When Moses came down from the mountain carrying the 10 Commandments no one noticed that chiseled on the back was an 11th. It read, “Thou shall send written questions to Yacht Designers and expect thoughtful answers and extremely detailed replies without any charge.”
Just kidding- sort of.
So why is it that my in-box is continually filled with emails from people I’ve never met or spoken with asking me to evaluate the features of other designs or construction quality from various builders? Just today, an email with exactly 12 complex questions arrived. It would take me a couple hours at least to bang out any reasonable answer. I have plenty of other things to do. So what is it that makes a person think that they can demand I spend hours critiquing the work of others? Is it the 11th Commandment?
In an effort to cut to the chase, as it were, here’s my abbreviated answer. Most of the catamarans available for sale, in my opinion, are poorly designed and built for use as a cruising boat. There are many reasons for this but a few of them are:
1) The market is dominated by the charter operators. They are the ones contracting 30 and 50 boats at a time so the designs and construction morphs to suit their needs. What they need are cheaply built boats that sleep a lot of people. Sailing performance, long term durability, resale value and suitability for offshore sailing are all at the bottom of the priority list.
2) Multihulls benefit from light weight yet strong construction. Unfortunately, achieving this entails many thousands of hours of painstaking work by skilled humans which drives up costs. Because the buyers in item #1 above are very sensitive to cost all possible shortcuts are taken to get the boat out the factory door at minimum manhours. The main result is that the boats are substantially heavier than they could be or should be. A 20% increase in weight leads to a 20% decrease in sailing performance. Many production cats are, by my estimation, 50% heavier than they should be for their length.
3) Cruising boats are typically sailed by fewer people for longer periods of time than charter boats. That means a cruising boat has fewer toilets and bunks crammed into it and more space devoted to living functions. It also means the rigging is set up for easy and safe shorthanded sailing, and that visibility from the normal helm positions is excellent.
Bottom line, I think most of the offerings are junk. But if I say bad things about a specific catamaran design or point out the hideous practices of the company management (like serial bankruptcies) it invariably gets back to the maker and the next thing I know I’m being threatened with legal action.
I built my first muilthull in 1973. Very nearly 50 years ago. Building, sailing and designing multihull boats is all I have done since then. I have owned a cruising multihull, in the water, every year since 1974. I have sailed many tens of thousands of miles and spent thousands of nights at anchor. My designs reflect my experience and it is against my religion to send someone out into the wild ocean in a vessel I would not take myself. Looking around at what passes for “cruising” boats these days it seems my view is not shared by many.
Not everyone needs a great boat. Crappy boats have their place. If you never leave the bay, if you just don’t care about sailing, if ugly is appealing- by all means, go for it. Buy the first thing you see, use it and learn what works and what doesn’t.
While I am always happy to discuss my own designs please don’t ask me to comment on the work of others. To be honest, I don’t closely follow the yachting press, I seldom go to boat shows, and I avert my eyes from most of the mainstream catamarans because they are so ugly it hurts to look at them.
I have seen a gazillion fads come and go in the boat market. One flash in the pan after another. But as the ad used to say, “you can’t fool mother nature”. Lots of what passes today for “improvements” are steps backward- some of it dangerously so. And much of the rest is just fluff intended to make someone write a check.
With 90 odd cruising boats currently sailing with my name attached I am proud of their record of safety. The owners for the most part have been very impressed with the level of performance and the high resale values are testament to their durability both in design and construction.
Good design never goes out of style.
CW