The strangest vessel made its formal premiere Thursday on San Francisco Bay, and it was a sight to see: It looked like a spider, wiggled over the waves like a porpoise, and was fast as the wind. It is named the Proteus, after a Greek god of the sea, and is the first of what might be a long line of wave adaptive modular vessels -- WAM-V for short -- developed by Ugo Conti, an engineer and inventor. Conti calls it "the prototype of a new class of vessel." Using technology developed by Conti's El Cerrito Marine Advanced Research Inc.,...