Our TMC clients often ask us sail related questions, so we thought to sit down with our Balance Catamaran 451 sailmaker, Bob Pattison, of Neil Pryde Sails, to get insight from the man with 40 years of experience!
Learn from the best about what type of sails are best for your needs, what exactly a “Roach” and a “Fat Head” is, and so much more.
By: Phillip Berman, published with editor’s permission from Boating NZ and Blue Water Sailing
In my forty-five year career in the catamaran industry there’s been a relentless debate on the virtues and vices of daggerboards versus fixed keels. This debate has, however, mostly been waged without “hard numbers” from which to compare performance differences. As we have had requests at Balance Catamarans for both keels and daggerboards, Anton Du Toit (my design partner) and I felt we should conduct a study, the results of which follow.
When we first set out to design and construct the Balance 526 we were aiming for cruising couples who wanted more performance and quality than they could find in mass production cats, but also more interior space, payload capacity and ease of use and maintenance than consumers focusing primarily on speed. Our intent was to find the balance – not to create the “lightest and fastest 52” in the world, or the “largest 52,” but a catamaran that could sail swiftly on all points of sail, carry significant levels of payload, yet still be gracious to live on. We also wanted her to be pleasing to the eye.
Our focus at Balance brings us an interesting range of buyers, some of whom are more focused on strength, space, safety and comfort rather than all out speed (cruiser types), others who are more speed focused, less value oriented, and prepared to give up comfort, ease of operation and payload capacity to go a bit faster (racer types). The later sorts of buyers are mostly what I affectionately call “spreadsheet guys.” (Full disclosure: I am not a spreadsheet guy. I am far more focused on how a boat lives, how tough she is, what she can carry, and how simple she is to sail and maintain without a professional crew.)
As we have gone along a few of our customers have asked if we would create the 526 with performance keels rather than daggerboards. They felt that the advantages of keels trumped the performance advantages of boards. We were happy to comply, so Anton set about to design high performance keels for the 526. (Note: On our 451, we only offer her with dual daggerboards and two shallow permanent fixed minikeels. On all other Balance designs it remains customer choice which configuration they wish to have.)
What we were not prepared to do was tell 526 buyers how much faster or slower the two different configurations would be. We felt it best to heed Lord Bryon’s advice to evade “kant and hyperbole” (the language of the day at boat shows!) so we hired the Wolfson Unit for Marine Technology and Industrial Aerodynamics at the University of Southampton to conduct comparative studies of the two configurations on identical 526 models. When you are comparing identical products with just two different variables it seemed a worthwhile study to undertake and share with our customers. It also becomes, to some extent, a worthwhile study for anyone considering a new or used catamaran purchase who is curious how the two different configurations impact performance.
While Anton and I believe these studies can be used by consumers to compare the relative performance differences between boards and keels, it is important to note that the 526 is a very light, narrowhulled epoxy performance cat and the keels we install are considerably finer, deeper and more carefullyshaped than those found on mass production designs. Additionally, we conducted the study with the daggerboards in the fully down position on all points of sail to reduce the studies complexity. The daggerboarded 526 would be marginally faster than the study indicates off- the-wind with boards raised due to a further reduction of wetted surface.
The disparity between keels and boards on a mass-production cat compared to a Balance or any other performance cat would be exaggerated considerably compared to the study that follows. I would note that we erred on the side of caution in setting our lightship weight for this study at 12.5 kg. We have carefully lode cell weighed our 5th boat and the actual lightship weight is 12,215 kg, or 26,930 pounds for the keeled 526 and 12,261 kg, or 27,030 pounds for the daggerboarded 526. Our lightship weight could be lower for customers prepared to put their boats on a diet, or sacrifice quality in several areas, but we have found that they want as much cabinetry as possible, folding tables, glass salon windows, Corian counter tops, and high-end flooring inside and out, etc. Spreadsheet guys miss the mark on this subject constantly in my experience. They also wrongly compare boats based on length, rather than the interior volume of the hulls and bridge – what I call the sum total of fiberglass parts. Regardless, the polars closely mimic the high performance our yachts have proven in real life cruising, fully laden, so this gives us great confidence in the studies accuracy.
Performance, of course, is not the be all and end all, so it is important to examine the advantages and disadvantages of boards versus keels beyond speed. They are as follows:
Shifting our focus now to the performance data generated by Wolfson Unit. Their analysis returned the predicted boat speed and leeway angle for the Balance 526 with a keel design and daggerboard design for all combinations of true wind speed from 4 to 25 knots and true wind angles from 40 to 180 degrees. We can begin comparing these two configurations by directly comparing the speed and leeway at major points of sail, specifically beating, close, beam and broad reaching.
While beating the two designs are predicted to perform as follows:
To summarize the upwind comparison, the daggerboard design is, on average, expected to sail 1.5 knots faster and 1.75 degrees higher. While close reaching the daggerboard design has less of an advantage than when beating, as can be seen from Table 2:
While close reaching the daggerboard design is expected to sail 0.5 knots faster and 0.75 degrees higher.
As the true wind angle approaches 90° for a beam reach, the keel and daggerboards become more closely matched.
In the beam reaching comparison the daggerboard design will sail slightly higher with a leeway advantage of about 0.25 degrees but it’s speed advantage in 5 knots TWS of 0.3 knots will fade to a 0.5 knot deficit in 16 knots TWS. At this point of sail the two designs are considered to have equal performance as the differences in leeway and boat speed are negligible.
Finally, while broad reaching the following speeds and leeway’s are expected.
In summary, when broad reaching the daggerboard design regains a slight advantage, as it maintains an additional 0.5 knots of boat speed. Leeway differences are again negligible.
Considering the above analyses, it can be seen that the daggerboard design will typically not only outperform the keel design but also out point it, make less leeway close to the wind, therefore giving the daggerboard design a substantial advantage when racing, or for performance focused sailors.
This data gives a fair comparison of the two designs at specific true wind speeds and angles but in order to fully understand the performance trends and enable better predictions between them, one must consider the entire range of wind conditions and all points of sail. This is best done with the use of speed and leeway deltas, where the differences between the two designs are calculated and analyzed.
The following two figures display the average speed and average leeway deltas. The calculation process to determine the deltas is chosen such that a positive value for the delta indicates an advantage for the daggerboard design, and a negative value favors the keel design. For example, a speed delta of +2 knots and a leeway delta of -1 degrees means that the daggerboard design is 2 knots faster than the keel design under the same conditions but would sail 1 degree lower than the keel design.
Considering Figures 1 and 2, the three TWS ranges used are from 4 to 7 Knots, 8 to 12 Knots and 14 to 25 Knots and will be referred to as light, medium, and strong wind conditions respectively. By analyzing the Average Speed Deltas shown in Figure 1 below and taking a beam reach (90 degrees TWA) as the point of sail under investigation, we can determine that in light winds the daggerboard design will perform better than the keel design as the blue line (4 to 7 knot TWS range) indicates a positive delta of 0.4 knots at 90 degree TWA. We can therefore expect the daggerboard design to outperform the keel design by about 0.4 knots under these conditions.
Counter to this, while still on a beam reach but when moving from a low wind condition to a high wind condition, the keel design begins to perform better. This is now taken from the green line (14 to 25 knot TWS range) and gives a -0.6 knot reading. Therefore the daggerboard design is now expected to be about 0.6 knots slower than the keel design under the new, higher TWS conditions.
Figure 2 is used in the same manner as Figure 1 but shows the leeway angle of each design rather than boat speed. Focusing again on a beam reaching condition, the leeway deltas indicate that the daggerboard will always out point the keel design as all three lines (TWS from 4 to 25 knots) indicate. positive values of 0.3, 0.35, and 0.1 degrees at 90 degrees TWA. Overall, Figure 2 shows that the daggerboard design has a significant gain in leeway over the keel design at all wind speeds and angles. This reaches a maximum when beating (TWA ±40-45 degrees) of 2 degrees, and declines to zero when running (TWA ±180 degrees).
With respect to the average boat speed deltas, Figure 1 shows that the daggerboard maintains a higher boat speed when sailing in light and medium winds (red and blue lines in Figure 1). In stronger conditions (green line) the daggerboards yield better boat speed when beating but the keel surpasses this between TWA of 60 to 145 degrees. Keeping in mind that the study was conducted with the daggerboards fully down at all times, in reality, the daggerboards will be raised in the 60 to 145 TWA range. As such the study slightly underestimates the speed of the daggerboard design over this TWA range.
Overall the daggerboard outperforms the keel in both boat speed and leeway in the vast majority of sailing conditions and is thus considered to be the better design choice if achieving ultimate performance is the key criteria. It should be noted that this study is specific to the Balance 526, but corresponding trends can be expected in performance cats of similar size and design.
In the end, and it is a point I cannot stress enough to any boat purchaser, all boats are sets of compromises and trade-offs, and so too with features – helm designs, sheeting systems, rig layouts, bimini designs, bed designs and locations, baths, engine placement, etc. Because I have been deeply involved in brokerage catamaran sales much of my life I recognize there is no one right or wrong boat, certainly no perfect boat, only a boat that happens to be a better fit for a particular sailor and his or her budget, cruising agenda and specific aesthetic proclivities.
At least now we can say that if someone wants a 526 with keels, here is how she will perform compared to a boarded version. It is then up to the buyer to decide which configuration is the most appealing to them. I will say that, based on the five 526 we have sailing today, with over 60,000 miles of sailing behind them, those owners with keels seem quite happy, just as those with boards.
Alright spreadsheet guys, here’s your numbers to mess with!
Phil Berman is a former Hobie Cat World Champion and the owner of The Multihull Company, a global catamaran yacht brokerage firm. He is also the owner of Balance Catamarans, a boutique brand of high-end performance voyaging catamarans. He can be reached at phil@multihullcompany.com.
By: Phillip Berman
Over the past few decades I’ve been privileged to earn my living as a yacht broker who specializes in catamarans. I’ve visited about 50 countries in the business and made great friends the world over, most of whom have taught me valuable nuggets of information on the art of catamaran voyaging.
I am asked, often enough, how safe is it to sail on a catamaran? I can say with some measure of pleasure that, so far, of the over 800 catamarans we have sold at The Multihull Company and Balance Catamarans that not a single customer of ours has capsized – at least that I know of! This is quite amazing when you consider that we specialize in live-aboard sailors, adventurers, and performance cat enthusiasts.
With that said, I’ve had a couple dismastings in our family of owners, a few boats have gone aground, and three of our owners have had collisions with other vessells. To date, thank goodness, there has not been a single yachting related death in our family of boat owners.
Not so long ago one of our catamaran family members ran their Leopard 46 aground on a reef in Huahine, French Polynesia. They are a happy go-lucky Mormon family who love the sea and set about with their children to sail around the world offering love and service to others anywhere they visited. They brought great honor to their church by the graciousness of their heartfelt service.
Their loss has compelled me to think a lot about how it could have been prevented and on voyaging safety in general. So here’s twenty things to keep in mind that will keep you safer when underway
This is true especially in countries that have small navy’s and less than accurate charts. I learned this from my friend Russell Eddington who sailed around the world on a Dolphin 460 we built for him in Brazil. I had visited him in Thailand and we anchored in Crabbe bay. Russell said, “Phil, come take a look at the plotter and see where it says we are.” We were anchored safely, well out in the middle of the bay, but the plotter had us 25 yards up on a beach.
What happened to the Govatos family is that they arrived at Huahine too late in the afternoon, had never been there before, and trusted in their chart plotter. Lacking the visuals they required to enter this narrow, reef-lined opening safely, they entered when they should have stood off for the night. This is a mistake made by many. Some get lucky, many do not.
I’ll never forget running into a delivery captain on the ferry from Tortola to St. Thomas a few years back who had just delivered a brand new 45 foot French catamaran to her new owner a few days earlier. On his first day sailing the happy new owner set his autopilot, fell asleep on the trampoline and ran into a reef. To add insult to injury he left the sails up long enough for the boat to get driven even deeper into the rocks as such that his yacht was destroyed. If you are near land, best be careful. Another huge mistake that has led to more than a few mishaps is sailors setting their autopilots and failing to account for current and drift to set them far off course after miles of sailing. Some years ago a man ran a Lagoon 55 onto a reef in French Polynesia for this very reason. It is vital that watch keepers keep a close eye of where they are and where they are set so they can compensate appropriately.
Catamarans really do not “talk to you” like monohulls. You get by a big gust and they do not heel over. Instead, all of the load goes right onto her sails and rigging and is transferred to her mast base, bulkheads, and hulls. Wise voyaging requires that you learn the sailing “sweet spot” of your catamaran on all points of sail and never carry more sail than you need to remain at or below your sweet spot. My own experience from sailing most of the production cats is that this is a range been 7 and 8 knots upwind. To go any faster you really have to push these cats very hard. Off the wind the sweet spot is typically a knot or two higher on most production cats. Anyways, the moment you are sailing in your sweet spot, if the winds picks up, shorten sail. Your speed is not likely to drop much, but you will be taking a lot of pressure off your sails, rig, mast base, bulkheads and hulls. Best of all your cat will ride more smoothly, comfortably, and safely.
Many accidents at sea come from fatigue. If you ever find yourself terribly tired while sailing in big seas and wind it is usually a good idea to “park your boat” if you have enough sea room. Drop the mainsail, roll in most of the jib, pull it a bit to windward, turn the helm to windward and sit it out. If it is really rough, set a sea anchor. Running with big seas is very tiring and difficult to do at night unless you have a lot of good and experienced crew onboard. You’re not racing, you’re cruising, so hove-to and chill out.
If you have ever sailed up the Delaware Bay at Night, with the lights of Wilmington to your west and the shoreline dotted with lights North and South, I can tell you it is very hard to pick out the lights of other vessels. I always set my course these days just to the side of shipping lane markers whenever I’ve got the water to do so. I certainly do not think it is a good idea to cross the straits of Gibraltar toward Africa at night. When crossing oceans, know where the shipping lanes are, plot courses to either side of them, and use extra caution when crossing the lanes at night. One great thing about AIS is that it can be set to alert you to close traffic, so this is a godsend for short handed voyagers. AIS is truly an amazing safety tool.
If you are short-handed you are actually a lot safer to sail a bit further out than the bulk of the traffic hugging close to the coast. The further out you are, as a rule, the deeper it is, the less danger of running aground, running into a lobster pot, a bouy or some unsighted small craft. If you ever sail up the Malaka Straights, be careful – the vast majority of little fishing boats are sailing without any form of marine lighting you could possibly recognize.
Losing a rig is no fun. It is better than falling from the sky, I grant, but still a very unpleasant experience. At night it can be rather horrifying when you hear that heavy thud. A good rig survey will reduce your chances of a dismasting significantly and also protect you from your insurance carrier claiming you did not practice prudent maritime precautions if you should lose your rig.
A great radar is your best friend, especially when sailing at night, as it shows where the rain is falling and the storm cells are located. If you stay focused on this you can generally position yourself to avoid storm cells, or at least to position yourself from from their centers. This will reduce your chances of a lightning strike and often save you from running into significant wind gusts.
The best and safest way to furl and unfurl headsails is to drop downwind, remove the pressure, and furl and unfurl when the headsails are in a nearly limpid state. I continue to be blown away at how many people do not do this and struggle with massively loaded furlers and sheets.
I suppose it goes without saying that you want to be certain your anchor is firmly set when resting at an anchorage. It is also critical to look carefully at where you are positioned in relation to the land, nearby rocks or reefs as well as the other yachts around you. Ask yourself: what if that boat to my right starts to swing into me, or drags her anchor? What if the wind switches direction at night? What if a current changes direction on me? Think carefully through the variables and plan your exit strategy for that 3 AM scramble.
Satellite communications have made cruising safer than ever before because you no longer have to sail blindly into bad weather. If you are competent at reading Grib files, get them and do that. If not, why not hire a great weather routing company to guide you? There is simply little reason these days to find yourself in the brunt of a major storm if you monitor weather closely and route away from the worst.
If you are worried about docking your boat in a new place, or taking her into a travel lift, either because of current or high winds or a tight fit you feel unconfident to manage, then don’t do it. Either get some help or find another day or place to dock or haul. Most boat damage comes from running into docks, other boats, or into travel lift walls. Oh, yeah, and don’t go under bridges lower than your mast! And be careful when sailing in the shallows!
Get yourself massive blow up fenders with felt covers and get plenty of them if you wish to allow yourself a margin for error when coming into docks – especially in high winds. Great big fenders can make up for a multitude of sins, and no matter how good a pilot you are, great big fenders reduce stress for everyone.
Before you leave a dock, or an anchorage, unzip your sailbag, attach your mainsail halyard, and pull your lazy jacks well forward and tie them off at the mast. On so many cats these days you have to climb up steps to attach a halyard or unzip the lazy bag. Why be climbing up steps or walking down a bimini at sea when you can do these at anchor or a dock? And why zip up a lazy bag until you are anchored and back at a dock? Too many people hurt themselves doing such things in bumpy seas. There’s just no reason to do it, so don’t.
Since catamarans do not sink unless they burn, the most dangerous thing on a cat at sea is a catastrophic fire. Get your propane system checked for leaks and make sure your solenoid system is working properly.
If you are ever hit by a sudden gust of wind, drive down hard, never up. The moment you head up on a cat in a gust the apparent wind moves aft, not forward, and this is how racing cats capsize. This is counter-intuitive for a lot of monohull sailors.
When sailing at night, short-handed, sail the boat throttled down a notch. Take in an extra reef, slow down a bit, and increase your margin for error.
If you are going to gybe, pull your mainsail into the center of your boat, sheet it in pretty tight and turn through the wind very slowly. A violent gybe is unnecessary, dangerous, breaks battens and can subject your entire rig to needless stress.
If someone is joining you for a sail, or a vacation, make it clear to them that safety is more important to you than them missing a flight or some obligation back home. Which means never sailing to any other agenda but yours and the safety of your boat. If people have to wait for you to arrive, let them wait. There are plenty of hotels in the world. If people are demanding you drop them off at X location to catch a flight, or to return to work, that is their agenda, not yours. Anyone who thinks things will always run on a schedule when yachting should not be a guest on a boat.
Phil Berman is a former Hobie Cat World Champion and the owner of The Multihull Company, a global catamaran yacht brokerage firm. He is also the owner of Balance Catamarans, a boutique brand of high-end performance voyaging catamarans. He can be reached at phil@multihullcompany.com.
By Phillip Berman and Andrew Holland
Here at The Multihull Company we have been closely watching a few recent videos and commentary on social media with an assortment of yacht brokers prognosticating on the impact of the recent hurricanes on the catamaran market. With having over 15 brokers selling catamarans around the world and managing the sale of about 100 catamarans a year our insights on the market come from the buyers and sellers we work with on a daily basis and the sales figures that are posted.
Frankly, in our view, it is still too early to say exactly where things are going, but now that a few weeks have passed we are starting to see some trends emerging. As always, there are winners and losers in every major global weather catastrophe. The big winners right now of course are the salvage companies running about the islands craning and towing boats.
In all these years of yacht brokering, if there is one thing we have learned it is that the human capacity to view all news as personally beneficial knows no bounds! Naturally, anyone selling a cat now inclines to the view that they have a cat that is worth more than it was pre-storm. The buyers, well, they don’t want to hear it. They are all excited about the salvage sales!
Here is our examination of the impacts of the recent storms on several sections of the catamaran market.
While we have indeed seen a significant loss of catamarans in St. Martin and Tortola, it is lost on many that the large majority of the boats lost were “bare-boat” charter catamarans. Most of these boats were privately owned and managed by charter operators for their owners. The view that some brokers have promoted is that with all of these boats lost that new boat sales will sky rocket is a bit overblown for two reasons:
The sad Catch-22 in all of this for everyone in the marine and tourist industries on these islands is that without the revenue from the tourists, the recovery will come more slowly and without the recovery efforts made quickly, the revenue to fund them from tourism will come more slowly. The restaurants, vendors, sailmakers, yacht brokers–my goodness, all of them will be earning a lot less, as well as all of the islanders who work with them. (Note: We can tell you that both of our brokers on Tortola and St. Martin lost their homes, along with many of their customers’ yachts, so it has been devastating to them, as it has been on every aspect of society in these islands. We must not forget all of the pain attached to any of this market speculation.)
For the very small number of private buyers who wanted a boat with four heads and four cabins to live on, the sellers of used four cabin cats will certainly have something a bit more valuable than before – but not much. After all, a 4 by 4 catamaran is for charter, and unless she is new enough, or sought after enough, her intended design is not what the private cruiser wants. Most of the private buyers today, the non-charter buyers, want a three-cabin catamaran or a four cabin with two heads, not four. In the 40 to 50-foot size range the buyers do not clamor for a charter configuration, which is why such boats always sold for less on the after-market than like models without four heads. Further, for many, any boat with a charter history was a non-starter to begin with. Our view is that every cat has a value, regardless of her condition or history, and we have never had an issue with our clients buying X charter cats at the right price.
As a general rule, the BVI is a lot less of a cruiser, liveaboard location than St. Martin or the islands South. During the hurricane season many cruisers are staying in Grenada. While we do not at this time have an accurate idea of how many “cruiser catamarans” were lost in the under 50 foot size range, we are confident that this number was proportionally very small in the BVI, but higher in St. Martin. We honestly do not think the “supply/demand” equation has changed massively in this category of catamaran, but it is the case that many of our own customers have lost cruising cats, and all of them are asking us to find them replacements. Right now, at our company, the problem is not finding buyers, but finding them boats they are excited to buy at prices they can afford.
While there was most certainly a portion of private owners version boats lost in the storms, the number lost does not at all compare to the numbers lost by charter operators, especially in the BVI. Private owner version catamarans were already a very competitive commodity prior to the storms due to larger demand and a general lack of supply. This can largely be attributed to the lack of boats built in these configurations during the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2012. As we will allude to later, the largest issue for American buyers is adjusting to the falling dollar, the rising Euro. This occurred well before the hurricane damage.
What we certainly lost a great deal of in the storms were the big, 55 foot-plus catamarans that operated so successfully in the BVI in the crewed charter business. Many of the most established and successful cats were lost in the BVI, and plenty of them also in St. Martin, as these are two of the most popular crewed yachting destinations globally. In our own company family we lost many big cats. Right in Village Cay Marina alone there was a sunk Lagoon 620, a destroyed Privilege 585, a capsized Voyage 580, along with others. The large question that looms for all of those who work in this industry is how their charter customers will respond? How many will cancel charters this season? How fast will the charter market come back? Should they reposition to the Bahamas or Grenadines? There are a lot of questions that have yet to be answered. So, again, while there has been a large loss of supply of luxury crewed charter boats, we are not yet sure how large the demand will be for crewed luxury charters this year and next and on? Our own view is that it will take time for the market come back. So, for those brokers who are out banging the drum for why you have to “buy now!” we can say the jury is still out on this. You do not need a lot of charter cats, bare or crewed, if you do not have a lot of charterers. So much of the answer to this one is about the alacrity with which the governments can get their islands fully functioning and beautiful again. This is hard to predict. But our guess is that the market will come back slowly over a period of the next 2 to 4 years.
The market for Gunboats, Dolphins, Balance Cats, HH, Outremer, Chris White, etc, the speedier performance voyaging type catamarans is not impacted at all in my view by the hurricane losses. Few of these boats were lost in these storms, and the market will neither go up or down but will remain on the steady upward trend we have seen as many people graduate from charter designs who get the yen to really do some serious sailing and voyaging. It is a smaller market, but a very passionate and convicted market.
There will always be salvage cats and salvage buyers! And there will be a lot of salvage catamarans for sale over the next year and a half on St. Martin and Tortola. The challenge for those who buy them is where to repair them? The labor on these islands will be taken up doing any number of things, only one of which is grinding and glassing repaired catamarans. The yards will have more work than they can handle, labor will be hard to find, repair prices up. What we tend to consistently see in salvage and or bargain hunter type buyers is that they are generally never schooled in the market well enough to know what the Bristol value would be for a given model of cat, let alone what that value would be for a repaired boat with a salvage history. To buy any damage yacht properly you have to both know exactly what it will cost to repair her, but what she would sell for when you need or decide to sell. History has taught me that most buyers underestimate the former number and overestimate the latter.
Lost on many Americans is that their dollar has been sliding hard to the Euro for the past several months, as such that the price for a new catamaran from the Europeans builders had already gone up for them over 10%. Add the hurricane damage, and the need to replace the most popular bareboat models – Lagoon’s from 40 to 50 feet, Fountaine Pajots, Robertson and Caine Moorings/Leopards, Bali Cats…all of these builders were undoubtedly get more orders than normal. This will push up prices a bit and lengthen delivery times from such builders. This will also stiffen the prices of the used production cat models, especially the non-chartered owner versions.
Right now, it is too early to know where it is all going. We do see a bit of a bubble mentality from many sellers (my boat has got to be worth more now!) and from some buyers (I am not going to allow myself to get into any feeding frenzy!). We certainly lost a lot of charter boats from 40 to 50 feet, and a lot of nice large luxury crewed cats. At the same time we lost a lot of charterers for the next few years, so it may in fact all even out in the short term. It is impossible to say for sure. But we do believe that over the next few years we will have a bit of a shortage of supply of good clean used catamarans in general. This was a trend that was already well under way before the storms. It is vital in such a market to stay calm, rational and patient. When you are ready to embark on a yachting adventure there will always be a boat for you.
By: Phillip Berman
Are you the sort of guy who asks builders for performance Polars? Who measures a catamarans power to weight ratio? Do you spend hours poring over catamaran owner web blogs and or forums? Do you research carefully the difference between various foam cores, glass materials, resins? Are you attracted to electric engines and lithium Ion batteries? Intrigued by rotating wing masts, foils, or curved dagger-boards? If you answer yes to most of the above you are what we yacht brokers jokingly call a “spreadsheet guy.”
As a life-time sailor and racer I honestly much prefer working with spread-sheeters over impulse buyers. Spread-sheet guys wisely focus on both the visible and the invisible when buying a boat because they recognize the purchase of a large catamaran is not, as one of my customers smartly says, “like buying a stick of bubble gum.” It is a big purchasing decision and all due diligence is in order.
There are, however, several limitations to the spreadsheet approach because the spreadsheet has a difficult time capturing the larger picture of what ultimately ads up to a great catamaran, or the many trade-offs a designer must make when designing a yacht. Here are 14 things spreadsheet guys too often forget when crunching their numbers:
Spread sheet guys know that they need accurate information to punch into their computers. Sadly for them, however, the light ship weight advertised by builders is the approximate weight of the boat before they add on a single option, the tender, the spares, etc. In all my years of yacht brokering I’ve never weighed a production catamaran that came in anything close to lightship weight. The older design Catana 471, for example, was said to weigh 26,000 lbs. One of our customers weighed his last year and it came in over 33,000 lbs. Just yesterday, during a survey in Greece, we hauled out a Catana 582 with an advertised weight of 23 tons. The crane operator scaled her in at 28 tons.
A few years ago a gentleman hired me to serve as his buyer broker and became infatuated with a Sunreef 70. I explained to him that such a boat was ideal for charter, a true palace of luxury inside, but he had best not be hoping for high performance. He begged to differ because he had gone to some website that calculates catamaran performance based on advertised numbers and was told it would consistently sail at 12 knots. Having sailed one of these yachts in a sea trial it was abundantly clear to me he picked up some very bad information.
About a year ago a man emailed me and asked if we had Polars for the new Balance 45I I had co-designed with Roger Hill. “No” I replied. “Why do you want them?” I never should have asked. Spreadsheet guy! I emailed Roger Hill and asked him to work with a firm in New Zealand to do the polars. When they arrived it became clear that if our Balance 451 could sail to the numbers that were generated we should have contacted Elan Musk to join his rocket team. All of the numbers punched in were as accurate as we could get, for the lightship boat. The polars said that in 30 knots of wind on the beam we would be sailing at 26 Knots. Give me a break! I might be running to the bathroom in those conditions at this speed (what our broker Jeff Jones jokingly calls “diaper weather”), but I immediately decided these numbers were useless. I’ve sailed the boat enough to know that she likes to sail happily in the 9 to 10 knot range with cruising gear and is happy in the right conditions to sail in the mid-teens. That’s quite fast enough for me. But if only the numbers are to be trusted I’ll just let you spreadsheet guys go ahead and deceive yourself. The Balance 451 is a 26 knot cat! Works fine for me. But it ain’t so.
The most relevant question for a voyaging sailor is what sorts of speeds his boat will average over a 24 hour period in winds over 10 knots on all points of sail when operated short-handed without pressing the boat.
One of the most exasperating things about boat shows is the performance nonsense tossed about by salesman on the docks. When folks are telling you that X charter cat can easily exceed 15 knots you must know this refers to a glorious mili-second in time captured on the GPS as the boat surfed down an 8 foot wave in 20 plus knot beam winds.
One good way to learn how easily a boat is driven is to motor her. If you run her up at 3,000 RPM, how fast will she go with her standard motors? Then back off and see how much her speed drops at 2,500 rpm? Then at 2,000 RPM? Every boat has a sweet spot where she slides through the water easily and efficiently and to go over that spot requires you must push her very, very hard to gain but a marginal increase in speed. The easily driven speed is the only thing that matters because when you are cruising you cannot safely push a boat for hours on end. Fact is, very few production catamarans today are capable of averaging over 7.5 knots over a 24 hour period.
Before a race everyone is taking everything off their boats and storing away sails they won’t be using, emptying the tanks, etc. We all know any boat will go faster the lighter we can make her. But if you are a cruising sailor you had best run your spreadsheets with all the stuff you intend to carry because it is one thing to go fast on an empty flat sided performance cat and quite another to sail fast when loaded for a voyage. Probably the most important number to factor into that spreadsheet is what is called the sinkage ratio. How many pounds does it take to sink an inch? Flat sided hulls will sink a lot faster than flared hulls. The top end speed of a flat sided hull empty is higher than the top end speed of a flared hull, or wider hull. But often enough, when you load them up, the flared or wider hull will start to outperform the narrower or flatter hull. It is for this reason that any good design process starts with a careful measurement of both what a boat will weigh with the chosen materials, but also what she will weigh after the consumer puts on his dive compressor, tender, generator and air conditioning, etc. My own observation in this business is that a lot of spreadsheet guys talk a good game about “keeping it light” but often overload their boats with gusto. So if you are going to get yourself a skinny boat either keep her on a diet or find something designed to carry the true loads you will be voyaging with.
It doesn’t take a spreadsheet to know that a dagger boarded cat is going to sail consistently higher and make less leeway upwind over a cat with fixed keels. Anyone who says otherwise is selling cats with keels (which, by the way, are far cheaper to fabricate.) They will also tell you that dagger-boards are complicated to operate, etc, which is also not true.
What is harder to calculate is what sort of performance a boat will make sailing into a range of different seas and winds, regardless of her keel and or dagger-board configuration. This is because upwind speed is heavily influenced by the quality of the main and jib – whether they are radial cut or not mostly – but also primarily by two major competing design issues- underwing clearance and windage.
All things being equal a cat with low underwing clearance should be a lot lighter and have less windage than a cat with high underwing clearance. In smooth or modest seas a low clearance cat should therefore be faster upwind – again, all things being equal. As the seas build, however, and hydrodynamic drag increases on the underwing the higher clearance cat should start to perform better, despite the fact that she also has a higher level of windage and carries more fiberglass weight. A lot of spreadsheet guys forget this – they fail to see that sticking a cat up high off the water an extra foot or more ads to a lot more weight and a lot more windage. This is a design trade off that is often difficult to punch into the spreadsheet. If we were sailing in the same conditions all of the time it would be far easier to design the perfect catamaran.
Most spreadsheet guys are focused on performance. They often reference this brand or that, tossing out numbers, statistics, etc., and often enjoy lambasting heavy charter cats. They have an idea of what they think is the Ferrari or the Porsche of catamarans based on “the numbers” or the price or the pedigree of the designer. What many fail to understand is that it isn’t at all difficult to design and build a fast catamaran. It is not a great secret to achieve – make her long, lean, and light and give her plenty of sail.
No, what is difficult, and what spreadsheets cannot measure, is the far more important stuff – How does she sleep? How does she ventilate? How easily is she sailed? What are her sight lines like when sailing or sitting inside? How easy is she to dock and maneuver? How intelligently is she laid out? How well are her systems designed for care and maintenance and reliability? And on and on. A yacht design is a thousand little decisions and trade off’s that, if well done, achieve a desired objective. Before criticizing those heavy charter cats recognize they are getting a lot of things right on the living elements based on the feedback of hundreds of charterers.
As for the endless helm station debates, I give up! If you love dual helms, or forward cockpits, or bulkhead helm designs, or interior helms, or fly bridges, who am I to tell you you’re nuts! All helm designs have advantages and disadvantages.
I am always fascinated at boat shows when people go giddy talking about carbon this or carbon that, infusion over wet bag, carbon mast over aluminum mast. Too often, sadly, they are just dreaming about a catamaran they cannot afford. But if speed is all you’re after you can easily build, say, a 60 foot catamaran with far less costly materials that will clean the clock of a 50 footer made with exotic and very costly materials. I am very sure that one can build a 65 foot long cat with balsa core, marine plywood bulkheads, and use polyester resin (the cheapest materials on the block) and plaster a cat that is 55 feet long made in all carbon. That 65 foot cat will cost a lot less and sail a lot faster. It will, however, be a lot more costly to dock! This is not an argument for using balsa core or polyester resin – there are many good reasons not to use both materials – but it is an argument for measuring the value of the exotic over the less than exotic when deciding where you get the most performance “cluck for your buck.” That said, if price is no object, we all know the sky’s the limit.
In the end the purchase of a yacht is a deeply personal decision and I am of the view that there is no wrong choice on some level – I’d rather see people sailing on anything than not sailing at all. Some boats are obviously just a lot more desirable for specific objectives. I suppose a boat is worth what anyone is prepared to pay for it, but the spreadsheet has a difficult time measuring value. Just a week or so ago I was in St. Martin on business and a met with the skipper of an ultra-high performance cat, all carbon rocket ship. I asked him about the boat, her speed, and what she ultimately cost her owner to build. The sum he quoted me was staggeringly high.
At a recent boat show I attended there was a cat on display that was ten feet longer than the one we had on display at over 3 times the price. Yes, one could have bought three of our cats for the price of one just 10 feet longer. Again, if price is no object, why not. But the spreadsheet has a very hard time assisting buyers in making a value decision. I note that this is also the case with boat competitions. The judges of competitions are focusing on features they like, or materials they like, never it seems on whether a boat is a good value or not. I have no idea why.
As eluded to above, you can spend significant sums of money for marginal weight reduction. But of course it all adds up. If you can shave 1,500 lbs from a yacht using exotic materials that either means you can design her hulls a bit narrower or stick on that generator and big tender and air conditioning you cannot live without. I call these sorts of materials light expensive.
Examples of light expensive are all carbon hulls, carbon rigs, curved carbon dagger-boards, high end carbon sails, carbon stanchions, composite rigging, epoxy spray finished hulls, etc. All of the above are very costly materials that lead to a lighter faster boat for a much higher cost.
At the same time you can lower the weight of a boat in a wide range of ways by using cheaper less durable and or more maintenance intensive materials. I call this light inexpensive.
Examples of light inexpensive are using aluminum posts over stainless or carbon, plastic windows over glass or quality plexi, thin fiberglass tables and helm seats, less and cheaper cabinetry, canvas bimini’s over hardtops, zip up helm covers over sliding glass tops, dacron sails over radial cut sails in more quality fabrics, etc. If you are only measuring weight and not quality, speed over anything else, there are many ways to make spreadsheet guys happier for less money up front at the expense of a less live-able, less durable and more costly boat to maintain over time. Just because a boat is lighter than another, or appears to be so, does not mean it is better quality. Nor is that so, of course, for a heavier boat.
One common error made by spreadsheet guys is when they compare cats of the same length without comparing the actual volume of the fiberglass parts. One cat might appear on paper to be heavier for the same length, but that in no way means it is a heavier built cat – that the builder did not focus on weight or was just too unskilled to know how to build it light. Does the 50 foot boat have wider hulls? More deck storage? Does it carry more fiberglass volume aft or forward? These sorts of things are about the trade-offs in design made by the designer and builder. So if you are only going to compare weight then you are very likely not comparing live-ability, or payload capacity, or deck space, etc., etc. It is wiser to look at the materials and fabrication techniques a builder is using when comparing the volume of fiberglass parts.
Reducing laminate schedules can remove a great deal of weight from any boat, regardless of the hull core or glass chosen. At issue is where the line crosses with durability and safety after years of use. Over the years in my used yacht sales I have seen the deterioration and cost associated with builders that opt for on-the-edge laminate schedules to produce lighter fiberglass parts at the expense of durability. I see this in spider cracks, osmosis, delaminations, cracked bulkheads. These are very often the result of flimsy, right on the edge engineering. I therefore suggest spreadsheet guys jump up and down on the deck of the cat of their dreams and open up the hatches to see how and if they flex. Not all fiberglass parts are made the same. Not all yachts will be able to press safely against rough seas or stand the test of many years of use.
All the numbers may add up, but someone has to sail the boat, reef the boat, jibe, tack, and dock her, etc. Seamanship is earned not purchased and can only be measured by miles of safe voyaging. A great many spreadsheet guys purchase ultra-performance cats they are honestly unqualified to sail safely. Just a few days ago I was notified that someone capsized a Gunboat. My own recommendation to those who want to sail on a performance cat is to get themselves a beach cat to play on with a crazy power to weight ratio and learn what it means to be a “wind bender.” And to learn to sail without reliance on wind-speed meters or wind angle instruments. To really sail well one must learn to do it without instruments. Set aside the tech from time to time and feel the wind, watch the telltales, and bond with your boat and the seas and the wind. Allow your intuitive faculties to teach you deeper truths than your electronics.
A lot of spreadsheet guys are all about the speed, but forget too often they have a lover to please, who is actually and quite often a lot more intelligent than he is about choosing beds you can sleep in, kitchens that function, and living spaces that lend themselves to a higher quality of life experience – both at the dock and underway.
At the risk of sounding sexist, I meet very few women spreadsheet buyers, although I have come across a few from time to time. My own wife loves the birding term to describe what most women do so well, which is to nidify, to build a nest. When a woman walks onto a boat she is asking herself if she can turn this space into a home, for herself and those she loves. She is usually the one who puts up the art, picks out the pillows, and brings a measure of style and joy to the living space. That, in part, is why the charter boat builders are so very often successful making sales at boat shows – a lot of guys start out with spreadsheets and performance in mind but end up capitulating to be sure his wife is happy with the spaces.
Here is where the spreadsheet guy has the important challenge of explaining to his wife or lover that this boat sitting at the dock also has to move the family safely and comfortably from here to there. He must somehow explain that the more spacious and comfortable a catamaran is at anchor or the dock the slower and less comfortable she will be underway. And what is the point of buying a sailing a boat if it won’t sail?
In the end, those spreadsheets can tell us a lot, they can be very helpful. Just remember that in yachting everything is a compromise, there is no perfect boat, and the best you can do is seek to find the boat that best suits your needs and agenda in a price point you can afford. Whether you are sitting on a carbon fiber rocket ship in the Tobago Cays sipping gin and tonics with Richard Branson, or hanging about on a well-worn charter cat, the fish are the same, the bars are the same and the sunsets are the same. That spreadsheet may be fun to mess with, but it cannot make you happy. The conditions for the later are a brew of ingredients unique to you that only you can mix.
I suggest we set those spreadsheets aside and just go for a sail.
Phil Berman is a former Hobie Cat World Champion and the owner of The Multihull Company, a global catamaran yacht brokerage firm. He is also the owner of Balance Catamarans, a boutique brand of high-end performance voyaging catamarans. He can be reached at phil@multihullcompany.com.
By now most monohull sailors have chartered a catamaran in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean and have come to appreciate the many virtues cats have to offer for cruising, including stable sailing with fewer seasick guests, faster off wind speeds, little or no rocking at anchor, a large aft cockpit for lounging and dining, privacy for each guest in suites that are far apart, and galley up cooking in a saloon bathed with light. Yet these traditional monohull sailors, while appreciative of the catamaran’s strengths, also come back from their charter experience with the same legitimate complaint-these boats sure don’t point very well and off-the-wind they steer like trucks.
For those converting from a power yacht to a sailing catamaran (and there are many these days) pointing ability and helm feel don’t mean too much. They order their catamaran with large engines and just toss in the towel when the wind is on the nose. But for those who intend on serious blue water passage making where beating for days on end is inevitable, or for those who are simply passionate about sailing, this lack of upwind performance and steering stiffness is downright aggravating.
For the most part, there are only four things you can do to greatly improve the upwind performance of cats beyond making them super light, lean and long:
It is very costly, of course, to take all of the above four steps to improve upwind performance in a cruising cat. In my view, however, you get the most mileage for your money with a super set of high tech sails and daggerboards. Of course, if you are a true sailing enthusiast or racer, taking all four steps will create a true rocket ship. When it comes to sails, much has been written already, so I’ll let the sailmakers weigh in on this one-which fabrics to use, what type of battens and what sort of cut for optimum upwind performance. Here I’ll focus simply on the pros and cons of daggerboards versus fixed keels for cruising sailors, because there are many misconceptions in the catamaran market on this subject.
A daggerboarded cat will sail consistently higher into the wind and make far less leeway than a cat with fixed keels-typically between five to seven degrees higher. This added pointing ability and reduced leeway represents a significant safety feature when cruising because it enables you to claw off a lee shore or to arrive at an upwind destination with far greater alacrity. As any blue water voyager knows, sometimes you cannot “run for cover”-you must “beat for cover.” A daggerboarded cat, all things being equal, will sail at least 1 to 2 knots faster, on average, than a catamaran with keels simply because it isn’t carrying the enormous fixed hydrodynamic drag (i.e. wetted surface) of two long and deep fixed keels. This added speed is a significant safety feature for longrange cruising. Not only are long passages cut shorter, reducing exposure to adverse weather, but should one encounter adverse weather it is much easier to either run from it or avoid it entirely with proper weather routing. A faster boat always increases one’s options, and therefore increases safety, when cruising. A daggerboarded cat typically draws one to two and a half feet less water than a cat with keels. As such, the sailing grounds and potential anchorages available to a cat with daggerboards are considerably larger than those available to a keel cat. In extremely severe seas daggerboards enable the skipper to adjust the balance of his catamaran by raising and lowering the boards.
When sailing in large cross-seas you typically raise the leeward daggerboard entirely and lower the windward board halfway to prevent being tripped over by a breaking wave. A keel cat is stuck with the keels down, all the time-as such, there is no way to prevent the boat from “tripping over herself ” in storm-force conditions with large breaking cross seas.
Off the wind a catamaran with fully raised daggerboards is much faster because wetted surface has been greatly reduced. But, more significantly, the maneuverability of a cat with raised boards off the wind is astounding. For the true sailing enthusiast there is nothing like surfing downwind on a daggerboarded cat-the boat feels loose and free with fully raised boards. The keeled cat, on the other hand, is always to an extent sailing down a train track it cannot escape.
Daggerboards are very costly to construct. A builder must create dual daggerboards as well as dual daggerboard trunks, along with the winches and pulley system to raise and lower them. Dual daggerboards add about $30,000 to $50,000 to the construction cost of a 45-foot catamaran. So you will always pay more to get a cat with daggerboards.
Daggerboarded cats are less ideal for bareboat chartering because bareboat sailors run aground a lot. Even if they are told to raise the daggerboards when they are not beating, after a few “Painkillers” they forget, which results in broken daggerboards. Charter sailors tend not to care about performance, so there is no sense offering them a costly option they will likely break.
Daggerboards that are not carefully installed by a professional shipyard can rattle in their trunks. This is annoying. A well-built cat will not have this problem.
If you are not a careful navigator and operate near shallow waters with one of your daggerboards in the down position and plow into a hard reef at high speed, you will break it. The good news is that you simply raise the broken board and sail away. The bad news is that a new board will cost about $8,000 to replace. To put this in perspective, if you had a hard grounding on a keel cat you would have to haul the boat and have the keel repaired at a shipyard. To replace a daggerboard you do not have to haul the boat or rely on a shipyard to do fiberglass repair. All this said, it is likely a few thousand dollars cheaper to repair a fixed keel (they are largely speaking just large chunks of glass and resin) than a costly vacuum bagged foam composite daggerboard.
If you are sailing far offshore and run into something with the boards down, chances are you will break just one board. It is easy enough to sail with one broken daggerboard as you can lower the unbroken boardif you must sail upwind. (A single daggerboarded cat will still far outpoint a keeled cat.) Daggerboard trunks take away a modest amount of interior room from the inside of each hull.
Daggerboards are for racers only. Not so. I am convinced this myth is propagated by builders who do not offer daggerboards due to their cost.
Daggerboards are complex to operate. Not so. Unless you are sailing upwind they are always in the raised position. When you sail upwind you simply un-cleat the boards and let them drop. To raise them you simply pull a few turns on a winch. It is easy to operate daggerboards.
You cannot beach a daggerboarded cat. No so. A properly built daggerboarded cat is easily beached and indeed can beach much closer to shore. The entire bottom of a well-built daggerboarded cat is solid fiberglass.
Since high volume production catamaran builders must sell nearly 50 percent of their yachts into bareboat charter, it is not surprising that none of their models have daggerboards. At the present time there are just four production builders of daggerboarded cats: Catana, Outremer, Gunboat and Dolphin. There are of course a wide range of custom and semi-custom dagger-boarded cats on the market, particularly in New Zealand and Australia.
I confess that my own background is that of a racer. Sailing is a kind of grace, a kind of magic to me, and therefore I prefer to own and sail daggerboarded cats-I love to pump upwind as high as a monohull but even faster, and I find surfing a cat in big seas with the daggerboards up is truly exciting. Yet over the years I have sold hundreds of fixed-keel catamarans and they work perfectly well for the needs of the bulk of the buyers I have advised. Most sailors I have learned are far less concerned with the performance of their cats underway than they are with her comfort at anchor. Indeed, they should be- the bulk of those who voyage in the Caribbean and Bahamas really spend 95 percent of their time on the hook. There is not a lot of sense in them purchasing a more costly daggerboarded cat unless they are true blue water voyagers or simply love to sail and expect their boat to return the love.
We all know that boats, unlike real estate, tend to depreciate. For those who are about to buy a catamaran, the question is: How much will it depreciate? Here at our brokerage firm it is pretty common for someone to call and ask, “How much am I going to lose over the next two years if I buy this boat?”
Alas, no honest broker could answer this question with deep conviction because a wide range of factors—always shifting and unpredictable—impact the resale value of used catamarans. Nevertheless, my experiences as a catamaran broker have given me a pretty clear picture of the most important issues that are currently impacting used catamaran values. They are currency fluctuations, condition, configuration, brand, new construction costs, and options that add value. Let’s discuss currency first, as it plays an especially powerful role in the catamaran market.
Since the majority of catamarans are built outside the U.S., and nearly 60 percent of them in France, the dollar/euro exchange rate plays a critical role influencing new and used catamaran values. When you buy a French built catamaran, you are to some extent making a euro play.
Certainly the cost of a new French cat dramatically impacts the value of used ones. For example, when the euro was very soft against the dollar three years ago, a Catana 431 could be bought new for a little under $500,000. Today that same boat costs at least 30 percent more if purchased new. As such, if you bought a Catana 431 several years ago you would be able to sell her today for close to what you purchased her for. The demand for the 431 remains strong and supply low. The cost of a new 431 is simply out of reach for many buyers so they must shift their attention to the brokerage market.
The same is so if you had bought a South African cat when the rand was weak against the dollar, as it also was four years ago. A used Voyage 430 or 440 has hardly depreciated over the past few years as the cost of getting a new one has gone up so much.
In short, if you think the dollar will get considerably stronger against the euro or the rand after you buy your new boat, you are taking a risk that depreciation will be higher than normal. You will, after all, be buying a depreciating currency. On the other hand, if you think the dollar will grow weaker after you buy a foreign built cat, getting her now could be a very wise decision if you are able to sell before the dollar bounces back. Right now, the prospects for the dollar over the next few years are not looking good. This month it softened to $1.50 to the euro, a mighty plunge over the past few years. This has created a bit of a feeding frenzy of foreign buyers coming to North America to purchase the larger, internationally branded cats on the brokerage market being sold in dollars.
I was talking with one of our brokers about this article and he laughed: “If you want to avoid depreciation take care of your boat.”
And he is certainly right. The surest and fastest way to see the value of your boat go downhill is to treat her poorly. Survey after survey indicates that a general failure to follow the most simple rules of yacht maintenance end up costing sellers a lot of money. Changing engine oil and filters, generator oil and filters, taking care of the sail drive oil, the seals on the sail drives, changing out the zincs…. Many of these most basic maintenance chores are overlooked by many sailors and it truly does impact resale in a very significant manner.
Because condition plays such a powerful role in yacht depreciation, and because most buyers recognize that a well cared for yacht is like a well cared for airplane, there is a powerful antipathy in the boat buying community towards purchasing anything that spent much time in bareboat charter. It is just assumed that an ex-charter boat is going to be pretty beat up. As such, if a boat goes into charter, even if it isn’t poorly cared for or abused, its resale value will instantly be negatively impacted.
I happen to believe that this general impression of charter boats is misguided. Boats are managed by a wide range of charter companies, and some of them do a much better job maintaining their fleets than others. Also, some boats get a lot more use in charter than others. There are plenty of very well maintained ex-charter boats on the market and often times an ex-charter boat can represent a pretty good value when buying a used catamaran. In the end, however, the true condition of a boat (chartered or non-chartered) cannot be ascertained until an objective surveyor has performed a rigid survey.
The layout of the cat you buy will strongly impact her resale value. At the present time, the supply demand curve looks like this:
1. Highest Demand: Owner version catamarans that have never seen bareboat charter. True owner version boats, configured for personal rather than charter use, did not become popular until the end of the 90s. Right now an owner version cat will fetch considerably more money on the used market than any other configuration.
2. Second Highest Demand: Owner version catamarans that have seen light charter. The demand for an owner version often trumps the desire to avoid an ex-charter cat. In other words, if the price is right, most buyers these days will do anything to have that owner version—even if it was in charter.
3. Third Highest Demand: Four cabin, two head catamarans that have never seen charter are the next best thing to an owner version for most buyers. Many cats in the late 90s came in this sort of configuration and it is far more desirable on the aftermarket to have two central heads, which are much larger than four small heads.
4. Fourth Highest Demand: Four cabin, two head catamarans that have seen some charter. For the most part, as noted above, when a buyer hears charter he fears abuse.
5. Fifth Highest Demand: Because so many catamarans are sent into charter fleets there are always a lot of heavily used four cabin, four head boats on the market. Sadly, these boats are in low demand, high supply and tend to drag down the value of similar models that were never in charter or configured in either two head or owner version layouts. Fact is, the Internet shopper looking for that “bargain” cannot understand why an owner version of the same year as a charter version should fetch $40,000 to $80,000 more. As such, while he might really want a non-chartered boat, or an owner version, he cannot justify spending the extra money to get one—or simply cannot afford it. That said, when he goes to sell the four cabin, four head boat, his resale value will remain low as he will always compete with the latest “phased out” offerings from the larger charter outfits.
Brand is obviously a very important factor to consider when thinking about depreciation. When it comes to selling a used cat the great value of a well-known brand is that buyers do not have to fly to the Caribbean or Europe to decide if they like a Lagoon 410, or a Moorings 4500, or a Catana 471. As most catamaran buyers attend at least a few major shows prior to making a purchase, it is likely they will be familiar with the brands that are shown regularly. For this reason, I tell clients who want us to sell a used catamaran that is not well branded, or custom built, to please bring her to our Florida or Annapolis locations where she can be easily seen and shown.
At the present time, the strongest charter/cruising cat brands in North America, in no particular order, are as follows: Lagoon, Moorings (Robertson and Caine), Fountaine Pajot, Voyage, Gemini, and Manta. Each of these brands has a dedicated sales force, advertising and consistent boat show presence. For many years Privilege Catamarans had a strong North American presence, but they have not been showing catamarans here consistently for the past few years.
The strongest non-charter, performance cruising cat brands are Catana, Dolphin and Outremer. Maine Cat also has a new open-bridge deck cat that is certainly a real sailing catamaran. Buyers for these sorts of cats are equally concerned with how the boat sails as with how it lives at the dock or mooring. They tend to be more experienced yachtsmen who are converting from a monohull to a catamaran or upgrading from a previous catamaran. Few place their boats in charter and intend to do serious blue water voyaging. While the market is smaller for such catamarans (I estimate about 20 percent of the total catamaran market), the supply of used performance cruising cats is always a lot lower. True performance cats are never getting “phased out” of charter fleets in bulk. As such, resale value for used owner version Catanas, Outremers and Dolphins is generally very strong.
There really are only two production built super high-performance catamaran brands sold in North America at this time: The Gunboat from South Africa and the Dolphin 60 from Brazil. This dimension of the market can be likened to the Ferrari in the car market; there is a very small pool of buyers who will not be satisfied with anything but super high performance under sail. Of course there are always a wide range of custom-built cats on the market for the high performance buyer, including designs by Chris White, Ian Farrier and a host of Australian designers. Resale value on such “unbranded” yachts—which are built by a range of different builders—generally varies enormously as the quality of the build varies a great deal.
Other than Moorings/Robertson & Caine, Voyage, Dean and Gunboat, the bulk of the South African builders have, to date, not invested heavily in branding. They have, for the most part, sought to sell their boats factory direct to avoid the costs associated with establishing a serious dealer network and costly print advertising. This has led to somewhat inconsistent marketing, after-client care and fluctuating resale values on the used market.
This does not mean that there are not any good quality, modestly marketed and branded South African cats. St. Francis Marine has operated on a small scale for years. The same can be said for Admiral Yachts, Maxim Catamarans, Parlay Catamarans and Knynsa Catamarans.
Australian catamarans have never been able to make much of a dent in the North American market. Seawind is by far the most successful brand and they have shown their boats consistently the past few years at North American boat shows.
In addition to brand recognition, used boat prices are strongly influenced by new boat prices. Whenever new boat prices rise, used boat values are lifted. One thing that has strongly influenced new boat prices over the past two years, in addition to currency fluctuations, has been the rising cost of fiberglass, resin and foam, which are petroleum based. Raw material costs have gone up all the way around in the marine industry. As long as new construction costs keep soaring, used boats will depreciate less and a lot more slowly. And some will actually appreciate.
Many sellers assume that the more options you have on a boat, the more you will fetch for her when you sell. This is not always the case. When buying a new boat the less you option her, the less depreciation you will have over the first two years of ownership because the way the boat is configured will be to your taste, not someone else’s. A near new or two-year-old boat placed on the used market will always compete with the new boats. If the new boat price does not rise substantially two years after you buy, many buyers will get a new boat the way they want it unless your catamaran is selling for at least 10 percent less.
The problem with the fully optioned boat, I have learned, is that new boat buyers seldom run the numbers as carefully as they should on what a truly well equipped new catamaran actually costs. If they see a year 2006 model for sale that has $80,000 of options and it is selling for just a bit more than a 2008, they still tend to gravitate toward the new model.
In a standard cruising cat from Lagoon, Fountaine Pajot, Moorings, etc., the trend has been for the boats to become more and more like homes. Many catamaran buyers today are first time yacht owners looking at their cats as second homes. They are more concerned with comfort at anchor than comfort and speed underway.
As such, the options that add the most value to these buyers are:
You will get less value from:
In performance cruising cats you will get the most value from:
You will get a bit less value from:
All things being equal, I have found that a well branded cat typically will not sink in value much more than seven percent a year after the first two years of ownership. And maintenance costs will remain low for the first four to five years. Over the past three years most good catamarans have not depreciated at all in dollar terms due to the strength of the euro and rand, which have raised new boat prices and lifted brokerage prices.
I have also come to see that most well built cats never sink much below half their replacement value if they are maintained in good working order. In other words, a 1992 45-foot cat is seldom going to sell for much less than $200,000 unless she is really in need of a total refit. The problem, of course, is that while depreciation flatlines, maintenance spikes! I see far too many buyers make penny wise and pound foolish choices in this regard. They focus far too much on the entry price and never enough on the maintenance price and exit price.
At present the demand for catamarans is very high because people are now fully aware of the enormous advantages of a catamaran over a monohull for living aboard. Also, as gas prices climb, a number of buyers drawn to trawlers are looking to catamarans that motor and sail nicely at the typical speed of a trawler yet cost considerably less to buy and operate. While I cannot predict the future I believe the demand for well built and properly designed catamarans will continue to grow in the years ahead.
There is no sure-fire way for any broker to tell a buyer how much he will get for his cat when the time comes to sell. Sales were almost dead after September 11th here in the U.S. and another serious upset could do the same again.
In the end, I believe too many of us let money get in the way of our happiness. Often, I have buyers come to me saying they just do not have enough money to get the boat they want. My advice is always the same:
“Just get a boat. If you cannot afford a cat, get a monohull. I can assure you the sunsets in St. Lucia look every bit as lovely from the deck of an 80-foot cat as they do from a 35-foot cat. Or, yes, a $30,000 1964 Pearson Alberg 35. The fish are the same too. And the azure water. And the bars and restaurants. You can do it on a 1994 Lagoon 37 for $150,000 and have a bang up good time. If you want to wait to get the dream boat, that is your choice. Just do it before you can’t.”
I’ve long been fond of quoting the 16th century Scottish philosopher David Hume who wrote that “all advantages are attended with disadvantages.” For Hume the good life had nothing to do with the quest for perfection, but the effort to discover the wise compromise that might inch us closer to fulfillment. Every person who contacts The Mulithull Company is striving to follow Hume’s advice (whether they know it or not!). They hope to make the wise compromise when choosing their yacht. As such, they seek honest answers to three primary questions:
Here I’ll endeavor to tackle the first question by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of a catamaran over a monohull.
The great success of catamarans in charter programs over the past decade is due primarily to the fact that catamarans offer enormous advantages over monohulls when the anchor is dropped. These benefits are as follows:
Because a catamaran does not have to carry a heavy lead keel underneath to stay upright, they are generally faster than a similarly sized monohull – especially off the wind. However, catamarans that carry keels cannot point as high into the wind as a monohull. They will, however, typically arrive at an upwind destination at about the same time because they are moving much faster. They sail a greater distance, but at a much higher speed.
A catamaran with daggerboards and good quality sails will point as high as a similar sized monohull. It will also travel at a much higher rate of speed and therefore arrive at upwind destinations sooner. (Note: these are generalizations based on apples to apples comparisons – a performance monohull vs. a performance cat, a cruising cat vs. a cruising monohull, etc.) It is important to note that most of the production catamarans on the market are under-powered charter designs made for trade wind sailing. In light airs many of these designs perform poorly unless larger headsails or a roachier mainsail are added.
In winds under 8 knots most catamarans, due to extreme wetted surface drag, are not any faster – and often slower – than similar sized monohulls.
Because a catamaran does not heel it offers far more comfort underway than a monohull.
For example:
One advantage most monohulls do have when underway is that they don’t pound or slap. Catamarans with low bridge deck clearance (the distance from the water to the bottom of her salon floor underneath the boat) are prone to pounding and slapping on the undercarriage in lumpy confused seas when sailing upwind. This banging and slapping is quite disconcerting when you first experience it. At times, in very lumpy seas, you will feel as though the boat is getting pounded to pieces. Most monohulls just don’t pound in this manner and are therefore a bit more comfortable than low bridge deck catamarans when beating into severe lumpy seas in high winds. Note that I am talking about lumpy seas, not necessarily large ones. In large swells bridge deck slapping is generally not a problem. The problem comes in cross-swells and confused seas – what I like to term, “Washing Machine seas.”
To overcome the unpleasantness of pounding I believe strongly in catamarans with excellent bridge deck clearance and semi-rounded under carriages that disperse wave action. I also prefer catamarans with few hull protrusions or chines as they increase not only slapping and pounding but magnify hydrodynamic drag.
Monohull sailors have for years argued that multihulls are not nearly as safe. I heartily disagree. One of the primary laws of physics is that “Everything in nature seeks its most stable position.” The most stable position for a catamaran is indeed upside down on the top of the ocean. But the most stable position for a monohull is at the bottom of the ocean. A well built and properly designed catamaran is very hard to sink – you must either be run over by a tanker or suffer a massive fire.
Multihulls gained a bad reputation in the 60’s and 70’s because most of them were home built, not beamy enough, and poorly designed. But modern Multihulls are very hard to capsize. It really takes a monumental act of bone-headedness to capsize a modern cruising Multihull in winds under 70 knots. If you are so bold as to cruise around far offshore in hurricane zones, well, yes, you are taking a serious risk. But so is a monohull sailor. Fact is, monohulls sink about as often as catamarans capsize, which explains why Lloyd’s insurance policies on cruising cats are nearly the same for cats and monohulls of similar value. (Note: racing mutihulls capsize quite often because they are little more than Hobie Cats on steroids, driven to the edge at all times by thrill seeking racers.)
In short, monohull sailors are rescued from liferafts. Multihull sailors are rescued from capsizes. Where would you rather be? Sitting in a small life raft in a storm or sitting securely inside your much larger and more stable upside down multihull? For me, the answer to this is a no brainer.
A faster boat is also a safer boat, as the faster boat is exposed to fewer storms. A catamaran that can regularly pull 220 mile days on a passage from Panama to Hawaii will be exposed to far less storm risk than the monohull that has a hard time regularly pulling 175 mile days. With good weather routing information a Multihull can avoid most serious weather and, at worst, place itself on the most favorable position to avoid the brunt of a storm. Since most multihulls can run before a storm between 10 and 15 knots they offer considerably more options and therefore safety than a boat that has difficulty topping out over 9 knots.
I would say that a monohull is preferable for serious offshore single-handed sailing because you can hove-to in a howler and sleep it out more easily than you can on a catamaran. A multihull does require very careful seamanship in serious storms. For this reason I believe monohulls are better suited to single handed sailing or voyaging in Northern and Southern latitudes. A super well built monohull will often capsize or even roll in a storm, but they generally pop back up, even if the rig has been swept away. Once a catamaran goes over she stays over. But, here again, she generally stays afloat, offering an excellent place to survive until one is rescued.
I also believe that catamarans are superior to monohulls in terms of redundancy. Cruising catamarans generally carry two diesel engines and a diesel generator. An engine failure on a monohull is the end of motoring. Not so on a catamaran. In fact, when motoring, most catamaran sailors only use one engine to conserve on fuel. They use two engines to dock.
And a catamaran has two hulls, not one. Should one of the hulls be damaged you still have another one for buoyancy. A hull fracture on a monohull is a far more serious and dangerous thing that it is on a Multihull.
Because most catamarans have twin engines they are far easier to dock than a single engine monohull. A modern catamaran can do a 360 turn in her own length. A monohull cannot do this. However, a monohull under sail is much more maneuverable and certainly will tack a lot faster than a catamaran.
In shallow areas the catamaran is clearly superior to a monohull. Because most cats draw 4 feet or less of water they can anchor in places a monohuller could not even consider. In the Bahamas and the South Pacific the catamaran sailor has a peerless advantage. I often anchor my own cat just a few feet away from a beach, occasionally tying her off to a tree.
While catamarans are better at anchor, monohulls have one huge advantage at the dock, marina or shipyard – they are much cheaper to haul and slip and they have a lot more options. Most catamarans must be slipped on end ties due to their beaminess. As such, there are some marinas a catamaran cannot use. Trimarans are even harder to contend with. And, for the most part, the marinas that do take multihulls charge more.
The beaminess of multihulls also greatly limits the number of shipyards that can haul them. Most 40 foot and over multihulls must be hauled on a 50 ton travel lift. This not only increases the cost of getting the boat out of the water, but greatly limits the multihullers choice of the shipyards he can use for repair and maintenance. This of course limits one’s shopping power and drives up the price for shipyard services.
Catamarans, alas, are very costly to build. Builders must create two hulls, a large salon, and finish all of them off with cabinetry. And the rigging and sails of a catamaran must be more stout because the Multihull doesn’t heal and bleech off loads when hit by puffs like a monohull.
Monohulls can be bought cheaper new and the buyer of a monohull has a lot more choice of builders.
On the used market monohulls are very cheap to buy because the supply presently far outstrips the demand. Such is not the case with catamarans. Used catamaran prices remain quite high and stable, even in our weak economy these past few years. When I am contacted by someone who says they are searching for a cruising multihull under $150,000 I often advise them to buy a monohull. Their choices in a catamaran are very, very limited. Under $100,000 the task is nearly impossible unless one is drawn to very old, one-off models, or older, smaller budget catamarans like the Gemini.
It is of course important to remember that if you buy a monohull cheap you will surely also sell her cheap. If you buy a catamaran properly she will hold her value remarkably well for years to come if the present trend toward catamarans continues. I see no reason why it won’t.
I believe there are many sailors who choose monohulls for purely esthetic and historical reasons. They are traditional and pretty and healing is a part of the esthetic for them. I understand this. My first large yacht was a gracious old Pearson Alberg 35, with a cocktail glass stern and truly lovely lines. Many of today’s modern catamarans are just not that pretty – they lack a certain romance.
As for myself, I could never again go back to a monohull. I like sailing fast. I like sailing flat. I like a big cockpit. I do not like rocking at anchor. I still well remember sailing on the outskirts of a monohull race near Newport, Rhode Island, a few summers back. I was close reaching on my 41 foot cat at 17 knots, passing monohulls as if they were standing still. Romantic? Perhaps not for everyone. But sure a lot of fun. As the Dalai Lama once said: “You cannot buy happiness. But you can buy exhilaration.”
Many people are confused about the pros and cons of daggerboards versus keels. As with everything, there are advantages and disadvantages. Here are my thoughts on the pros and cons of dagger-boards:
Over the years I have sold a fare share of catamarans to a wide range of people. They all start with a vision of where they will go on their boats, and what they will do, but never really know for sure who will take to the cruising lifestyle and who won’t. Some tell me they just want to sail in the Caribbean, but end up circumnavigating. Others tell me they plan to circumnavigate but never go much beyond the Bahamas, etc.
Four years ago I sold a new Dolphin 460 catamaran to Russell Eddington, a former Hobie cat racer I have known since my teens. Russell has sailed his Dolphin, “Free Spirit”, over 28,000 miles since that time. I was fortunate to recently meet up with him in Thailand and to spend a few days cruising around the islands off Phuket on Free Spirit. During our time together I peppered him with questions about his voyaging, what he learned, what advice he would give to others, etc. Here are some of Russell’s thoughts:
1. Most people over plan and obsess and worry too much. This is not just an American trait, but a trait I saw everywhere I went. I recall hanging out in Moololaba Australia and meeting fellow sailors. They just planned and planned and planned. I said to them, “Why don’t you just take off?” To me it has always been super simple. Check the weather, provision, and go.
2. I see people preparing all the time for that horrible weather they are certain they will encounter, but for the most part, sailing with the trades is 99% percent easy going. If the wind gets too strong, just shorten sail or take it all down and rest. After 28,000 miles I have used a sea anchor only once and it was simply to deploy and make riding out the storm very easy and comfortable.
3. It takes a bit of time to get to know any boat, but after you bond with your boat, you learn what you need to do to make sure she functions well and safely. I am always working on the boat to some extent, I always have a little list of the things I want to do and eventually I get to them. But I never let the chores get in the way of going sailing. The boat will never be perfect, so do not let imperfection become an excuse for not taking off.
4. Do not be afraid to single-hand sail sometimes. I had a situation in the Caribbean where my girlfriend had business in the states, so I just sailed the boat to Florida myself, stopping each night at a new anchorage. It was easy and fun. Any time the autopilot is working you really are never by yourself!
5. I have to say that so far the South Pacific to my mind is the most fantastic cruising in the world. The people are friendly, many islands untouched, and the weather is very pleasant. After I left Panama, I have never locked the boat the again. People are simply a lot sweeter and less prone to steal from you than in the Caribbean or Central America.
6. It is important always to stay calm and relaxed and to take things in stride when you travel on a boat. I have had some difficult experiences here and there, but keeping a low key attitude just always seems to work out better for me.
7. Learn local customs and treat everyone with great respect and they will be warm and helpful to you 99% of the time. Going nuclear on people just never works too well in my experience – warmth and sensitivity are appreciated around the world. I try to be the good American, not the ugly one.
8. There is always all of this talk of piracy and such, fear of all sort of things. I sailed my boat right up from Bali and into the Melaka straights and I never felt scared at all. I think the likelihood of dying in a car accident in the states is ten times higher than running into pirates. Running into an unlit fishing boat at night, however, is a lot easier here than in the Caribbean! You really have to stay on careful watch at night when sailing Asia as there is a lot of traffic and many unlit boats.
9. Do not rely solely on the GPS, and keep in mind that many GPS charts in remote parts of the world are not super accurate. Use caution at all times when close to shore or obstructions and it is best not to approach foreign ports at night if you can avoid it. I arrived in Bali after sailing a 1,000 miles and was anxious to get into the harbor, but I arrived just after Sunset, and while it was blowing hard and we had to hang out all night waiting to get in, I learned the following day after I arrived that they had pulled two boats off the reef just a few days before that tried to enter at night. Do not let fatigue or laziness compel you to take chances when you shouldn’t. Be wise and you will be fine.
10. Finally, just go sailing. If you have a solid boat you can go just about anywhere and have a magical time. All along the way you will meet interesting people, fellow sailors, warm and friendly locals, explore different cultures, etc. I have been piling up just a ton of great memories from this trip, things I will always cherish and never forget. Right now, the only compelling question is: where will I go next?!
