Artfully, quietly, radically
Carol Cronin sits down with one significant contributor to America’s Cup success who prefers to fly well below the radar… Seattle-based engineer, designer and free-thinker par excellence Paul Bieker
I first heard the name Paul Bieker 30 years ago, rigging up for the only big Inter - national 14 regatta I ever sailed. All around the busy boatpark sailors were raving about the speed and durability of the newest Bieker boats. And a class that prides itself on cutting-edge development is a tough group to impress. Since then I’ve occasionally stumbled
onto one of Paul’s many innovations… but spotlight hunter he is not. Even this profile took a little coaxing: ‘I worry that I may be a little too boring for something like that.’ Fortunately, we both love to talk about making boats go faster – and he doesn’t seem to mind dumbing down the technical stuff. The reward was a fascinating glimpse into a unique free-thinking design process.
A lot of art Paul was born in Portland, Oregon, and he grew up racing and cruising with his family on the west coast of the US – while end- lessly drawing boats. He was the eldest of three, and after high school ‘my dad
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packed up the family and we sailed down through the South Pacific to Polynesia’, on a Swan 48. In addition to providing future design inspiration, ‘The nice thing about a trip like that is it gives you time to think.’ There was also time to apply to the
Rhode Island School of Design, where Paul started university once the family returned to land. ‘I tried to be a regular architect, because my dad suggested that… a more practical path. But I did a couple of years and decided that, yeah, I really did want to design boats for a living.’ His degree in naval architecture came with high honours from the University of California at Berkeley. ‘The neat thing about boats is that
there’s still a lot of art to it,’ he says. ‘The first thing a boat has to do is interact with its environment; the variety of wind and sea conditions. They’re pretty complex machines, and I think we’re still a long ways from being able to just design them with a computer. I like that.’ This is a just a bit ironic from a guy
revered for his computer savvy, so I ask about the transition he’s experienced over almost 40 years of design work. ‘When I first started I had the ducks and splines and a nice set of curves and everything to hand-fair lines. But even in college I played around with writing simple curve-fairing programs in Fortran. ‘The IBM AT had just come out, and that
was one of the first PCs on which you could really do meaningful CAD work.’ Then after
university… ‘I don’t think I ever designed a boat again by hand. It’s a pretty good chance that the last boat I hand drew was a concrete canoe for the UC Berkeley Civil Engineering Department competition! It was a challenge; how to make a lightweight concrete structure… and it had nothing to do with anything that I did after that.’
Int14 lessons Paul had a brief stint in Gary Mull’s ‘too analogue’ office before migrating north to design commercial vessels. Seattle’s active International 14 fleet ‘was a big thing for me. I didn’t know anything about compos- ites from school; I learned by building the 14s. How to put things together, how to do laminates, the strengths of the different materials…’ He never had a serious boat failure, he
says. ‘I had enough of a structural back- ground that I knew when something wasn’t right, and I didn’t let it get out of the door. ‘Probably the worst thing I ever did was
when I first decided I wanted to vacuum- bag a boat. I was having a hard time finding a vacuum pump, so I decided to try using a shop vac. It didn’t have enough oomph to really pull the core down against the skin in the mould, so we had these big pockets of air on the outside skin that we had to inject with resin. That was brutal! But that boat ended up winning the US Nationals…’ He does remember breaking down with a girlfriend-crew on one of the first 14s he
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