I n the world’s yacht magazines, many articles are now being written about my design and personal life. From this interest have come requests to reprint my book ‘Two Girls Two Catamarans’ written 35 years ago.

This book details my seminal years, when I began living on the sea, developing with pioneering Atlantic voyages, some of modern man’s first offshore catamarans, living a dreamlife with more than one woman.

Domenico Pelini and Monica Puleo of Italy not only urged me to republish, they also found me an Italian publisher, Crociera Totale, who liked the story and provided the resources to republish the book. We are very grateful for their help.

For reprinting, I reread ‘Two Girls Two Catamarans’. After many years of just seeing ‘Two Girls Two Catamarans’ as a book on my library shelves, it has been an emotional, eyeopening experience, reviewing myself as a young man. In the 1950s, I was physically strong and mentally extremely self-sufficient.

I was living out life problems many of which are still subjects of uptodate interest and comment: adventure, self-sufficiency from organised society, sex, woman/man relationships, what is human life for. All subjects intertwined around the concept that sailing the seas on an ancient canoe-form craft of the Pacific would offer me insight into such problems.

The book also describes attitudes and concepts of the period of 1955-1960, 1955 being ten years after the end of World War II, and ten years before the accepted great burst of social and cultural freedom in the mid 1960s.

In the mid 1950s there was little TV, a limited number of magazines, no Internet. Photographs and films were most often in black and white; air travel was for the very wealthy. Before we made our first Atlantic crossing, just over 20 small sailing craft had sailed the Atlantic.

The 1950s look a very grey world from the now of the year 2000. It was not. It was a world full of ideas, discussions, hope and spiritual generosity. We of this book were guided and helped by this world. It was inhabited by people who had survived the War of ten years previous, men and women, who had survived incredible hardships, both on the battlefield and in the bombed/shelled/burnt out cities.

These people had been forced to think first hand the basic realities of politics. They dreamed of a world without war, security from loss of all possessions due to war, dignity of labour, dignity in sickness, dignity in old age, maximum development of all the facets of a human personality.

It was heady stuff. My mentors of that time were practical; they had learnt to work in danger in cooperating groups or alone to make do and mend. They had superficially the Christian sexual moralities of the prewar years, but in the mass movements of the war years this system had not survived.

People had found themselves in love with more than one partner; some had experienced pleasure in brief sexual encounters. The forces of nature — strongest in the mountains and the ocean — seemed after the years of war clean, uplifting in their hardship, desirable in their purity of nature.

Risking one’s life in the mountains or on the sea was a personal decision. Rescue with mass publicity did not yet exist. That then is the general background to myself, the young English-man and Ruth and Jutta, the two young German women, when we set out on our voyage, in the fall of 1955.

James Wharram Devoran, Cornwall, November 2000