Weld.Weld’s hopes to race it in the 1980 OSTAR are dashed by a rule change.

1977 is also the year construction starts on FLICKA. Jan would spend four long days in the capsized FLICKA in the Atlantic Ocean during a qualifier for the next OSTAR challenge. He had plenty of time to think about the development of a self-righting trimaran before he was rescued by a passing freighter. Sadly, FLICKA had to be abandoned at sea.

The Boatbuilder

The first issue of The Boatbuilder is published. This black and white, 8-page newsletter about epoxy and epoxy projects will eventually grow up to be the 28-page, full-color Epoxyworks Magazine.

The Gougeon Brothers are commissioned to build SLINGSHOT, 60′ proa/trimaran, for Karl Thomas of Troy, Michigan. The purpose was to challenge the World’s Sailing Speed Record in England. Designed by Georg Thomas, it features a flattened after-section for planing and can reach speeds of over 40 mph.

NASA Project

Gougeon Brothers, Inc. manufactures laminated wood specimens for use in NASA’s Wind Energy Project Office. Tests are performed to determine the strength of an epoxy bond between a threaded steel rod and a laminated wood specimen. The mean value for the 15″ stud depth laminated for veneer specimens is 64,800 lbs of load, well in excess of the 38,000 maximum load expected on wind turbine blades.

GBI on Boat Construction

The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction is first published. The boatbuilding guide details composite construction techniques using wood and epoxy. It quickly becomes a favorite resource for professionals and first-time builders.

January, 1980

Jan designs and begins to build Splinter, a developed plywood trimaran designed to be rightable after a capsize. SPLINTER was the second boat, after ADAGIO, that the Gougeons built with a wingmast. Jan places first in the Port Huron to Mackinac race aboard SPLINTER in 1981, 1982 and 1983 and also sets a record for the fastest finish. SPLINTER is still racing on the Saginaw Bay.

March, 1980

Racing SLINGSHOT in the ditch in Texas City, Texas, the crew (consisting of Mike Zuteck, Olaf Harkin, Peter Harken, Jan Gougeon, Dan Reichelsdorfer, Ron Sherry, and John Maudlin) posted a speed of 38 knots. But during a storm—with winds over 50 knots—Slingshot came loose from her mooring, hit a breakwater and broke into pieces. All that remains of her is a section of the bow which hangs in the Gougeon Brothers boat shop.

Part 3: Setting the Foundation for Future Success

January, 1983

Employee-Owned

Gougeon Brothers, Inc. undertakes the groundwork for becoming an employee-owned company. Any full-time Gougeon employee you speak with is a part-owner of the company and has a vested interest in keeping you as a satisfied customer.

January, 1984

MTS Machine

Gougeon Brothers, Inc. obtains an MTS testing machine, which exerts gradually increasing loads on test samples and accurately records the amount of deflection at sample failure. Today, our lab includes 2 MTS machines, 3 DCSs and a DMA for thermal analysis, FTIR for analyzing composition, a TGA for characterizing the thermal decomposition of materials, and a Rheometer for measuring viscosity.

OLLIE, the prototype STRESSFORM 35′ trimaran designed by Jan Gougeon and Built by Gougeon Brothers, Inc., is launched. She will sail successfully for decades to come.

Wind Blade Turbines

Production of 65′ long wind turbine blades for Westinghouse begins in GBI’s Bay City plant. When erected, the wind turbine sweeps a 142′ diameter and produces 600 KW of power in winds of 28 mph.

November 1986

Repair Kits Introduced

WEST SYSTEM Handy Packs and Maxi Packs hit the market to meet customer demands for smaller packages of epoxy. The self-contained repair kits retailed for $3.95 and $11.95 respectively, while Ronald Reagan was president.

January 1987

Fiberglass Repair Manual

The first edition of the popular Fiberglass Boat Repair & Maintenance is introduced. The illustrated manual offers a variety of fiberglass boat repair techniques and retails for just $2 in 1987. The up-to-date version is now available as a free download on this website. or in print at fine marine chandleries.

ADRENALIN, a Formula 40 trimaran, is built of wood, epoxy and carbon fiber by Gougeon Brothers for Bill Piper of Ossineke, Michigan. She takes an extremely close second place in her first regatta in the Formula 40 Grand Prix circuit in Brest, France in April of 1988.

November 1988

Laminating Epoxy

Gougeon Brothers, Inc. introduces Gougeon Laminating Epoxy (GLR/GLH), the precursor to their PRO-SET® line of OEM epoxy products. Among many high-end projects, GLR/GLH is used in building offshore powerboats like POPEYE’S DIET COKE® by Goetz Custom Yachts. PRO-SET epoxies have been used in the construction of high-speed powerboats ever since.

January 1989

410 Microlight

Lightweight, inexpensive 410 Microlight Fairing filler is introduced. This is an easy to mix, sand and shape epoxy filler that stores nicely even in humid environments. The product reduces the hassle of sanding and fairing for epoxy users worldwide.

Siberian DN Victory

Jan Gougeon enjoys Russian hospitality and a victory in the 1989 DN Big Cup of Siberia, placing 1st overall in the 7 races of the Gold Fleet Regatta. “While there was some difficulty with the language barrier, we had a lot of fun learning from each other,” Jan said. He is 44 years old and a 3-time World DN Iceboat Champion at the time of his big Siberian win.

The water-ballasted, shoal-drafted, trailerable and streamlined Gougeon 32 Catamaran is developed for production. There are still Gougeon-32’s competing in regattas today, including Russell Brown’s “Icognito“.

September 1990

Wooden Boat Manual

Wooden Boat Restoration & Repair is published, illustrating professional-level repair techniques for wooden boat enthusiasts. This popular manual is now available as a free, downloadable PDF on this website (under Instruction) and print copies can be purchased at fine marine chandleries.

February 1991

DN Gold Cup

Jan Gougeon takes his 4th DN World Gold Cup, placing 1st overall in the 5 races of the International DN Ice Yacht Racing Association (IDNIYRA) Gold Fleet Regatta on Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay, Feb. 3-4, 1991.

September 1992

Epoxyworks Magazine debuts. After 15 years of growth in scope, size and popularity as The Boatbuilder, the 26-page biannual publication evolves beyond boat construction to encompass all types of building, restoration, and repair with epoxy. The cover feature is the restored Whalebone Arch at Christ Church Cathedral in Stanely, Falkland Islands.

October 1992

Pocket Rocket

POCKET ROCKET, Jan Gougeon’s personal prototype of the Gougeon 32 (or G-32, or as it was briefly known, Hummer) production catamaran, ends the racing season undefeated for line honors. The boat places 1st in the singlehanded Port Huron to Mackinac Race, the Lake Huron Double Handed Challenge, and the Buzzards Bay Regatta.

October 1994

PRO-SET Epoxy

The brand name of Gougeon Laminating Epoxies is changed to PRO-SET Epoxies. These OEM epoxies set new standards in room-temperature cured, post-curable laminating and infusion epoxies and continue to grow in popularity among high-end composite builders.

The 1938 Frank Lloyd Wright-designed, 14,000 sq. ft. residence Wingspread (Racine, Washington) undergoes extensive stabilization and roof repairs using PRO-SET Epoxy products from Gougeon Brothers, Inc., as well as materials testing and guidance from GBI’s technical department.

January 1997

Hodgdon Yachts, Inc. in East Boothbay, Maine begins cold molding ANTONISA, a 124′ sloop of mahogany and WEST SYSTEM Epoxy. The carbon composite mast is 172′ tall. Completed in 1999, ANTONISA weighs in at 350,000 pounds. The salon features a marble fireplace and a pipe organ.

January 1998

The Jubilee Sailing Trust begins constructing the world’s largest wood/epoxy tall ship underway: TENACIOUS, a 65-meter (250′) 3-masted barque. Based in the United Kingdom, the Jubiliee Sailing Trust helps integrate physically disabled people into sailing aboard TENACIOUS. WEST SYSTEM Epoxy is used throughout the construction.

September 1999

Hydromat Test

The Hydromat Panel Test, a Gougeon-developed structural test using a self-contained pressure bladder, becomes the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard D6416. The test evaluates the performance of sandwich composites, plywood, or flat plates of almost any material. The pressure bladder represents more realistic loading pressures than earlier ASTM standard tests for these qualities.

Serendipity

SERENDIPITY, a modern decked sailing canoe, is built by Hugh Horton for Meade Gougeon using wood, epoxy and composite Kevlar® components. The rig has a simple and efficient reefing system.

January 2001

Scheherazade

Hodgdon Yachts in East Boothbay, Maine builds SCHEHERAZADE, a 155′ Bruce King-designed wood-epoxy ketch. She’s cold molded with multiple layers of Douglas fir, western red cedar, and WEST SYSTEM Epoxy.

ISO Certification

Gougeon Brothers, Inc. completes the arduous process of certification under ISO 9001:2000 Quality Standard. The standard represents a quality management system that pervades all elements of the business, giving structure to a whole dynamic of customer service.

Part 4: Making Bonds that’ll Last a Lifetime

Babyface nelson.

BABYFACE NELSON is launched on Gull Lake following two years of cold molded construction in mahogany and WEST SYSTEM Epoxy. Built by Bruce Hutchinson, the boat is a replica of Gold Cup racer BABY BOOTLEGGER, designed by George Crouch in 1924.

February 2004

Scaled Composite begins using PRO-SET Epoxies

Scaled Composite in Mojave, California begins using PRO-SET Epoxies in the development of their cutting-edge spacecraft such as SPACESHIPONE, PROTEUS, VOYAGER, CAPTIVE CARRY (shown), and ADAM. Scaled’s founder, renowned aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, began using WEST SYSTEM Epoxies in moldless composite construction homebuilt aircraft in the 1970s.

5th Edition

The 5th Edition of The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction is published. It is expanded by 20% with new material, a revised layout for easier navigation, and is updated to reflect evolving epoxy technology.

August 2005

Meade and Jan launch their Gougmarans: lightweight, shallow-draft, efficient power catamarans on Dick Newick-designed 32′ hulls. Jan’s is christened MAGIC CARPET, while Meade’s is simply called GOUGMARAN.

G/flex Epoxy

G/flex toughened epoxies are introduced. The innovative products are rubber toughened and bond tenaciously with many types of plastic, aluminum, and hardwoods. They’re are resistant to the stress of expansion, contraction, shock, and vibration. These specialty epoxies come in an unthickened (G/flex 650) and pre-thickened (G/flex 655) form and are available in sizes from 8-oz kits to 50-gallon drums.

September 2008

Six10 Introduced

Six10 Thickened Epoxy Adhesive, a 2-part epoxy system in a chambered, self-metering cartridge designed to be dispensed with a standard caulking gun, is introduced. Its convenience and versatility make it an immediate hit with first-time and seasoned epoxy users.

August 2009

40th Anniversary

Gougeon Brothers, Inc. celebrates 40 years in business with a big summer barbecue party, complete with a live band and fireworks. Friends and colleagues from around the globe join in the festivities.

ZOGO, a hybrid diesel/electric launch designed by Stephens, Waring & White and built by French and Webb in Brooklin, Maine, is launched. This craft pushes the envelope for high-efficiency, low-impact boating. She burns just 1.5 gallons of fuel per hour cruising at 10.5 knots.

January 2011

The Gougeon Brothers technical staff builds the i550 HOT CANARY, an 18′ sport boat to be raced in the Everglades Challenge. The i550, designed by Chris Beckwith, is a small but substantial boat that can handle rough seas.

Jan Gougeon launches STRINGS. Ten years in the making, sometimes referred to as Project X, the 40′ boat is essentially a folding catamaran with a fuselage. Jan designed STRINGS to be easy to sail solo, self-righting, and trailerable, with a shallow draft, yet a big enough footprint to be a serious offshore contender. Sadly, it is to be Jan’s final boat.

Greg Hatten’s replica of the river dory PORTOLA completes a 24-trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, surviving some of the biggest white water on the planet for an almost 300-mile maiden voyage. Hatten built PORTOLA of wood and WEST SYSTEM Epoxy.

December 2012

Jan C. Gougeon

August 7, 1945-December 18, 2012. The youngest of the three Gougeon Brothers, Jan was a natural engineer and a visionary. Jan was working in the shop until a few days before his death. Boats he designed and built include WEE THREE, FLICKA, SPLINTER, OLLIE, POCKET ROCKET, MAGIC CARPET, and STRINGS. He was the DN Iceboat World Gold Cup Champion in 1975, 1982, 1985 and 1991; the Great Cup of Siberia in 1989 and the DN North American Championship in 1971, 1972 and 2000. He was also a licensed airplane pilot and an all around great guy. We miss him.

January 2013

Tech Building

The Gougeon technical staff moves into their new building. The facility includes a large, adaptable workshop and a climate-controlled lab. An independent “floating” concrete slab isolates the company’s MTS hydraulic mechanical testing machines from outside vibration interference. The building is dedicated to the memory of Jan C. Gougeon.

October 2015

Hall of Fame

Meade and Jan Gougeon are inducted into The National Sailing Hall of Fame (NSHOF) in October of 2015. Meade and Jan, along with their brother Joel, founded Gougeon Brothers, Inc. in 1969. The two brothers were selected because of their pioneering work in the use of epoxies for boat construction, and because each is an accomplished sailor.

December 2015

Oracle Team USA

ORACLE TEAM USA uses PRO-SET adhesives by Gougeon Brothers, Inc. in the construction of their 2017 America’s Cup contender. Ian Burns, performance team manager for ORACLE TEAM USA, says these adhesives are used to build high-quality small parts. The individually crafted components are joined to the boat with epoxy adhesives, becoming the strongest part of the hulls. Floor manager Johnathan Holstrom points out the adhesives are what ORACLE TEAM USA counts on to hold everything together. He calls PRO-SET epoxies “the nuts and bolts,” in the construction of these state-of-the-art race boats.

Still formidable after 46 years, ADAGIO takes a victory in Division III of the 2016 Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac Race. She’s crewed by Alan Gurski, Matt Scharl, and Ben Gougeon. ADAGIO’s longevity is a testament to wood/epoxy boat building. She is the first large wooden boat bonded entirely with epoxy and without mechanical fasteners. She is also the first wooden boat completely sealed with epoxy inside and out. At the time of the 2016 win, she is 47 years old.

Elderly Care

Meade Gougeon, 78, places 2nd in his class in the 2017 Everglades Challenge aboard his outrigger sailing canoe ELDERLY CARE. The grueling 300-mile race may have been the toughest in 15 years. “Three days of high winds, headwinds, and rough seas. It was wet and bumpy,” is how Meade describes it. More than half of the 108-boat fleet dropped out, with just 51 entrants making it across the finish line ahead of the 8-day time limit.

August 2017

Meade A. Gougeon

September 25, 1938-August 27, 2017. The eldest of the three Gougeon Brothers was a pioneer in wood/epoxy engineering, an avid multihull sailor and the father of 10. His trimaran Adagio is believed to be the first wood-epoxy boat built entirely without fasteners, and is still winning races today. Meade won the US DN Iceboat Championship in 1981 and 1997, and placed first in his class in the grueling 300-mile Everglades Challenge in 2014 and 2017. In 2015, was inducted, along with his brother Jan, into to National Sailing Hall of Fame.

Entropy Resins

Gougeon Brothers Inc. acquired Entropy Resins, bio-based epoxy formulator of adhesives, coatings and composites that maximizes renewable ingredients. Entropy Resins pioneered the use of the USDA’s BioPreferred labeling program to quantify rapidly renewable feedstocks. “Over the last decade we have admired Entropy Resins as they grew from a great idea into a best-in-class bio-based epoxy brand,” said Alan Gurski, president and CEO of Gougeon Brothers Inc. “We share their values of high-performance products and long-term sustainability.”

August 2019

GBI Celebrates its 50th Anniversary

Gougeon Brothers, Inc. celebrates its 50th year in business. And there is so much to celebrate! The company manufactures WEST SYSTEM, PRO-SET, and Entropy Resins epoxies, all of which are sold worldwide. They consult for high-end composites builders ranging from the builders of America’s Cup boats to the U.S. Navy. Their employee-owners know it’s a great place to work.

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Winners Named after Challengingly Slow Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac Race

First finishers of bell's beer bayview mackinac race arrive monday morning.

DETROIT, MICH. (July 19, 2018) – Tediously light winds made for one of the slowest  Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac Races   in decades. In fact, the 94-year-old distance race, which started Saturday, July 14 on lower Lake Huron, was so slow that at Tuesday’s final party at Mackinac Island’s Grand Hotel, awards were handed out as some competitors were still finishing up. Most years, the first boats finish on Sunday, but this year the first two finishers –The Reichel/Pugh Max Z86  Windquest  and the Reichel/Pugh 74  Wizard , the largest boats in the race – didn’t arrive until Monday morning.

“Eleven boats were still out there when we started Tuesday’s awards party at 11 a.m., and when the band stopped playing at 3:30 p.m., four boats were still out,” said Chairman Gary Shoemaker. He further explained that after the two big boats finished, there was not another single finisher until seven Santa Cruz 70s finished, interestingly, within 15 minutes of each other at 4pm Monday afternoon. “By midnight only 18 boats had finished, and by 6 a.m. on Tuesday there were 33 left to go, so in six hours we finished 146 boats or 75% of the fleet,” said Shoemaker, commending the Race Committee on their diligent efforts.

Winners were named in all 17 classes that had sailed one or the other of two distance courses offered: the 204 nm Shore Course and the 259 nm Cove Island Course. The overall prize in Division II went to brothers Al and Bob Declercq (St. Clair Shores, Mich,) who systematically outsailed all other classes on the Shore Course with their Declercq 36  Flying Buffalo.

Both Declerqs, who each have won “30 or so” Mackinac Races, found this edition of the Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac satisfying despite the frustrating conditions. “ Flying Buffalo  is not a light-air boat, and we were able to win in our worst conditions, so we’re happy about that,” said Al Declerq. He cited the S&S Pilot 33 Albacore  and the Tartan 34  Chippewa  as the closest competitors in their Class O (they finished second and third to  Flying Buffalo , respectively), and overall, the Beneteau First 42  Comfortably Numb  (winner of Class N and second overall on the Shore Course) was “right there.” “We tried to watch them and sail with them the whole time instead of separating; I’d rather be close and try to outsail them instead of far away and just having luck come into play,” he said.

Declerq also described a squall with 30 mph winds that hit them 40 miles from the finish line (about 4 p.m. on Monday). “It lasted only 20 minutes, and we switched to smaller sails. We were side-by-side with another boat in our class; we were ready, they were not, and in ten minutes we were a mile ahead of them.”

Matthew Schaedler’s J/122  Blitzkrieg  won overall in Division I on the Cove Island Course. Representing North Cape Yacht Club in Monroe, Michigan (north of Toledo, Ohio, where Schaedler is from), the boat and team made an impression on everyone. “When you think of the rocket ships on our long course, it’s amazing that this J/122 came from a great distance and just smoked everybody,” said Chairman Shoemaker.

Taking Division III for Multihulls (also sailing the Cove Island Course) was Ben Gougeon and Alan Gurski’s (Bay City, Mich.) Gougeon 35 trimaran  Adagio .

“This year was nearly twice the time on the water as last year’s race, requiring a second night at sea,” said Gurski. “Nights are when races are lost.”

On the first night, when the wind was light and variable,  Adagio  was able to gain separation from the fleet by constantly changing sails and trimming. On night two, the wind was much better and Adagio increased its separation by staying focused and gearing up and down with sail changes as required. Day three served up heavier air, and it was all about maintaining concentration, as fatigue was at its worst. “There wasn’t any rest for the crew on day three,” said Gurski. “We have a great fleet of smart and seasoned sailors, and we knew the boats behind us were in better air for longer and would take advantage of that to cover their handicaps. Some were running right down the rhumb line, making great VMG.  We knew it would be very tight on corrected, so we just kept pressing all the way to the island.

The last finisher, or “the pickle boat” as some call it, was the Seidelmann 299  Sojourner,  which is owned and raced by the Boy Scouts of America Sea Scout Ship 1148. They had spent three years renovating their boat and preparing for the race, so giving up was not an option. The team arrived in port Tuesday evening.

“I’m so proud of them, that they finished what they started,” said Shoemaker. A total of 42 boats weren’t so dogged and dropped out, some in the first 24 hours, having run out of food, water and patience in the light winds.

Sponsors for the 2018 Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac Race include Bell's Brewery, Grand Hotel, Gill, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Shepler's Mackinac Island Ferry, North Sails, Pentastar Aviation, Legal Copy Services, Aitken & Ormond Insurance, Frankenmuth Insurance, Coral Reef Sailing Apparel, Vortexx Pressure Washers, Sykes & Webster, and Bayview Yacht Club Foundation. Supporters are Detroit Sports Media, Marx Layne, Freighter’s Eatery & Tap Room, Futuramic Tool and Engineering, General RV Center, It’s Your Window, Marygrove Awnings, Mike's Marine Supply, Offshore Spars, Pink Pony - Chippewa Hotel, and Thomas Hardware Company.

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Trimaran Cool

Three hulls. Lots of sail. Spray. Speed. Trimarans are the coolest boats under sail. This blog will link you to the world of trimarans - new designs, records, classic boats from yesterday, anything trimaran.

Friday, October 23, 2009

• The Adrenalin is pumping again

8 comments:

Absolutely superb. I'm close to completing an Amaran with pivotable floats. I searched for Adrenalin, but couldn't find her. I wrote to the Gougeon Brothers, but wasn't asnwered. And now, all of a sudden she's there again. What a brilliant shapes. It was twenty years ahead of it's time; if not more. So, we are still the lucky early birds to see the dawn of this beauty. Johannes N. Schilder, MD, PhD www.thedutchdoctor.nl www.sailingsinstruction.page.tl

They were more than 20 years ahead of their time because they built pivoting float tris earlier.

She will be sailing again soon in Phuket Thailand

SHE IS SAILING AGAIN IN PHUKET

She had her maiden regatta in The Bay Regatta Phuket a week ago. Preformed pretty well with the guys getting used to the handling. Unfortunately she was smacked during the night in Railey Beach by her support boat when it dragged in some solid gusts of wind. The damage brought about a seperating of a important crossbeam so she sailed conservatively from then on to reduce loads. Mark Horwood of Latitude 8 with the help of many freindsgot her out of the container and ready for the regatta. She makes a fine sight on the water and even looks fast at anchor. All the multihullers up here are looking forward to seeing her at Multihull Solutions Multihull Regatta in June and at Cape Panwa Phuket Raceweek. She and the crew can only get better.

Correction to the above comment by Bob Mott ( me). Regattas are 11th-13th July Multihull Solutions Regatta run out of one location Ao Chalong Yacht Club and Cape Panwa Hotel Phuket Raceweek 16th July to 20th July run out of one location Cape Panwa Hotel

Adrenalin is for sale in Phuket. Test sail and then break down and put in her custom alloy insulated 40 foot container and ship her anywhere. Contact Mark Horwood

She's heading ashore and getting a spring clean . New tramp mats and a spruce up. Lots of fun to sail on this bit of history. Bigger Code 0 for better VMGs and she still kicks arse!

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Gougeon 32 catamaran

Discussion in ' Multihulls ' started by rapscallion , Jul 11, 2011 .

rapscallion Senior Member

Really weird. But I get it. I'm so tired of being all stressed out over rising slip costs and the potential lack of slip availability, along with being at the mercy of the crane operator's schedule every spring and fall. I need people to help me raise and lower the mast every year. I have been lucky, because there have been people nice enough to help. But a boat that can be trailer launched and ready to sail in minutes???!! A fast boat that is easy to own!!! For that kind of awesome I can embrace the weirdness with a kind of fondness reserved for a new grandparent that gets to hold their grandson for the first time, and gets to hand the grandson back to the parents because grandbabys diaper needs to be changed... and grandpa isn't about to deprive the parents of the honor. I get it.. and it is a thing of beauty!!  

Plodunkgeo Previous Member

Mr. rapscallion, It would seem that your search is defined by the performance envelope more than the utilitarian as a day sailing boat for pure pleasure. That choice would put you into the fringe of the genre if you are not able to spend large sums of money on a given project. With the G32 well out of production, are you not skating on the thin ice of a new day, rather than basing your efforts while looking to a functional solution that is more affordable? I believe you have mentioned the L7 previously and I wonder why that boat does not fit your needs from a performance, as well as price point?  

The L7 is a great boat. I would be very happy with a boat like that if I had one. Given the L7 design and the G32 design, I do believe one fits my personal needs better than the other.  

basil Senior Member

What about a stretched one of these. http://www.wallerdesign.com.au/tc670.html  

That is essentially what a G32 is... but wow, the design weight seems heavy! The G32 is less than that fully loaded and on the trailer. But, yes, other than the weight, that is what I'm looking at. The other option is a Kelsall approach using KSS panels and building a POD cat with AMAs that slide from a 8'6" to about 12'. Derek has yet to build one of his KISSKATS but the idea of building a racer intrigued him. I think a POD cat similar to the KD800 would fit what I'm thinking rather nicely. http://www.ikarus342000.com/KD800page.htm But, if you are going to the trouble of adding the complexity of a variable beam in the form of a folding/sliding system are you better off with a catamaran or a trimaran in this size range? Which one of the two would give you a better performance/ease of use/interior space combination? That's a tough question.. It's like asking how long is a piece of string. Traditionally, trimarans have dominated this market segment, and with good reason. In the 22' to 30' size range I believe a trimaran COULD give you more useful space given an equal level of performance when compared to a catamaran... but then again doesn't the 8.5 meter box rule class seem to prefer catamarans? At the end of the day it really comes down to this: I'm looking for a clever design that can be truly trailer sailed... meaning the boat can be launched from a trailer and sailing by 1 person in minutes... I would like the boat to be "fast" and have enough accommodation for 2 for a weekend of spartan camping. "Fast" and "accommodation" are the two nebulous criteria here, A quick setup and launch is the part of the design that can't be compromised. I think the G32 fits, the L7 probably fits (I have never seen someone set up and launch one, so I don't know exactly what is involved) the KD 800 approach fits, heck even the DC3 and seaclipper 24 have a shot as long as the rig is engineered to raise and lower quickly and easily. Although, I believe I would be happier with the performance of the L7 vs. the seaclipper. Nevertheless, from a cost benefit perspective, the DC3 and seaclipper 24 are notable designs. And a 26' to 28' Jarcat with water ballast would most likely fit the criteria, but at that point a low budget L7 type trimaran may start to make more sense from a performance/dollar spent perspective, especially of the Waller weighs 800 to 1000 lbs more than the L7 would. But, if the waller was built to be light, by default it would be a strong contender. My criteria may seem murky but they really aren't. The selection criteria do not contain a discrete answer. It is more like a series of differential equations that can be solved in terms of one another to yield a solution set instead of a single answer. Cost and grief of ownership must be minimized. The G32 wins there... by light years. The L7 is most likely another very strong contender along with a light waller/jarcat. Fast! The L7 and G32 win there too. Accommodation.. waller/jarcat are strong, the L7 and g32 pass as well in my opinion. Sticker price. Based on what I know all of the designs are within budget, although I don't have a feel for how much building a kelsall would cost.  

jamez Senior Member

Have you checked out the forthcoming waters 22? http://www.smalltridesign.com/W22/W22-Trimaran-Design-Approach.html Similar build idea to the L7, but you build your own pans. Mike infers that it should be possible to use an L7 style sliding I beam if desired.  

BPGougeon Junior Member

Hi Rapscallion, I know of an older gentleman (almost eighty) in southeastern Michigan who has a G32, and last I heard was entertaining the idea of selling it. If you're serious I'd be happy to track him down for you. Ben Gougeon  

BPGougeon! I sent you a PM with my contact info.  

Steve W Senior Member

Raps, Go for it, looks like an opportunity to me. Good luck. Steve.  

redreuben redreuben

Raps, Check this out, also a 7m version. http://www.surteesmultihulls.com/9m-folding-catamaran Cheers, RR  

themanshed Senior Member

The Reynolds 33 Catamaran R33 has a really slick reefing boom rig.  

themanshed said: ↑ The Reynolds 33 Catamaran R33 has a really slick reefing boom rig. Click to expand...

Alas, no G32 available at this time. What a great boat!  

Well, I was lucky enough find a G-32 owner willing to part with the boat at a price I could afford! And if everything goes according to plan I hope to pick her up in the next week or two... I'm buying Janet C, Meade Gougeon's G32! Talk about buying a boat with Provenance! Meade mentioned there are a couple of things that have to be attended to before racing her seriously, and that he would coach me through the process.... How cool is that!!! I have always been a huge fan of the Gougeon brothers.... the Mad scientist sailors from the midwest who can build the fastest and most beautiful wood boats in the world... just to put things into perspective... Adagio, the 35' trimaran Meade and jan built in 1969, has a PHRF rating of -66!! Not bad for an old wood boat! Wood is still very fast if built correctly..  

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HASYB Senior Member

Hey Raps, Congrats on acquiring such a classic beauty. Enjoy, big time! Happy sailing! Cheers, Hielan  

Gougeonified Chat 18 knockabout

Meade Gougeon passes away.

Jan gougeon passes away.

Gougeon/Gardiner trimaran for sale

Seen this Rad Cat from Gougeon Boys?

High end vs low end cruising catamaran

Help identifying this 30-ish foot catamaran

Catamaran crossbeam design

RFQ - 6m catamaran hull shape

Maxsurf Resistance Catamaran

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Boat Building & Repair

• Multihull Construction
• Multihull Sailing

Surviving FLICKA’s Capsize, Part 2

By: Grace Ombry

By  Grace Ombry

On June 20, 1979, while sailing in a qualifying race for the OSTAR (Original Single-Handed Transatlantic Race), Jan Gougeon’s self-designed and built 31′ trimaran FLICKA was capsized by heavy seas in the North Atlantic. Jan survived on the overturned plywood/epoxy multihull for four days before he was rescued by a passing freighter. The following is the second half of a transcript of a phone call between Jan, his brothers Meade and Joel, as well as fellow multihull designer/sailor Mike Zuteck. Their discussion takes place on June 26, 1979, just hours after the freighter that rescued Jan delivered him to dry land. Part 1 of this conversation can be found here.

FLICKA was never recovered.

We’ve divided their lengthy discussion into two parts. At the end of Part 1, Jan described the feeling of leaving FLICKA behind after his rescue. In this installment, he goes on to discuss the failure of his EPIRB unit, what he learned from surviving FLICKA’s capsize, and his conviction that all multihulls should be self-rescuing.

Meade Gougeon: Weren’t the outriggers holding it up pretty good though?

Jan Gougeon: Oh, everything was perfect, yeah. No, the boat to this second-if someone would go out there and get it-all they’d have to do is patch two holes and the boat is perfect, outside of I removed a couple of pieces of the furniture inside to make things. But the boat is structurally, absolutely flawlessly, beautiful. As a matter of fact, I took the time yesterday—while I was stringing up this thing—to look at the A-frames. I was concerned about the A-frames being loaded that way. I was thinking of unbolting one outrigger and trying to right it. But I didn’t want to take the chance of losing what I had as a good survival platform. I mean it was perfect. I had it so perfect for surviving in that I figured if I had to stay there for a month, I was going to be able to handle it.

If I ever tried to start unbolting stuff, the chances of something hurting me… As soon as I ever got an arm broken or something, I’d die. You know I knew that. Or even a bad cut or something. I couldn’t take many chances. Even though the water was warm, when I worked on the boat I put on my wet suit and boots and anything I could to protect myself so if I fell I wouldn’t cut myself.

Meade: Anyway, [boat designer] Damian McLaughlin called and said that the waves in the Gulfstream were running 35 feet.

Joel Gougeon: He said that every twentieth wave was running 35 feet.

Jan:    Well I’d say, I never went across the Gulfstream then, that it was good I didn’t sail there. I would say at that point, on a trimaran unattended, the only way that it would survive—and I say any trimaran will survive almost anything if you have a sea anchor to keep the nose into the waves—I don’t think anything will get it. That’s my feeling right now.

Meade: How about going downwind with it?

Jan:    Downwind would be no sweat. But I think that going head-to-wind, the problem with [going] downwind is you need a person to steer it.

If you had a head-to-wind, the bows are nice and fine and the sea will kind of crash over it, but it would never tip over.

Joel:    How high were [the seas] running when it flipped over?

Jan:    Oh, I’d say the [wave] that tipped me over was probably 14 feet. I didn’t see it but it was bigger than the rest. I didn’t want to get into the Gulfstream because I knew it would just, you know. It was death. It would be death.

Meade: But you had the mast up with some sail area on it, though? You had a double-reef main?

Jan:    Double reef main, the mast feathered in the wind. If only I had stayed up and sailed it. I ain’t kidding you, the boat with that rig will sail to weather in 50 knots of wind with ease. No problems at all if you’re steering it. As long as you’re steering it, it’s not a problem. As soon as you go to bed though, the boat can’t take care of itself. It needs a sea anchor.

Boy, the first two days I had such a fabulous sail though. So fabulous you wouldn’t believe it. It’s something like you dream about. Like cross country skiing only it’s always downhill. Fantastic, man. It’s going off the wind and the genny, about half the jib rolled out and one reef in the main. The boat would get on these waves and you’d surf for maybe four or five minutes, going like hell, just beautiful control. And it would hit the next sea and the shape of the outriggers and everything worked so beautiful. There was never even any tendency of nose-diving, never any want to broach, nothing. Unbelievably controlled.

Meade: Did you have the boards down?

Jan:     The boards were down. When I was hove-to I had the leeward board all the way down and the windward board up to keep the nose into the wind. The boards up and the boat sitting to beam would never work. The boat never even started to want to go sideways, it just went straight up and flipped over. It was like someone stuck a stick under me and pushed up in the middle of the boat. It’s absolutely treachery to lay beam-to. Not the way to do it. And the weight of the boat doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it weighs 4,000 pounds at that point. See, what happened when the boat was upside down with the cabin full of water it, was more like a catamaran with the two hulls far apart. All of a sudden that gets real stable in the waves. I think of it like a proa*, the main hull is actually a nuisance when you’re beam-to, it shouldn’t be there, it’s something for the waves to hit.

I haven’t got money problems at all. There’s no hassle that way. I even saved my American Express card, I mean, believe that? It’s still in my wallet. They make them out of pretty good stuff. Whatever it is, it held up pretty good.

My ultimate, ultimate point of depression though was standing on the bridge watching my boat disappear behind the ship.

Meade: You had to be pretty happy to be alive though, Jan, didn’t you?

Jan:    That’s what I told the captain. I said, “I still have two hands and I can build myself another boat.” A little bit of plywood and some staples and glue and you get another one.

I’ve had so many great gobs of things to contribute to any of these guys going out to sea on what they should do to be ready, though. If they’ll listen to me and believe me, anyone who does all the things that I tell them will always come home again. It’s so simple to come home again if you do these few things. Almost any trimaran can have these particular qualities that my boat had. It’s obvious what the flaw is when the boat is beam-to. The main hull just displaces. It’s 30-feet long and the wave immediately moves the boat because it displaces the entire length of the boat, you know what I mean? So immediately the boat starts going up. Well, when the boat meets the wave head-on, the wave can go right up to the sheer of the boat and it only displaces a small percentage of the weight of the boat because of the shape of the wave.

Nothing happens to you head-on. But [a wave approaching] beam-to will flip you. Every trimaran I can imagine is afflicted by that. The beam is everything right then. The distance between the main hull and the outrigger is the whole key. Because the angle that it finally gets at is less, but the displacement of the outrigger means nothing. The outrigger didn’t even-as a matter of fact, the boat didn’t-it took a side slam after it got up in the air. It dropped, and when it tipped over I thought that the outrigger had actually busted underneath. That it had busted the ends of the beams off is what I had the feeling had happened. But when it was upside-down it seemed to be floating pretty level and so the seas weren’t hitting the main hull. I couldn’t see out at that point, so when I cut [my way] out, I of course cut on the side of the main hull.  I looked and everything was still there. All the boards and everything were still operational and everything was like brand new.

Meade: So you didn’t lose any of the stuff out of the inside of the boat?

Jan:    Well, I lost all the canned foods. They were gone instantly. Anything that sank got sucked out of the main hatch as fast as it could. But all of the rest of the food… I had a lot of dried food and packaged food that was stored in these little bins and stuff. Another key thing is you’ve got to have some covers on the bins so the stuff doesn’t fall out. But I grabbed stuff as fast as I could. I mean, the fabulous cuisine of the transoceanic I could see glowing underneath the saltwater. I immediately grabbed the [fresh] water-first thing-and then the food was next and tools. As fast as you can grab stuff, you grab it. I’ll tell you, the really scary thing would be tipping over in the dark.

Joel:     What time was it when you flipped over?

Jan:    It was about four o’clock, I think.

Joel:    Oh, in the afternoon.

Jan:    Yeah. My [wrist]watch worked through the whole thing. But, anyway, I looked at my watch. As a matter of fact, I kept a log of the whole thing. But [when] I left I didn’t grab it all. I even had the log right up to the point I tipped over. It went down. I was working out the sight and I had paperwork of the sight. I saved that, but left it all on the boat when I ran out of there. Some of the—

Meade: You actually summoned the freighter? The guy saw you though? You didn’t call him on the radio you just…

Jan:    No. I didn’t have a radio.

Meade: He just saw you.

Jan:    He saw me, yeah. I stood on the bottom and I had on a yellow-you know what you call it-and everything.

Joel:    What about that Nicro beeper or whatever the hell it was?

Jan:    Oh, let me tell you about the Nicro beeper. I mean, [it was only] worth a few minutes.

Meade: The EPIRB [Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon]?

Jan:    Yeah, the EPIRB, right? OK, the first night I flip over I’m upside down. I figure, tonight I’ll turn on the EPIRB and tomorrow they’ll come and pick me up, right? So I turn on the EPIRB and I hang my [man overboard] strobe light outside. I put the EPIRB out there and the red lights on. Come morning, I notice that the little red light is out on the EPIRB. I bring it back into the cabin and the thing is real warm. So I tear it apart. Inside is a big cloud of smoke. One of the wires has gotten pinched and the thing was shorting out. I take it all apart and carefully scrape off all the stuff. I get the EPIRB back together and it lights up again. I don’t know whether it is broadcasting or not anymore. The thing failed. It’s supposed to work for eight days. I don’t think it ever-probably ever in its life-broadcasted a signal. So that was just all false security.

Mike Zuteck: That’s too bad.

Jan:    The VHF radio thing, you can hear them talking and stuff so you know it’s working. You know you can talk to them. And if they don’t answer you, or if they answer you and it’s garbled, at least someone is hearing you.

Joel:    Yeah, having a good radio onboard would be the way to go.

Jan:     You can’t have a regular radio because that gets underwater and it depends on the ship’s battery. You’ve got to have a handheld VHF . You know, the little handheld job that I was looking at, the six-channel one. That’s the only way because the regular radio is operating on the ship’s battery and those are gone. I had big piles of flashlight batteries, so in the back cabin I had a workshop made and in one of the little areas was a work table. I tore the EPIRB apart and cleaned out all the burned crud in between the little jobbers, figuring I could maybe save it. I tore the EPIRB’s battery pack apart to count how many batteries were in it to figure out the voltage, see. When I figured out how many volts it was, I hooked all these flashlight batteries and stuff together to get the right voltage. Among great sparks and smoke, nothing ever did EPIRB again. So I gave up that idea and I figured maybe I could start cutting parts of the boat off and light them [on fire] and let them drift.

Joel:     Well, when you were in the back cabin it was fairly dry there?

Jan:    Yeah, I was high and dry. Well, there was some surge that would splash in there once in a while, so I took one of the tables and I cut it to fit in there with a towel. I measured about 38 times and I made this line. It was one of those fits where you have only one shot at it because it is going to take you four hours with a hacksaw to cut it. I cut it, put the towel around it, drove it in there with the winch handle. The forces of God would never have moved it. It will be there until the day someone finds the boat and salvages it. They’ll just have to put up with that piece of wood in there because that’s how tight it’s driven in there. And no more water ever got in the back compartment, outside of the window leaking a little bit. The window would have been a nice strong window. It would have stayed dry forever, fully waterproof. Absolutely fortified there. Absolutely, the answer to survival is the place where it’s dry. You’ve got to stay dry and out of the water. After the first day, the sleeping bag got kind of wet. But during the day when it was kind of calm for a while, I opened up the picture window in my back cabin and dried out the sleeping bag.

I took the other table-half with the little pin sticking out, wrapped line around the pins, then cut holes in the side of the boat with my jackknife. I tied the lines around it. I could tie it down at night real tight. I stuffed all my extra clothes in it so that water wouldn’t leak through the cracks in the cabin. I’ve got a pretty good report written for the Coast Guard that I got a copy of. I’ll bring that home.

Great amounts of stuff learned in the multihull thing. It’s not a dead cause yet. The fact that I survived, the only thing that I won’t do, I mean, the criteria for my next boat is it’s still got to be fast. But it’s got to be self-rescuing. And it’s got to be able to be hauled behind my Honda. That’s the criteria.

Editor’s Note

Jan would go on to design his first self-rescuing 25′ trimaran, SPLINTER, launched in 1980. SPLINTER placed first in the Port Huron to Mackinaw Race in 1981, 1982, and 1983, and also set a record for fastest finish. Built of plywood and WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy, SPLINTER is still racing on the Saginaw Bay 40 years later.

Jan went on to design and build the 35′ trimaran OLLIE; the trailerable GOUGEON 32 catamaran; and the folding, trailerable 40’ catamaran STRINGS. After FLICKA’s capsize, every sailboat Jan designed featured self-righting capabilities. All of Jan’s sailboats continue to compete on the Great Lakes today.

Jan passed away in 2012 and was inducted into The National Sailing Hall of Fame in 2015. We miss him dearly.

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