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Performance Study of Daggerboards Versus Keels

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Performance Study of Daggerboards Versus Keels

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:

Advantages to Keels:

  1. No moving parts. One less thing to operate or break.
  2. If you ground the boat you hit the keels and they are easily repaired and at a low cost generally.
  3. You can chock the boat more easily on the hard and it is easier to beach in some circumstances.
  4. They cost less to fabricate.
  5. You get more room amidships for additional cabinetry.
  6. The keels add a bit of buoyancy. On a 526 about 1,600 pounds as our keels are large and mostly hollow inside.
  7. Daggerboards are typically a bit heavier. On the 526 each board and trunk weigh about 50 pounds more.
  8. Poorly designed boards and trunks can allow the boards to rattle when they are not under load. Keels do not rattle.

Advantages to Daggerboards:

  1. Boarded cats point higher and side-slip less as the study shows. I have noted that on keeled production cats you can “stick them up into the wind” but they tend to crab horribly when pinched, as such that you must crack off considerably to reduce leeway and sustain momentum. On most of the sea trials I conduct on production cats we “close reach” to windward on sea trials. This is less the case on deep, finely shaped performance catamaran keels.
  2. The draft on most keeled catamarans is deeper than the draft on daggerboarded cats. Our 526 keeled version draws about 12 inches more than the daggerboarded version. On daggerboarded cats the rudder tip usually represents her deepest draft. It is important to note that some cats carry very stubby keels to sustain shallower draft, but the shallower the keel the less well she performs when sailing close to the wind. This is important to keep in mind if you are comparing performance on fixed keeled production cats.
  3. Off the wind with the boards raised to 1/4 there is less drag and the boat steers and sails faster and more playfully.
  4. The daggerboarded cat is a bit faster and makes less leeway on nearly all points of sail as the study shows in the majority of wind conditions.
  5. An equally efficient set of keels have much more wetted surface than daggerboards, almost 4 times more. This is the case on our 526 keels.
  6. Daggerboards set properly can assist in preventing a cat from a “tripping capsize” in very high winds with large breaking cross seas. Both boards can be fully raised, or only the leeward board raised, so the boat can side-slip easily.
  7.  Daggerboarded cats tend to have a bit higher resale value due to the fact that so few are produced in mass production. A buyer that wants boards will only focus on catamarans that have them.

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.

About Phillip Berman

Phillip Berman is the president of The Multihull Company and a lifetime catamaran sailor and racer. He grew up racing Hobie Cats in California in the late 1960’s and published his first book on catamaran racing at the age of seventeen. Other Articles by Phillip Berman Include:

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Salvaging a Storm Damaged Sailboat

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Salvaging a Storm Damaged Sailboat

By:  Cap’n Fatty Goodlander  

Powerful storms that pounded the northern Caribbean, Florida and Texas last fall were potent reminders that severe weather causes severe damage. Still, every dark cloud has a silver lining. As insurance claims are paid out and piles of vessels are untangled, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of handyman skippers are going to end up with amazing boats, literally for pennies on the dollar.

I know of which I speak. My wife, Carolyn, and I purchased the salvage rights to a Hughes 38 found sunk on the beach after Hurricane Hugo struck the Virgin Islands in 1989 for $3,000 — then fixed her up and sailed her twice around the world.

Wild Card certainly wasn’t the most pristine yacht we saw in the 100,000 ocean miles we sailed her over the course of 23 wonderful years, but at an initial cost of 3 cents per mile, she was certainly among the cheapest. The problem with buying a hurricane-­damaged fiberglass sailboat is that a good buy can look like it is practically worthless, and a worthless vessel can look like a good buy. So the first concept you need to understand is that you’re not only buying a boat, you’re buying a tremendous liability as well. And once you buy it, the only way out involves either a pile of cash or a lot of blood, sweat and tears, sustained over a long period of time.

The first priority of a successful salvage is finding a wrecked boat that looks bad and thus sells cheap, but is actually fairly straightforward to remove and repair.

When it comes to salvage, tenacity is the key. If in doubt, don’t. I repeat: Only masochists need apply.

However, big risks can equal big gains, and each deal is unique. I’ve seen insured boats with barely any damage sitting atop uninsured boats that were totally crushed. The owner of the insured boat says shrilly, “She’s totaled!” Meanwhile, the crushed boat’s owner says, “I think I can fix her. It’s really just cosmetic!”

The first priority of a successful salvage is finding a wrecked boat that looks bad and thus sells cheap, but is actually fairly straightforward to remove and repair. Reinvigorating a vessel doesn’t only include the expense of buying the materials and smearing them on; transportation and shipyard costs must be factored in as well.

Some of the best deals happen fast, as each passing day, more and more sanity enters the marketplace. My buddy Kevin Rowlette, aboard Husky, was hired to drag a damaged Beneteau from the beach into deep water to sink it. But, instead of scuttling it, he tossed a single dollar bill at the owner as he attached his towline to the vessel. He eventually repaired it, and it became the famous Fast Buck. We sailed together during many a regatta. In fact, I think we did the entire Caribbean Ocean Racing Triangle series on it in the early 1990s, and every time Kevin would buy me a beer, he’d lament, “Damn, that’s twice what I paid for the boat, Fatty!”

Many people are scared by holes through the hull. Don’t be. These can be fixed easily if they are of small to moderate size and the boat hasn’t lost its shape. Use clear-cedar battens inside the vessel to maintain a fair curve as you fiberglass. Start outside, then once the shape is locked in, you can remove the battens and finish the repair on the inside.

There are certain types of damage to avoid: snapped-off rudder skegs; displaced keels; severe hull-to-deck-joint damage; smashed-off bows; crushed or cracked stems; and any damage that displaces such things as the engine, propeller shaft, mast step or rudder.

A vessel sunk for a day or two is a problem. A vessel underwater for more than a couple of weeks is a nightmare. Why? Because everything mechanical and electrical will have to be thrown away. In addition, all the wood will delaminate, swell, split and crack, meaning you’ll have to replace all the structural bulkheads, chainplate webs, mast steps and, of course, the entire interior.

That aside, the good news is that any fiberglass boat can be fixed.

There was an ace “glass mon” on Tortola who happened to end up with a new Beneteau 456 that had its deck burned up by an electrical fire in the headliner. He stowed it in the corner of the boatyard until he could find time to repair it. Later, an identical boat pounded hard on Anegada Reef. He bid peanuts on the vessel and then used a circular saw to cut both boats horizontally along the waterline before fiberglassing the good halves of each back together. He was totally honest with the new buyer on the boat’s history, and the guy learned to live with an interior that’s a micro bit askew!

In Wild Card’s case, when we found her, the prominent damage was just a small area of egg-shelling, or cracking with moderate seepage, around the port turn of the bilge where she’d pounded on the beach. We temporarily patched her, lifted her onto a barge with a crane and took her to Independent Boat Yard, where I cast myself at “de feet of de local glass mon.”

His name was Mike Sheen, and he was horrified when I prostrated myself before him, grabbed his ankles, burst into tears and said, “I’m an idiot! I’ve just spent all my wife and child’s food money on a wrecked boat. Woe is me!”

“Shut up and grind!” he growled.

That’s the key to mending fiberglass: Just bite the bullet and grind until your arms fall off. Grinding is the essential skill.

About two hours into it, Mike came by and said, “See how milky the fiberglass is? Grind it until it is clear, then angle the edge 16-to-1.”

I started to ask a question, but he growled. “Shut up and grind, Fatty!”

I quickly learned that a hole or wound in fiberglass is like a bullet through a windshield. While the opening is small, the damage is great. Endlessly, I ground away, until our little eggshell wound was 12 feet wide and 3 feet high, and had an actual hole through the hull the size of a basketball.

About 10 days later, I was down to pure fiberglass, with no milky places, and the area was faired with a 16-to-1 angled edge, so there was plenty of raw fiberglass for the new cloth and resin to adhere to.

Time to rebuild. I jammed a piece of waxed Formica inside the boat to keep the proper shape at the hole. Carolyn cut up the biaxial glass, with cloth on one side and mat on the other, in large chunks and placed it on our wet-out board. I slopped polyester resin on the cloth side and flipped it over to wet-out the mat side. Then I placed it over the wetted-out wound and rolled out the bubbles.

You have to work fast. The MEK catalyst makes the resin kick quickly in the tropics. We only put on a few layers at a time to avoid excessive heat buildup or, worst case, having the semi-kicked cloth begin to droop away from the hull. We tried to add new layers on sticky-but-cooling resin to avoid excess grinding. If we allowed the resin to dry, we reground it to ensure perfect adhesion.

Once the outside of the repair was glassed greater than flush with the outside gelcoat, we went inside the boat, built a plastic tent and attacked the entire area with our grinder, then fiberglassed an additional four layers inside.

Glass mon Mike told me during our relaunch, “If you ever hit anything, Fatty, try to hit it on the repaired side. It is much stronger.”

This resulted in what I refer to as a hamburger patch, with a small hole where the patty is and two large overlapping buns inside and out.

Next, we block-sanded the repair on the outside using long, commercially available blocks of the gritty, abrasive material to achieve the fair curve of the hull. Then we finished off the job using West System Epoxy and micro balloons. You cannot see the repair to this day, nearly three decades and 100,000 ocean miles later.

Glass mon Mike told me during our relaunch, “If you ever hit anything, Fatty, try to hit it on the repaired side. It is much stronger.”

When I went to pay him for his consulting work, he waved away my money and said loudly, “Shut up and grind!”

Was it gruesome work rebuilding Wild Card? You betcha. Was it worth it? Oh, yes! For less than $10,000 and 21 days of utter agony, we ended up with an offshore-capable boat worth $50,000 and lots of calluses.

Though we weren’t ready to circumnavigate yet, coming in second in the Coral Bay Thanksgiving regatta was sweet less than a month after we lifted her off the beach.

In the ensuing years, we tossed in a new Perkins diesel and replaced all the electronics as time and money permitted. We improved the boat while still living in paradise, among the nicest, friendliest, most nurturing people in the world.

This article was originally published in Cruising World Magazine is being used with express permission from the publisher.

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THE MAKING OF A CAT: PART I

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THE MAKING OF A CAT: PART I

By Tim Murphy 

Comfort. Performance. Ease-of-use. Good ergonomic flow. Ask ­several creators of new cruising catamarans what the original design concept was, and you’ll likely hear some repetition of the same short list of familiar themes. Yet when you look at the boats themselves, the results could hardly be more different. With that ­puzzle in mind, we identified four standout cats from this year’s fleet of new models, including three Boat of the Year winners, and we closely interviewed their creators to find out how each project moved from the germ of an idea through prototype to model launch — and how they arrived at such different boats.

The Cats and Their Creators

The four cruising catamarans in our group come from three continents.

The U.S.-built Maine Cat 38 is conceived, designed, manufactured and sold by one man: Dick Vermeulen. Since 1993, working with a dozen craftsmen in midcoast Maine, Vermeulen has launched 130 boats, including 63 Maine Cat 30s and 24 MC 41s, as well as a 47-foot power cat and a 22-foot Dick Newick design. Today Maine Cat has the capacity to build five, maybe six, MC 38s per year.

“We’re really a craft shop here, one at a time. But there’s one thing about the boat that comes down the line here,” says Vermeulen, a mechanical engineer who grew up sailing competitively in New Jersey. “It has to be the fastest cruising cat out there, or I’ve failed at everything I’ve done.”

The French-built Lagoon 42 comes from the world’s most prolific catamaran builder. Part of Groupe Beneteau, whose Boat Division will turn over roughly $960 million annually, Lagoon’s roughly 1,200 employees are on track to launch 350 boats, in models ranging from 38 to 77 feet, this year. Since its first boat in 1987, Lagoon has built some 4,200 cruising cats. We spoke with Lagoon America director Fred Signat, a 20-year veteran of the company who came up through the design department before managing sales regions in Europe, the Indian Ocean, and North America.

“Roughly the life of one model is five years,” says Signat. “It’s very close to the car business now, and so every year we’re working on model changes. But if a boat is a success, we’re not in a rush to replace that model.” The Lagoon 42 won Best Full-Size Multihull Under 50 Feet in last year’s BOTY contest.

Franck Bauguil manages yacht sales for Travelopia, which until recently was known as TUI Marine. In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s the parent company of The Moorings, Sunsail and Leopard Catamarans — a marine leisure business that employs 77,000 people and manages 1,800 charter boats at 80 bases around the world. Travelopia is also the sole client of South Africa-based Robertson and Caine, a company that employs 1,400 people building catamarans from 40 to 58 feet. Bauguil provides the design brief for all new models to the builder and to Alex Simonis, the naval architect.

The nav station boasts commanding views of the surroundings (left), while the owner’s suite is an open, spacious cabin.
Billy Black

“What’s unique about us,” Bauguil says, “is that Robertson and Caine doesn’t have 50 or 100 dealers in front of it. It has one, and I’m the contact person.” Collating feedback from several departments within Travelopia (sales, charter operations, after-sales and others), Bauguil knows exactly how many boats of each model to build in a given year — 211 boats in 2017 — and how many of those will go into private ownership or charter. And because 60 percent of the boats will go into charter programs managed by Travelopia, Bauguil knows his company carries the responsibility to service the boats for at least the first five years. It’s an incentive to create boats that are easy to maintain, a benefit that extends to private owners as well. The Leopard 45 (Moorings 4500, Sunsail 454) won Best Charter Boat in the most recent BOTY contest.

Phil Berman, president of the Multihull Company, based in Philadelphia, has been pursuing the sweet spot in performance cruising catamarans for his entire career. After winning Hobie Cat World Championships in 1979 and 1980, and founding a yacht brokerage specializing in catamarans, he understands both what it takes to make a fast catamaran and what the market is looking for. In the early 2000s, Berman imported the sporty Dolphin line of catamarans from Brazil; in 2011, he founded Balance Catamarans. Among other projects, he conceived the Balance 526, designed by Anton du Toit and built by Nexus Yachts in South Africa. The boat was a home run in the eyes of the BOTY judges, winning the top prize in 2017, Import Boat of the Year.

“I felt the opportunity in the market arose because all of the big builders are really very skewed toward low performance and high volume,” Berman contends. “Each succeeding generation of cats is getting slower.” The 526 was born to counter that trend. “She’s a wind-speed boat in light airs,” he said, meaning the boat will sail as quick as the breeze in 10 knots or less. Berman and Nexus Yachts plan to deliver five or six new boats per year.

The Germ of an Idea

We asked each cat creator what inspires a new model. Here, in their own words, are their responses.

Dick Vermeulen (Maine Cat 38): Everybody has to take a look at the intended use, and that was my starting place for the 38. The Maine Cat 41 was the big “had-everything, liveaboard monster boat.” It had the ability to carry all that weight. It had the genset. It had the air conditioning. It had the watermaker. It had 365 pounds of toys on board, not counting the dinghy and the engine. The Maine Cat 30 is a real plain-jane, inexpensive, go-­sailing type of boat, and I really enjoyed it. And obviously, our customers do too. When a used one comes on the market, it doesn’t last for a couple of days, and it’s sold again.
So that was the starting place for the 38. Who’s going to sail this boat? And how? If they’re into all the junk, then they don’t want my boat. Again, it has to be the quickest cruising cat going, so to get to that point, you’ve got to get rid of junk. The owners who are going to buy this boat, yeah, they’re interested in the comfort. And the stability. And the ambiance. And the spaces. And the visibility. And all this great stuff. But what do they really want to do? They want to pass the guy next to them. And that’s what I want to do. My end goal is to have the most efficient piece of machinery on the water.
And then you’ve got to figure out who’s going to be on the boat, and how they’re going to handle the boat. I’ve got a lot of guys who want to be able to go out there on a Sunday afternoon by themselves. And if they have a 40-some-odd-foot beast, they’re not going out. But to have a Maine Cat 30, they’ll go out. And I’ve made the 38 as simple to sail, if not simpler, as the 30. I’ve got to have a boat that I can handle myself.

Fred Signat (Lagoon 42): Several years ago, we wanted something new. Frankly, the Lagoon image — our competitors were talking about Lagoons as caravans, so we wanted to renew this image. We asked the journalists to apply the technical solutions they used on the racing boats to the Lagoons. They came up with plenty of ideas that we accepted and many that we didn’t. And the main idea was the new rig (moved aft, beginning with the 2015 Lagoon 39 and 52). On the Lagoon 380, the rig was 37 percent aft; on the 42 it’s 53 percent aft. That really reduced the pitching, one of the key points addressed by the journalists. The philosophy was to have an easy boat to handle, so we have the self-tacking jib. The Lagoon philosophy: easy to use. Comfort. Safety. And performance, even if it’s not a racing boat.

At Lagoon, we have two scenarios. On the new Lagoon 42, we had the Lagoon 420 and 421 before. We built 170 of those, and we wanted to renew the model. For a replacement like that, we get feedback from customers and our dealers and after-sales services. We look at our competition and what’s new on the market. We look at trends, such as fabric. Let’s say 20 percent of these boats go into charter, so we get feedback from charter companies. With a project like the Lagoon Seventy 7 (U.S. launch was at the Miami boat show in February 2017), we had no model to replace, so the process was very different. The first time we talked with dealers about the Seventy 7 was roughly three and a half years earlier. We had feedback from the Lagoon 620 owners and from people looking at custom boats at CNB (Lagoon’s sister company at Groupe Beneteau), so we mixed those feedbacks, and that’s why it took us so long to develop the project. It’s a big boat!

Franck Bauguil (Leopard 45): Right now, we have Project 2020, which lines up a development plan for the next three years. The next two models that we’ll develop are pretty much set in stone. But when you start looking at Model Three down the development pipeline, that can change. The time from the first product brief to a boat in the water for a test sail is 18 months. We plan not only the production per year but also the overall number. For the 45-footer, we’re going to have 46 units per year. Over the life cycle of the product, which is five to six years, we’re looking at 200 units. That’s going to affect the price, because obviously, you have an initial investment and then you spread out your capital over the number of boats. So the more you do, technically the lower the price. In the brief, we already have a target price for the boat equipped: charter-­ready, or owner-ready. We define performance in our design brief. I don’t know if the other guys do that, but we do. We define dimension. We define accommodations. But only in the broad sense: four cabins, four heads, en suite. We want the design team to start working on the boat, giving them direction, but not to be too restrictive either.

And we can define some innovations in the brief. When we did the brief of the 44-footer (the 2011 Import Boat of the Year), we had a forward cockpit. That was the first forward cockpit we did, including access to the forward cockpit from inside. That was in the brief. And that’s ambitious. We’re the most open boat you can find. So the brief for last year’s 45 had the same ratio of open access to the cockpit from that bulkhead. In that case, we said to Alex Simonis, the naval architect, “You’ve got to do it. See you in two weeks.” He may come back and say it’s impossible. But it hasn’t happened yet. His job is to make it happen. By that point, we may have done some other feasibility studies where we want to do something but we know it’s too ambitious so it’s not going to happen.

Phil Berman (Balance 526): Since the formation of my company, the Multihull Company, about 15 years ago, I’ve sold about 500 used catamarans. So all I do is go to surveys and sail all of these boats. I see them repaired, and I see them broken. And the best part for me is that when the boats are sold, I get to know exactly what the people thought about their boat. Until they’re sold, everybody’s lying about them online because they want to hold their resale value. I’ve seen all the mistakes.
During a sea trial of a 56-foot catamaran off Palm Beach, Florida, several years ago, in 17 knots of wind, I couldn’t get the boat to go more than 7 knots. I thought, We’ve really lost the balance in the catamaran scene. Too many of the boats are designed for charter, and the people who are looking for higher performance, a more pleasurable sailing boat, are kind of left in the lurch. On one hand, some of the boats are too extreme; all they’re about is performance or racing. And on the other, they’re too “charter” — too big inside, too slow. So what we sought to do here with this company was seek a balance between comfort on the one hand and performance on the other. And to produce yachts that are simple to maintain, easy to operate and that bring real sailing pleasure to people.

So what I wanted to design was the most objection-free performance cat possible. We designed the Balance 526 to really kind of cruise along easily between 9 and 12 knots.

Tim Murphy is a Cruising World editor-at-large and a longtime Boat of the Year judge.

Read on to Part II

About the Author

This article was originally published in Cruising World Magazine and is being reused with permission from the publisher.

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THE MAKING OF A CAT: PART II

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THE MAKING OF A CAT: PART II

By Tim Murphy

What It’s Not

A crucial step in defining anything is to clarify what it’s not. We asked each cat creator what they knew their boat was not going to do or include.

Dick Vermeulen (Maine Cat 38): This boat is not going to have to sleep 12 people. It has to sleep five people. And it doesn’t need two heads. It needs one head. We can put a Porta Potti over in the other hull so they’ve got privacy over there. But they don’t need two showers. They don’t need two holding tanks. They don’t need all that garbage. You can’t have the genset. Because the design of the boat is so open, if you can sleep on the bridgedeck, if you can sleep on the trampolines, if you can sleep in a hammock hung underneath the hardtop, maybe we don’t need air conditioning. Maybe we don’t need to be in a cabin with a door on it, with no ventilation. The design of the interior of this boat says, well, I’m just not going to do AC, so you can get rid of a lot of junk. Simple: That’s the design criteria.

Phil Berman (Balance 526): I wouldn’t ever recommend this boat for bareboat charter. It’s just too performance oriented. This is all E-glass with carbon reinforce­ments and epoxy resins. Composite bulkheads, liberal use of carbon all over the place — this is a much more sophisticated boat than your typical charter boat.

Fred Signat (Lagoon 42): We didn’t choose daggerboards, because that’s really not in the Lagoon philosophy. Comfort means volume in the cabins. The galley today is really the key point. That’s why we didn’t use the daggerboards. We wanted to keep the volume inside.

Franck Bauguil (Leopard 45): There’s a limit to how far you can push volume. Lagoons have gigantic beds. If we want a gigantic bed and a big cockpit, it’s not going to happen. This is where we know what we have. For us it’s crystal clear: We’re going to favor the common areas, where you spend most of your time. We’re going to have the biggest cockpit in the business, but we’re not going to offer a huge bed, because you can’t have both.

I’m always trying to understand with numbers how our customers are utilizing this boat. For example, we found out that on our Moorings 4800 four-cabin boat, only half the time do we have eight people on it. So I’m asking: How many people are on the boat? Where do they sleep? I have some data, but I’m missing some, because if I have a six-pass (six-passenger charter), it could be three couples, or it could be a big family with teenagers and kids. And teenagers and kids are not going to use cabins in the same way. So now we’re drilling further, with crew lists and the ages of our customers. That’s going to be for our next project to figure out the number of cabins and configurations of cabins.
catamarans

Comfort and Performance

Skinny catamaran hulls are uncommonly sensitive to the weight that goes into the boat, and too much wetted surface profoundly hinders a cat’s boat speed. Does that mean comfort and performance are a zero-sum choice? We asked each creator how they work through this puzzle.

Franck Bauguil (Leopard 45): We try to do a boat that is a compromise between space and performance. Clearly, we try to offer the comfort people are looking for on cats, but without killing the performance. We keep the hulls very narrow (below the waterline). The volume is above the waterline with the step (chine).

Phil Berman (Balance 526): I met naval architect Anton du Toit, and I liked the way he did his hulls. I liked his general philosophy of hulls that don’t have any protrusions or chines. These hulls, if you look at them, there’s no funny stuff coming out of them. There’s no bumps. There’s no trickery. There’s just pure-form hulls. And that was really important to me, hydrodynamically. All these little tricks that they do to make the boat feel bigger down below, all that does is create hydrodynamic disturbance in the boat. You want the boat to be just a straight hull like a Tornado catamaran. So I asked Anton, if we want this boat to tool along without difficulty at 10 to 12 knots, what’s the hull-fineness ratio have to be? How wide can we go? How wide can we make the berths in the aft end of the boat — without bumping it out or creating chines to make the hulls wider than they should be?

It became clear that the aft berth to port would have to be slightly narrower and smaller than the berths athwartships because, if we widened the hull just another 6 inches back there, we wouldn’t have achieved the hull-fineness ratio required to do the speeds we wanted to do. I kind of knew from the beginning that we would have our master berth athwartships over the bridge because that’s what Peter Johnstone did in the Gunboats. I think that’s just what you have to do if you really want to have beds from which you can get off on either side — and really good headroom.

I wanted the bridgedeck clearance to be around 3 feet off the water but loaded. When this boat’s empty, it’s probably 3 feet 3 inches. To go any higher, you really start getting into too much windage on the sides of the hulls, and you start adding weight to the boat. And that windage hurts you upwind significantly. It really blows you back. It also makes it harder to dock the boat, because you’re getting blown around. We had like 2-foot-7-inch clearance on the Dolphin 460 that we did in Brazil, and that boat was great. In some really, really bad conditions you’re going to get an occasional slap or pound. You’re not going to get away from that. But remember, the sharper the bows and the smaller the bow wave, the less clearance you need. The higher performance the boat, the less bridgedeck clearance you need. Because the bows are so sharp, it’s not creating a bow wave. And a lot of the slapping occurs from the big waves when the boat is rocking. The bow waves meet right about the saloon door, and you’ll hear it: boom, boom, boom, boom. But all things being equal, I know for a 50-footer, 3 feet is the balanced choice.

Fred Signat (Lagoon 42): We learn from the past. The Lagoon 420 has a very long bridgedeck, with a very small net. The comfort was great because it had lots of volume. But clearly the boat was sailing like a dog. For the Lagoon 42, we reduced the bridgedeck ratio (LOA-to-bridgedeck length) to 1.52-to-1.

Dick Vermeulen (Maine Cat 38): I made a decision very early on that this boat was going to have a chine, or what I’d call a knuckle. It was going to have a really skinny waterline and a really nice knuckle, and then we’d belly it out because I thought it looked really cool. It’s about 12 inches off the waterline. It is probably the best thing we’ve ever drawn. It’s unbelievable, because what it does underneath the boat in the bridgedeck area is it curves all that water. When you’re in an 8-foot wave, obviously, game’s over. But if you’re in the normal 3 to 4 feet and you’re cutting through a wave and doing 12 or 13 knots, you don’t hear anything. The boat’s silent. And that’s because it’s not allowing that water that would normally be jumping up and hitting the underside of the bridgedeck. It turns it right away. It also makes spray out of everything down there, so you are perhaps inducing some drag. But you’re also making the boat really, really quiet.

From Abstract Design to Physical Structure

It’s one thing to use high-tech, three-dimensional computer-­aided design software to render boats and their components, but there’s no substitute for creating full-scale structures in space to test those designs. We asked each cat creator what they learn in the building stage that the designs couldn’t entirely reveal.

Phil Berman (Balance 526): In the design drawings, we generally marked out the area for our helm station. And we did tons and tons of drawings for sight lines and stuff. You want to be able to sit and see out over the water at all times, and always be in the light. We knew when we got to that point, it had to be mocked up, so I visited the factory in South Africa. It was really important for me to sit around the chairs and see the sight lines. And headroom is important. Frankly, I think the only real mistake you see in the Balance 45 (a Roger Hill design built in China) is that the boat didn’t have 6-foot-6-inch headroom. This boat’s headroom is 6-foot-9.

Fred Signat (Lagoon 42): We work with VPLP Design for naval architects and Nauta Yachts Design for the interiors. They know that we have some industrial points we have to follow. For example, we have some wood rail shapes that we want to reuse, and we have some composite constraints — the way you design it and design the mold — that we cannot avoid. So that’s an impact on some shapes. For every model, we have a project manager in-house who’s the link between the naval architects and our designers. Once we pass the files to the designers and say go, they work in parallel. They’re talking to each other. Even when the architects are still working on the hull shape, we can start plumbing and electricity very early. Once we have the final hull shape, it’s quite easy to modify the plumbing to make sure it follows the hull.

We still do some full-scale mock-ups to evaluate the volume of the galley. Or to make sure we have enough room in the heads. Even though we have lots of experience, it’s very easy to make mistakes. Most of the time it’s in plywood, just to have an idea of volume. But we don’t go into details of finishing.

For the Lagoon 42 and the last several projects, we produced hull number one and hull number two. Number one was at the Dusseldorf show; hull two was at the Miami show. And then we stopped the line. We sailed the boats, tested the boats. Then after we do the reverse engineering and feedback, the idea is to really start the production line. We start to deliver the boats three to five months after that.

Dick Vermeulen (Maine Cat 38): For this project, we came across thermoforming. Hodgdon Yacht Services had done it in one of its designs. Lyman-Morse had done it. We found a company in Rhode Island that did these infrared ovens, and JP Mouligné at Gurit showed us some stuff this thing could do. We get Corecell sheets up to 165 degrees, and it’s infrared, so it’s heated completely through the material. Then you place the Corecell in the mold, and you press it down. You let it cool for about a minute and a half, take your hands off, and it doesn’t change shape. The core starts as flat sheets, not 1-inch cubes with scrim like Divinycell, so there are no kerfs to fill with resin. When we built the first 38 hull — no deck on it yet, but three bulkheads in it, 6 feet wide at the beam, probably another 6 feet in depth — it weighed 426 pounds. I could lift the thing out of the cradles. It blew us away. It was the biggest revelation we’ve ever had in construction. We infuse all the way through the entire boat with vinylester resins. It takes us a hell of a lot longer to build boats, but it’s just bomber. I just saved 50 pounds. I was ecstatic. If I can make it strong and I can make it light, I’ve got the world by the tail.

Franck Bauguil (Leopard 45): Mock-ups are fantastic. We don’t involve a big design committee by that stage. Just John Robertson and me. It’s a very family-type organization. It’s a bit old-school, but you know how particular we are about helm stations. We make sure everything flows: distribution, movement. That’s not a coincidence. Yeah, CAD is great, and virtual tours and 3D. You can probably do 90 percent on the CAD. But I’ll tell you, on the mock-up, we change stuff. We make sure all the maneuvers are going to flow, all the sheets and halyards, the foot switch. I have to know that I can singlehand this boat. The helm station is crucial. Everything is mocked up, down to: Can I take a shower without getting everything wet? If I open that electrical panel, how long is that going to take? Can I reach the bottom of the fridge? Can I access my steering? I don’t even write these things in the design brief, because it’s understood. We have to turn the boats around quickly (in charter operation). And if anything breaks, we have to replace it right away.

Vive la Difference!

There you have it. One builder unabashedly offers the greatest volume in a given length. One builder seeks a compromise in trading private space for public areas to gather in. One builder willingly trades away the gadgets of home-style comforts for lightness and speed. And one builder aims to balance the difference. Every one of those design criteria we cited at the top — comfort, performance, ease-of-use, good ergonomic flow — is a worthy goal for cat creators to strive for. In the meantime, we can thank Neptune for the risk-­takers who wake up every day and mix these ingredients to their own tastes and share the results with all of us — especially those lucky sailors who get to take them sailing.

Tim Murphy is a Cruising World editor-at-large and a longtime Boat of the Year judge.

About the Author

This article was originally published in Cruising World Magazine and is being reused with permission from the publisher.

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Heavy-Sea Rating

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Heavy-Sea Rating

By Will Bendix, Featured in The Surfer’s Journal

I meet Jonathan Paarman at his warehouse on the outskirts of St. Francis Bay. His directions were simple enough: drive past the manicured thatched condos that run along the canals, then over the bridge, and past the road you’d usually turn down to get to Bruce’s Beauties. I turn left at a big Yamaha sign into a small network of dirt roads. I can still see the ocean and smell the sticky scent of fynbos that clings to the air. Boatyards and workshops sit alongside the road, smattered with rusty informal shacks.

Paarman’s warehouse looks non-descript, a towering shell of gray cement and corrugated iron roofing, like an airplane hanger dropped among the scrub. Inside I discover a hive of activity. The half-built skeleton of a 60-foot catamaran sits raised on enormous blocks and stretches across the warehouse floor. A legion of tradesmen is at work pounding hammers, fitting the cabin, drilling and wiring the exposed guts of the boat. “There’s a lot of surfing going on here,” says Paarman, running his hand along one of the catamaran’s keel hulls as we walk beside it. “This thing is designed to go anywhere.”

At 6’3″ with hands like sledgehammers, Paarman cuts an imposing figure. His barrel chest belies his 62 years of age and is testament to decades spent on the water, rigging sails, and chasing down huge surf. Instead of the booming voice you’d expect, he speaks with a calm, measured cadence. “It takes at least a year to build one of these,” he says with trademark understatement. Then he begins to talk about the many lifetimes of experience that goes into building each boat.

Jonathan Paarman. J.P. The Iceman. Often overlooked as one of the greatest power surfers in the world during the 1970s and 80s, he comes from a rich oceanic pedigree. His uncle was John Whitmore, the rugged pioneer known as “the father of South African surfing.” When Whitmore’s cousin, Ken Paarman, married Sea Point belle Leonie Johnston, it was the merging of two salty bloodlines. “My father Ken was never really into surfing, but he had been fishing forever,” says Paarman. “He used to fish with my uncle John. They fished tuna and dived perlemoen. That’s what you did if you lived around the ocean back then.”

Paarman and his five brothers—Donald, Shaun, Lee, Mark and Roger—grew up in a modest bungalow on the beach in Bakoven, a kelpy bay framed by granite boulders near the seaside suburb of Camps Bay. They were surrounded by an extended clan of uncles and cousins for whom the ocean was simply a way of life.

“It was just there for the taking,” says Paarman. “We grew up on the beach bodysurfing in the shorebreak, playing in tin canoes and watching my uncles surf for hours. When they came in we would jump on their boards. There was no real ‘introduction’ to surfing. It just happened.”

The nascent Cape Town surf scene was vastly different from its warm water counterpart in Durban, in no small part due to the raw nature of the waves. Surfing on the tip of the continent was more about pitting yourself against the elements, whereas Durban was forging a reputation for its high-performance hot-dogging. The Cape surfers were different too—a hardy crew of fishermen and sailors with a predilection for heavy waves. Paarman would become known for seamlessly merging the two styles.

“The guys in Cape Town always rode bigger waves,” he says. “They would ride the Outer Kom, and Sunset was ridden as far back as the 60s. Being a youngster I always had to go with the older guys. They would ride the big waves and I wasn’t going to sit on the beach, so I’d paddle out.”

Paarman surfed his first contest when he was 12 at the Outer Kom, a heavy muscled left that comes out of deep water then bulldozes its way down a shelf strewn with bull kelp. The organizers didn’t want to let the youngster paddle out because the waves were booming, but he managed to convince them otherwise and went on to win the event.

“I first became aware of Jonny in 1968 at the South African Surfing Championships in Cape Town,” recalls 1977 World Champion, Shaun Tomson. “We were competing in the Boys Under 14 Division and he blew my cousin Mike and I away to win the final. He had the same long-armed, swooping style at 13 in those small waves as he did while roaring across a J-Bay wall or going vertical into a bending, 12-foot Sunset Beach northwest bowl.”

At the time, the Cape Peninsula was still an undeveloped wilderness, holding unknown waves in the crook of its cliffs and swathes of wideopen beaches. One of these spots was the Hoek, a powerful wedge that lies at the northern end of Noordhoek beach, which Paarman is attributed with pioneering. “I wouldn’t know who pioneered what or where,” he says dismissively. “We just used to surf there. We may have surfed there first, because the wave was too steep for the old-style surfboards. But eventually we got into it.”

The crisp barrel and wailing shoulder suited Paarman’s style and helped refine the attack he became known for: coming from deep behind the bowl to demolish the lip. Tomson remembers Paarman using this approach when the young South African team arrived at Bells for the 1970 World Championships. “It was early in the morning after a long drive from Sydney. Jonny was the first of us out into the perfect 6 foot surf, packed with the best surfers in the world at the time—Nat Young, Nuuhiwa, Tabeling, Farrelly, Fitz, and others. Peter Drouyn dropped in on Jonny on his first wave and J.P. launched into his trademark swooping bottom turn, went straight back up the face, and cracked an upside-down reo that nearly blew off Drouyn’s head. I never saw anyone drop in on him again. His style was completely unpredictable and totally explosive.”

Thanks to his Cape pedigree, Paarman’s act was also scalable. Kommetjie lies toward the tip of the Cape Peninsula and juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, copping the full brunt of open ocean swells. “When it started maxing out at Cape Town’s beachbreaks, we’d go to the Kom,” he recalls. “That’s where it all happened.”

Besides the Outer Kom, there’s the Crayfish Factory, 365, Sunset, and an assortment of lesserknown reefs that have made it the epicenter of big-wave surfing in Africa. Dungeons, across the bay, would come later, but it was among these deep-water reefs that Paarman honed his taste for power surfing in waves of consequence, looking for the lip when most other surfers were gunning for the channel.

“I used to get criticized sometimes that I would ride too small a board,” he says. “But only once or twice did I have it so big at the Outer that I couldn’t paddle into it because the west swell was just grinding. Otherwise you can hotdog it. You can take off late under the lip, come screaming off the bottom, and whack it again under the lip. If you ride a big 8-foot gun, it’s too easy. That wasn’t my style—you must fucking go for it. I wanted to take off halfway down, pull into the tube, whatever. I wanted the performance.”

This approach served Paarman well when he first headed to Hawaii in 1972.

“People never realized how big the waves are in Cape Town, so going to Hawaii was like getting into a warm bath,” he says. “We were used to big peaks coming in and moving and shifting around at places like Sunset. It’s very similar to the Cape, so we slipped in quickly.”

Paarman’s transition was eased by his friendship with the Aikau family. He had become friends with Eddie after the young Hawaiian came to compete in the Gunston 500 in Durban earlier that year, and J.P. was received warmly in turn by the rest of the Aikau clan. “We got on really well with all of the Hawaiians,” he says. “We often used to go to the Aikau’s house and have a party. Once you were big mates with Eddie and his family it was fine.”

While his peers like Tomson, Rabbit, and PT were busting down the door, J.P.’s quiet approach was markedly different. “Those guys were going for it,” he says, “which is not a problem. But we were in Hawaii and you had to respect the Hawaiians. I think that’s maybe where I got a lot of respect in turn, because I never really gave off that vibe like I was trying to be the greatest.”

As the cameras shifted their focus to document the changing of the guard at Backdoor, Paarman was happy to focus on Sunset, building an intuitive connection with the wave. He recalls sitting deep on the west peak when Eddie and a few other locals paddled up to him and asked incredulously what he was doing there—this was where the locals took off. “I always liked to sit more on the inside, right across the wall, which allowed you to take off deep and then shoot the bowl.”

His relationship with Pipeline was less amicable. Despite relishing the powerful lefts of Outer Kom, Paarman struggled to come to grips with the Banzai. “I got invited to the Pipe Masters but I wasn’t geared for the Pipe,” he says. “The boards I had were killing me. They’d just spin out and I’d get smashed. It wasn’t fun.”

Still, his Hawaiian campaigns earned him a reputation for being nearly fearless. “I’d take off thinking, ‘I’m going to fucking hit the lip on a 10, 12 foot wave,’” he says, laughing. “Or I’d take off so bloody late that you’re getting tubed on the way down, stuff like that.”

But beneath his go-for-broke approach, he was also a calculating thinker. “Having watched him from the water and through the camera lens for years, I came to realize that J.P. was one of the most intelligent surfers around,” says Shafiq Morton, a prolific South African photographer who documented the best of the era. What stood out for Morton was Paarman’s constant analyzing, from the equipment he rode to how he read a lineup and his fellow competitors. “To describe J.P. simply as a wild man was such an underestimation of who he was.”

Paarman was also unflappable, earning him the nickname ‘The Iceman.’ His Hawaiian reputation was cemented when he placed in the finals of the Duke Kahanamoku Invitational and the Smirnoff Pro, both held at Sunset beach in 1976. The same year, he finished runner-up to Shaun Tomson who had become untouchable in the Gunston 500. But a lack of sponsorship money and an indifference to dancing for the cameras gradually saw him drift from the fledgling pro circuit, spending more and more time riding the Cape reefs and working for Whitmore, who had secured the license to build and distribute Hobie Cats in South Africa

Paarman has been involved in board building and sailing since his early teens. By the age of 15, he was a provincial sailing champ and was racing Hobie 14s whenever he wasn’t surfing. “I’d always be in shit because I was sailing miles out to sea, in the fucking shipping lanes,” he cackles.

Through a chance meeting with Dick Metz in Cape Town in 1959, Paarman’s uncle John Whitmore was introduced to Gordon Clark and later Hobie Alter, who were laying the foundation for the global board-building industry at the time. Ever industrious, Whitmore began manufacturing Clark Foam and Hobie Cats in South Africa and J.P. inevitably became his apprentice.

“I used to blow Clark Foam for my uncle and then we did some surfboards in the factory as well,” says Paarman. “We had a little shaping bay but I never really shaped a lot of surfboards. I shaped more windsurfers. Then for many years I was very involved with the Hobie Cats, putting all the aluminum in, constructing them under the guidance of John.”

Paarman’s windsurfing exploits would in fact become legendary as he carved the windblown lineups with the same committed approach he took to surfing. After Whitmore sold his shares in the business, Paarman left and started making windsurfers full-time with Vernon Castle, another talented Cape surfer. He was also sailing religiously, wracking up numerous transatlantic crossings while still pushing the limits surfing around Cape Town. As Derek Hynd would famously comment, “Jonathan Paarman is to the beastly waves of Cape Town what Barry Kanaiaupuni is to Sunset Beach.” But there was one wave that still eluded him.

“We always looked at Dungeons as we went over Chapman’s Peak,” says Paarman. “Sometimes it would be prefect, just huge and spitting, but we didn’t really think it was possible until the mid 80s. That’s when we started surfing it—guys like Pierre de Villiers, Peter Button, myself. The problem there is sitting in the lineup and getting eaten by the sets. That’s probably the worst part about it. And all the water that’s moving around out there. But coming from that background also helped me deal with heavy seas when I was sailing. Getting caught in a big storm is like getting caught inside. You’ve just got to stay calm, drop the sails, and deal with it.

By the late 90s, Paarman turned his attention to mono-hull yachts, building a big ocean-going maxi with a group of friends. Soon he was hired to work for Voyage, one of the biggest yacht manufacturers in South Africa. Within a few years he was running the Cape Town plant that was producing 12 large boats a year. Then his younger brother’s hunger for untapped waves lured him to St Francis Bay.
The seed for Mark Paarman’s wanderlust was planted on his first runs to J-Bay in the 70s, when J.P. would let his unlicensed kid brother drive the kombi on the long haul up from Cape Town. They would camp among the dunes for weeks, living off the fish they caught and riding the sublime waves. While J.P. pursued his pro career, Mark set off for the virgin frontier of Indonesia and was smitten. After traveling the globe, he eventually returned to J-Bay, where he bought a commercial fishing boat and pioneered the local chokka industry.

Chokka or squid fishing is heavy, grueling work but the business thrived, consuming Mark for decades. The urge to explore never waned though, and eventually he had the resources to build an expedition catamaran that would allow him to scour remote archipelagos and reef passes. “Marky wanted something he could really explore on, a cat that could move fast and outrun storms—and carry all his kak!” Paarman says with a laugh, referring to the copious amount of diving, fishing, and surfing gear his brother wanted to haul with him. “He looked around but there was nothing really that could do both, so he decided to build his own.”

Along with his friend John Henrick, a die-hard fisherman who loved the idea, Mark recruited Roger, the youngest of the Paarman brothers, to manage the project. But they needed someone who could breathe life into their vision. “The deal was for me to come up here for a couple of years and build two boats,” recalls Paarman. “That’s how it started—it was all built on Marky’s dream to go surfing.”

Nexus, the boat-building company they founded on the outskirts of St Francis Bay, now supplies handcrafted voyaging catamarans to clients around the world. Paarman points to a workbench in the bustling warehouse, among the molds and industrial machinery. “That was all that was here when I arrived,” he says. “It’s been difficult making a business of it. You build a million dollar boat, but there’s still not a huge amount of money you get out of it because of the materials and the amount of time it takes. But seeing one of these finished, thinking where it will go, it’s a beautiful thing.”

After they built their maiden boat, they needed customers, so Roger took the catamaran to the Annapolis Boat Show in Maryland. “It was the worst possible timing,” recalls Paarman. “The boating industry at that time was just dead. It was right in the middle of the global financial crisis when everything just crashed. But Phil Berman saw it and he loved it.”

The timing was in fact nothing short of serendipitous. Berman, a California yacht broker and former Hobie Cat world champion, was specifically looking to develop an expedition catamaran that married the capacity of a charter boat with some of the performance of a high-tech racing cat. When he saw the Paarmans’ 60 footer, he realized there was no need to reinvent the wheel and they joined forces. “Most charter catamarans are very wide,” explains Paarman. “They’re not fast but they can carry a lot of toys. What we’re making is a fast ocean-going boat, but one that can still carry a lot of gear.”

He points to the belly of the hull under construction. With his fingertips pressed together and hands parted to form a narrow upside-down V, Paarman explains how a sharp bow slices through the water more efficiently, making it faster and less prone to pitching and rolling. “You can see the hulls are quite sleek,” he says, “unlike a normal charter. They’re built to withstand heavy seas. In fact everything is built around this. The bow is what you call a wavepiercing bow, and this is carried through the bottom curve of the boat. There’s a lot of ‘sheer’ all round for speed and comfort.”

Working with naval architect Anthony Key, Paarman has meticulously developed the composites they use to make everything from the hull to the mast, the doors and even the davit— the small crane used to lift the tender. “The whole boat is built around foam sandwich composites made from carbon fiber, E-glass, and epoxy. I was fortunate to have all that experience and knowledge from building Hobie Cats, learning from John Whitmore, from Hobie in California. That’s all come with me through the years and what you see here,” he says, motioning to the factory floor. “But you could never build one of these on your own. The real trick is surrounding yourself with good people, the right people.”

Paarman points out all the other expertise that goes into building a boat, likening it to a floating ecosystem that sustains itself through its water-making systems, electrics, communication systems, and propulsion. Many of the core team who work here are lifelong friends of the Paarmans and the Nexus roll call reads more like a who’s who of South African surfing. Evidence of their shared history lies scattered around the warehouse with surfboards tucked into corners among industrial equipment and hanging from rafters. One yellowing pintail sits wrenched in two on a workbench, the victim of a recent swell. “Productivity definitely slows down if Supers is firing,” Paarman chuckles.

J.P. rarely surfs Supers himself nowadays, preferring to ride the less crowded spots or work on the new model cats, like a 52-foot expedition boat that can be piloted single-handedly. “I often say to my brother, ‘We had it so good in the 70s and 80s, surfing Supers ace out, exploring this coastline.’ How do you really go from that to what it is now? You can’t. You’ve got to look ahead. You’ve got to look to what’s next.”

With Special Thanks To The Surfer’s Journal

About The Author

This article was originally published in The Surfers Journal is being used with express permission from the publisher.

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BALANCE CATAMARANS IS BORN: A BOLD MOVE IN A CHALLENGING MARKET

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BALANCE CATAMARANS IS BORN: A BOLD MOVE IN A CHALLENGING MARKET

Multihull Quarterly Publisher George Day discusses the launch of a new catamaran brand with industry veteran Phillip Berman, New Zealand designer Roger Hill, and Chinese builder Lee Xiangong.

 George Day (GD): Phil, with factories closing all over the world in the yacht industry as a result of the Global Financial Crisis, why have you decided to go into boat building? 

Phillip Berman (PB):  It’s always an act of madness to build boats I suppose.  But I’ve been in the industry long enough to know the primary reason brands and builders fail stems for their lack of understanding of the consumer or failure to deliver a quality product. If you design the wrong boat, or build it improperly, or are forced to sell it for an uncompetitive price, you will fail very quickly in the marine industry. As we annually sell about 50 to 60 brokerage catamarans at The Multihull Company our brokerage team have a very good sense of the market, how it breaks down in various segments, and the range of objections buyers have about different models. I can assure you it’s foolhardy to try to compete with Lagoon, Fountaine Pajot or Robertson and Caine in the Comfort Cat market. Balance Catamarans are focused on a totally different clientele and therefore built in a very different fashion.

GD: Why is that Phil?

PB: Because you have to scale your production and build process to achieve the price point buyers can afford for the type of boat they desire. The big production companies must build in a highly automated fashion to minimize labor hours. It also means they must use cheaper materials in the fabrication of their builds. That does not mean to say any of these major brands are “cheap,” but the fact is, when you are focused on a consumer who does not care deeply about performance, and is in fact focused primarily on interior volume and price, there is no reason to build a boat with lighter and more costly materials. Or to build a boat that is seldom meant to sail in nasty weather far from a port of refuge. At Balance we must spend far more on materials and labor hours because we are building a blue water sailing catamaran, not a motor-sailor for short jaunts around the protected waters of the Caribbean.

Roger Hill (RH): In the end, my goal is to design our hulls as narrow as we can after factoring in the volumes we want inside the boat and the materials we are using. If Phil and Lee were not building the Balance Cats with foam cores, and epoxy foam bulkheads and floors, and Lee was not prepared to triple the labor hours required to construct the boats for Balance, I’d have to design the hulls considerably wider and of course that would come at a significant cost to performance.

Lee Xiangong (LX): I’ve built over 50 of Roger’s power cats in China, and some of them are designed to travel at over 45 knots. This sort of build requires the most careful engineering and laminate schedules and of course the most costly fabrication materials. The great advantage we have at our factory in China is we can afford to use these more costly materials and spend many more man hours on our builds without pricing the Balance catamarans out of the market. In fact, all of us are very confident we are producing the highest quality performance cruising cat for the money in the world. We see no way at all the French can possibly compete with us in the same price points without either using cheaper materials, or finishing their boats inside to a far lower standard.

RH: It’s a very interesting challenge when designing and building a blue water performance cat. On the one hand you are deeply focused on weight – how and where can we shave weight without compromising strength and sea worthiness?  If you error too far toward the light side, in the wrong places, it is easy enough to create a catamaran that feels like a noodle when pushing into stiff seas. I am not going to comment here on some of the specific production cats I’ve sailed so as not to upset anyone, but what I see are two extremes – they are either very heavy, balsa core boats with marine plywood bulkheads that hold their shape well enough in a big sea, but sail very slowly, or they are built too lightly and cheaply and therefore noodle and creak when driven into large seas. I am very sure we could build the Balance Cats even lighter than we do, using reduced laminate schedules, but I use as my engineering criteria a hard sail from Auckland to Tasmania. If all hell breaks loose we want the Balance to be able to press against stiff seas without coming apart.

GD: Lee, China often gets a bad rap on quality?   What do you say about that?

LX: Generalizations about quality from country to country are pretty irrational, as if all French boats hold something in common, or all South African boats, etc. I am told that Gunboat’s used to be built in South Africa, and now they are building their bigger ones here in China. But South Africa also has turned out some very cheap, low quality builds, etc. There are many high quality yachts built here in China, and many very poorly built ones. Here in the Juhai area we have a range of very high end builders.  I will not mention the builders I hold less respect for.

PB: One of my hobbies is cycling and my “Italian” carbon bike was made right here in China. I have since learned nearly every high-end carbon bike is made in China. Along with our I Phones, computers, etc. Here in China you can get any level of quality you want.  We could very certainly produce our boats for far less than we do if we wished to lower our build standards and finish. In fact, if we were not building a blue water performance boat we could easily undersell the French and South African production builders in the Comfort Cat market as our material costs would go way down and our labor hours would be chopped by many thousands. But at Balance we are hard-focused on quality, performance, durability.  All my years in boating and yacht sales have taught me that the devil is in the details and that means the engineering, design and fabrication have to be very exacting.  

GD: Lee, what is your background in building?  What have you learned about deploying the Chinese workforce?

I took my BSC in Shipbuilding Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. I’ve been involved in many of China’s highest technology sailboat projects, including the 68 foot Clipper Round-the-World Yachts. My expertise is in mold making, production scheduling, and quality control. For the past few years I oversaw the construction of about fifty Roger Hill designed Power Cats for Arrow Cat Marine.  What I have learned about deploying the Chinese workforce is that everything has to be heavily engineered and the renderings very clear, which is why I trained in 3D modeling and CNC operations. You can achieve the highest levels of quality in China so long as you are very clear and precise with your workers on what you are trying to achieve.  It is very helpful that with the Balance Catamaran we are working again with Roger Hill, as his engineering is careful and we have a good working relationship based on our experience together.

GD: Why Balance Catamarans Phil?  Do you have a problem with what you call Comfort production cats?      

PB:  No, not at all. In fact if I had to take a charter holiday with a big family in the BVI I’d get the biggest cat I could find for the least amount of money – and that, in fact, is what drives the charter market and drives the major production builders – as well it should. The “big box” end of the market will always represent 85% of the catamarans built. And I can assure you, at The Multihull Company, the sale of such cats will always remain a huge part of our daily business in brokerage. For folks who plan to sail around the Caribbean, or the Bahamas, and do very little passage making these boats are just fine and represent good value for a wide range of buyers. I know as a yacht broker that the Balance line we are building is for a very limited few. This project is more or less a labor of love for me, because I am just building the sort of boat I would want for myself, and working with the team I have put together whom I feel confident will build that boat.

GD: I hear a lot of people say, who needs performance?  I am retired, what difference does it make if I average 6 knots or 9 knots?

PB: It really starts to mean something for the more limited market of buyers who are real adventurers, or consistent passage makers. Performance means the ability to sail well on all points of sail, the ability to sail away from bad weather and the reduction of exposure to it. A 15% to 25% percent jump in performance underway is huge if you are passage making. At the boat show docks people are focused on space and the Corian counter tops, this I know all too well, but eventually everyone learns these cats are meant to move through the water – under sail and power, and how swiftly they do it, and how comfortably, is vitally important if they intend to really go places. If the intention is to mostly park the boat it makes total sense to focus on the cheapest and most spacious options you can find. While it may be slow and uncomfortable underway, or less stout for the serious seas one might encounter when venturing far afield, it isn’t underway very often so that’s an acceptable trade off.  

That said, and this is how I came upon our brand name, a Balance ought to be struck between comfort at anchor and safety and performance underway for those who really want to sail. I just truly feel the Balance has largely been lost by the major production builders because they must sell over 50% of their production directly into charter programs. They start with charter needs at the top when designing their boats. A very telling fact is that in the mid-90’s a 47 foot cat carried 27 hp motors, in the mid-2000’s 40 hp motors, and now they are often carrying 75 hp motors. If it takes a 75 hp motor to push a 45 foot cat you know you have a heavy, high windage yacht with very wide hulls to push through the water. And to be bluntly honest I think the current crop of cats with massive flat windows or forward porches are potentially dangerous in large seas. I know of a few cats with large forward facing vertical windows that have been hit with big breakers and broke.

RH: I would add that in my experience there is a limited class of people who just frankly love to sail, care how their boat sails, and get enormous satisfaction and pride from really sailing. So many of the cats today I see are really hybrid trawlers or motor sailors. As Phil says, when you see builders offering 75 HP Turbo engines on 44 foot cats you know you’ve got a motor sailor. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, I’ve designed and built a range of powercats and motorsailors, but such boats are not satisfying to passionate sailors. And if you care at all about the planet, these are not Green boats!   As one of Phil’s brokers, Derek Escher once noted, the greenest boat is a sailboat – a real sailboat. Turning on the engines is a last resort. So the Balance is a bit more of purist’s boat, although we feel we have kept enough comfort in her to satisfy most cruising couples.

GD: Phil, you were heavily involved with the Dolphin brand and globally distributed that brand for many years. What happened to Dolphin?  And why now Balance?   The boats seem to have many similarities.

PB: We had a very ideal and special situation with Dolphin that began in 2003, when I partnered with Philipe Pouvreau and the Pimenta family. The boat came along at the right time, we had the perfect team to build them, and the Brazilian currency and labor market at the time were favorable to build such a high labor hour boat.  We had an excellent run, selling about 24 of them from 2003 to 2007, but each and every year of our production the dollar slid to the Brazilian Reles. Our costs just kept getting higher and higher and we had to raise the price of the boat massively in a short period of time. When the global financial crisis came Dolphin was hit by the perfect storm – a declining buyer pool and a far more costly product. In so many respects, the Balance project is meant to replace the fantastic experience we had building the Dolphin brand – limited production, high labor hour boats, with good performance for a small but passionate buying pool.

GD: How do Dolphins and these smaller, boutique brands fare on the resale market?

PB: Interestingly, the Dolphin has held up better on resale than just about any other cat that was sold new during her build tenure. Dolphin’s and Catana’s have held up nicely in resale value and I believe this is so simply because when it is time for a seller to sell they are not competing with the resale of so many phased out charter boats, or an oversupply of the same model created by the larger production builders. I feel confident it will be so as well for our Balance cats. Anytime you produce a quality product with a limited supply your resale prospects will remain strong. I have seen this occur with the Antares, the former PDQ, with the Dolphin, and with the older Catana’s and Gunboats.

GD: Roger, why the daggerboards with the small mini keels?

RH: The mini keels are quite shallow and meant to protect the sail-drive legs and rudders if the boat were to strike a log or something underway. Also, the mini keels protect the hulls if the boat is grounded in shallow water. We also designed the mini-keels so that the boat can rest nicely bows down on a beach. The dual daggerboards, of course, are to make certain the Balance points at a high angle into the wind with minimal side-slipping and infinitely less drag while sailing off the wind. Phil and I think this is the right compromise for the voyaging sailor. It strikes a Balance between protection, utility, safety and performance. Again, Phil and I did not set about to create a racing cat here but a cat that is safe, comfortable, and yet turns a very nice speed on all points of sail.

GD: Lee, how many labor hours will go into a Balance Cat?

LX: The number will vary a good deal because our boats are more customized than others and our buyers pretty sophisticated, demanding a range of different fit-outs. But if you remove the time associated with installation of special gear, or cabin and salon modifications, each 421 will take about 17,000 labor hours to build, the 450 another 2,000.  All of our drawers and cabinets are built with our own CNC router, and cored foam sandwhich, so the level of cabinetry we offer is considerably more costly and finished than what I have seen from the production builders in France and South Africa.  I do not think they can build cabinets to the standard we do with their labor rates. Also, we are installing pre-preg epoxy bulkheads, using vinylester resin, infusing a great deal, foam core floorboards, etc. We also take an enormous amount of time on our wiring and systems fit out.

GD: Phil, how many boats do you intend to build each year?

PB: We are organized at present to build no more than six Balance 421 and 450’s in our first year and we may just stick with that number. We could easily ramp up to do 10, but we’ll never build more than that on an annual basis. We would much rather have fewer satisfied customers than grow to a scale that becomes unwieldly. This way we can carefully manage each sale, each customer, ourselves, offering a far higher level of customer care and intimacy, just as we did with Dolphin.

GD: What are your plans for larger boats?

PB: We have entered into a partnership with a builder in South Africa to build a Sixty footer on a very limited custom basis, the Balance 601. We are in the design phase now for a 48 and 52 but have yet to settle on the details of where she will be built.

GD: So when can we see one? 

PB: We have one 421 and one 450 under build now. The plan is to ship a 450 over to the U.S. for the Annapolis Boat Show in October 2013. But anyone is welcome to visit our factory in China to see the boats under build. We are very proud of the product and know our boats will stand up to the highest level of scrutiny. I think I’ve assembled an amazing team of experts for this project and am excited, to say the least.

GD: Thanks a lot Phil, Roger, and Lee. We look forward to seeing the Balance 450 at Annapolis in 2013. 

Originally Published in Multihulls Quarterly Magazine

Multihull Quarterly Publisher George Day discusses the launch of a new catamaran brand with industry veteran Phillip Berman, New Zealand designer Roger Hill, and Chinese builder Lee Xiangong.

This article was originally published in April, 2013.

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CATAMARAN VS MONOHULL

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CATAMARAN VS MONOHULL

WHICH IS BEST FOR YOU?

 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:

  1. Is a sailing catamaran really right for them?
  2. If so, what is the best catamaran for their needs and budget?
  3. And which catamaran offers them the most value for their dollar?

Here I’ll endeavor to tackle the first question by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of a catamaran over a monohull.

COMFORT AT ANCHOR

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:

  • Catamarans are considerably more stable than a monohull. As such, they do not bang back and forth in swells. So catamaran cruisers can eat, sleep, and live far more comfortably on the hook than a monohuller.
  • Catamarans are much wider than monohulls and therefore provide enormous aft cockpits. In tropical climates this is an enormous plus because cruisers tend to spend the majority of their time dining, reading, and lounging in the cockpit under the protection of the bimini.
  • The main salon of a catamaran is on the same (or nearly the same) level as the cockpit. Unlike a monohuller, catamaran sailors do not step down into a deep dark place (where the windows are generally above eye level), but rather straight from the cockpit into a light filled salon. I don’t mean to get New Age here, but catamaran sailors truly “Live in the Light.” Onboard a catamaran you remain intimately connected to the world outside. This makes cooking, reading, dining, navigating and lounging far more pleasant on a catamaran than a monohull.
  • Because catamarans are more stable, those onboard do not enter into an extended stowing routine whenever they hoist anchor. Similarly, catamaran sailors do not enter into an extended un-stowing routine when they drop anchor. Having lived on both catamarans and monohulls, I cannot stress what a huge plus this is for live-aboard sailors.
  • When sailing with three or more people catamarans offer much more privacy as the two hulls, and the suites and heads within them, are far away from each other.

SPEED UNDER SAIL

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.

COMFORT UNDERWAY

Because a catamaran does not heel it offers far more comfort underway than a monohull.

For example:

  • Cooking is much easier on a cat underway and more pleasant as you are looking out on the world and not “down below.” Most catamarans do not have gimbaled stoves and ovens because they simply don’t need them.
  • Your guests are far less prone to sea sickness because you have mostly fore and aft pitching and very little beam-to-beam motion. Catamarans don’t roll from swell to swell like a monohull.
  • Walking on the deck of a cat underway is far easier as the boat is sailing flat. This makes sail changes and reefing much, much easier and a lot safer. The danger of falling overboard on a catamaran is considerably less than on a monohull.
  • Finally, it is much nicer to sleep on a boat that doesn’t heel.

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.

SAFETY

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.

MANEUVERABILITY

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.

HAULING, STORAGE AND SLIPPAGE

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.

COST

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.

MONOHULLS ARE ROMANTIC

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.”

About Phillip Berman

Phillip Berman is the president of The Multihull Company and a lifetime catamaran sailor and racer. He grew up racing Hobie Cats in California in the late 1960’s and published his first book on catamaran racing at the age of seventeen. Other Articles by Phillip Berman Include:

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DAGGERBOARDS VS KEELS

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DAGGERBOARDS VS KEELS

WHICH IS BEST FOR ME?

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:

PROS

  • A daggerboarded cat will sail consistently higher into the wind than a cat with keels. Typically between 5 to 7 degrees higher. This added speed and pointing ability 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. Sometimes you cannot “run for cover” – you must “beat for cover.”
  • A daggerboarded cat, all things being equal, will sail at least 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 long-range 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 2 to 2.5 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 half-way 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.

CONS

  • Daggerboards are very costly to construct. A builder must create dual dagger-boards as well as dual dagger-board trunks, along with the winches and pulleys to raise and lower them. Dual daggerboards add about $30,000 to the construction cost of a 45 foot catamaran.
  • Dagger-boarded cats are not a good idea for bare-boat chartering because bare-boat sailors run aground a lot. Even if they are told to raise the dagger-boards when they are not beating, they forget which results in broken daggerboards. Charter sailors do not 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 your daggerboard(s) in the down position and plow into a hard reef at high speed, you will do serious damage to the bottom of your boat. While most daggerboarded cats have mini-skegs to protect the rudders and saildrives from a grounding, a high speed collision with a reef could do major damage to the bottom of your catamaran.
  • Daggerboard trunks take away a modest amount of interior room from the inside of each hull.

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT DAGGERBOARDS

  • Daggerboards are for racers only. Not so. I am convinced this myth is propagated by builders who do not offer dagger-boards 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 uncleat 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% 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, Sud Composites, 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.
  • For the most part, daggerboards are preferred by serious offshore voyagers who insist that their catamarans sail upwind swiftly and as high as a monohull. They also want a catamaran that is considerably faster than a monohull on all points of sail, not only because they enjoy sailing fast, but because it is safer.
  • We sell a lot of used catamarans at The Multihull Company. Most of them have keels. As for me, if given a choice, a dagger-boarded cat is my preference. But I am a true enthusiast!

About Phillip Berman

Phillip Berman is the president of The Multihull Company and a lifetime catamaran sailor and racer. He grew up racing Hobie Cats in California in the late 1960’s and published his first book on catamaran racing at the age of seventeen. Other Articles by Phillip Berman Include:

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SAILDRIVES OR STRAIGHT SHAFTS? WHICH IS BEST FOR ME?

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SAILDRIVES OR STRAIGHT SHAFTS? WHICH IS BEST FOR ME?

Many buyers who contact us these days develop some very strong personal preferences about a range of things: dagger boards versus keels, Yanmar versus Volvo, Flybridge versus Bulkhead Helms, etc. etc. Many buyers send us long “Must Have” lists. 

One of the “Must Have’s” we are getting from some buyers these days is: “straight shaft engines.” Either there is a builder or two out there touting them because that is what they happen to offer, or some forum or blog or owner group stating their superiority, but we see a bit of an uptick in people who think straight shafts are the only way to go. What is clear to me is that most of these catamaran purchasers do not fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of straight shafts over sail drives or recognize how many limitations and negatives they pose for catamarans under 50 feet in length. Let me clear a few things up.

Straight Shaft Advantages

  • Nobody currently makes sail drives for engines much larger than 75 horse power. As such, on most production cruising cats over 50 feet you will only be able to get straight shafts.
  • Straight shafts are relatively mechanically simple. You have a shaft coming directly off the back of the engine that runs through a seal and then to a cutlass bearing and out into the water. 
  • Straight shafts are generally cheaper and easier to repair than sail drives.
  • Straight shafts force the designer and builder to place the engines further forward in the boat and anytime you move weight toward the center you reduce pitching momentum. Many racing multihulls carry their engines in the very center of their hulls for this reason

Straight Shaft Disadvantages

  • Straight shafts require precision engine alignment and tend to put much more pressure on engine mounts. Engines often need to be realigned.
  • Straight shafts are always louder and produce more vibration than sail drives. In larger cats with long sterns and space the engines and shafts can remain aft of the sleeping quarters in separate sound insulated compartments. On smaller cats this is generally not the case. 
  • Straight shafts produce less effective horsepower at the prop because the prop is at an angle. On a typical 40 foot horse power engine you lose 3 to 4 horse power over a cat with sail drives. 
  • The less the prop is angled down the better the performance on a straight shaft. That usually means positioning the engines quite forward of the sterns. This in-turn produces the enormous negatives of having to house the engines under the aft bunks, or a portion of them, in most cats under 50 feet in length. This amounts to: louder inside the living spaces, more vibration, more heat, and a potential for engine exhaust to encroach on the yachts interior. It also makes it a bit more difficult to properly ventilate the engine rooms.
  • Sleeping close to, or over the top of a running engine, especially a straight shaft, can be noisy and hot.
    Most shaft seals are supposedly “dripless,” but anyone who has spent time around them knows that when the dripless seal starts to drip you had better take care of it fast. I have seen plenty of flooded engine rooms in my years on straight shaft cats. Both seals and cutlass bearings are therefore best replaced every two to three years. Straight shafts, in short, are not maintenance free.

Sail Drive Advantages

  • Sail drives are very quiet.
  • Exact engine alignment is not critical. 
  • Sail drives can be positioned further aft in cats with ease and therefore make it possible to keep the engines out of the aft staterooms and in their own watertight engine rooms. On cats under 50 feet the design trend today is to produce sharper bows and wider, flared sterns aft, both to manage the engine weight aft and to get the cat to sit back on her haunches and pierce through waves to dampen pitching moment. A good example of this is the evolution of the Leopard 47 (a straight shaft boat) to the far superior sailing Morelli and Melvin designed Leopard 46 (a sail drive boat.)
  • Sail drives offer more horsepower at the prop.

Sail Drive Negatives

  • Sail drives generally cost more to replace than shafts. The typical drive leg for a 40 to 50 foot cat is between $3,500 and $5,000 dollars.
  • Sail drives legs must always have good zinc protection or there is a danger of the shaft corroding. Sloppy zinc inspections can lead to the destruction of sail drive legs. I’ve seen plenty of this at surveys from sloppy owner care.
  • Sail drives carry seals that are meant to prevent salt water incursion into the lubricated shaft leg. If the seals are compromised salt water can enter the drive leg and lead to internal corrosion. Note: water incursion in a drive leg is easily seen if one inspects the sail drive fluid level and finds milky looking oil. Most prudent sailors replace their sail drive seals at least every other haul out. If they see milky fluid they change the fluid right away and then replace the seals at the next haul out. (The newer drives allow you to change the oil from inside the engine room easily, without having to haul the boat.). When a sailor finds milky fluid on the older sail drive legs it is good to run the engines and transmissions frequently. This will keep the sail drive oil emulsified until the next haul when the seals can be replaced. 
  • Some older sail drives had cone clutch or shifting problems. These were sometimes found on Yanmar SD 50 drive legs. That problem has been overcome with the new generation drives. 

I have heard some internet chatter that straight shafts are better if you run aground, but I strongly disagree. If you run aground hard with shafts or sail drives and for any reason they are not protected by a keel, or mini keels, or a skeg, you are going to have a bit of a mess on your hands either way. One of the reasons I much prefer engines in their own watertight engine rooms is that if one does run aground and water enters the engine room from a broken shaft or sail drive leg, the water remains in the engine room, never enters the living quarters where water damage leads to major floor and woodwork repair in general. 

The upshot of all this: Getting hung up on shafts or sail drives as a major purchasing concern is quite unwarranted. If having a shaft is something you are so convinced you must have, bear in mind you will live with all the advantages as well as the disadvantages noted above. More importantly, you will learn very quickly when you start to shop for a cat that 95% of the builders today have all concluded that the advantages of sail drives far outweigh their disadvantages on cats below 50 feet and are therefore superior for use in the smaller modern catamaran. I happen to agree. 

About Phillip Berman

Phillip Berman is the president of The Multihull Company and a lifetime catamaran sailor and racer. He grew up racing Hobie Cats in California in the late 1960’s and published his first book on catamaran racing at the age of seventeen. Other Articles by Phillip Berman Include:

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MODERN MULTIHULLS

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MODERN MULTIHULLS

By Andrew Cross

New designs dazzle with innovation Multihull designers are an amazingly creative bunch, always looking to the future instead of clinging to the past. The crop of new designs in build this fall is no exception. From South Africa to the U.S. to Australia, catamarans are leading the evolutionary wave.

GUNBOAT 66

The new 66-footer from Gunboat is a flat-out performance cruiser that has the capability of sailing at speeds usually reserved for the high end of the racing scene. Twenty knots is not out of the question in the right conditions.

The first 66 was designed for a triple circumnavigator who was tired of making 150-mile days and looking for more. The new 66 delivers 280 to 350 miles a day in trade wind conditions, which will enable the owner to cross oceans twice as fast as before and will allow him to visit more great destinations on his fourth circumnavigation.

Built in South Africa, the 66 has hulls designed by Morrelli & Melvin with lots of input from Gunboat’s founder Peter Johnstone. In the last 10 years, Gunboats have sailed nearly two million sea miles, so Johnstone and his crew have a lot of experience to draw upon. The rig is cutting edge modern and the sail plan is designed to give the boat the horsepower to really fly. With deep daggerboards, the 66 will behave very nicely upwind, too. The 66 has ample bridgedeck clearance, so wave slapping is reduced to the absolute minimum.

The all carbon and epoxy construction, built to round-the-world-racing standards, has proven to be exceptionally durable, quiet and safe. The ride of a Gunboat can be described as “on the water” rather than through it. Many are surprised by how smooth, responsive and comfortable these light cats are in the roughest of seas. The 66’s interior has a huge saloon with a raised galley, dinette and inside nav station. The boat is built on a semi-custom basis, so you can configure sleeping cabins to suit your needs, but the standard plan shows two large double cabins forward and two smaller guest or kids’ cabins aft. Check the 66 and its sister ships out at www.gunboat.com.

MORRELLI & MELVIN 65

Gino Morrelli and Pete Melvin are on a roll. Their designs—from little A Cats to the giant BMW Oracle trimaran that won the America’s Cup last winter—have been setting the standard. And now they have contributed significantly to the new America’s Cup 72 cat rule that will prevail through Cup 34 in 2013.

On the cruising side, the new M&M 65 is an attractive world cruiser with reverse angle wave piercing bows and teardrop-shaped hulls that make the boat very stable in a seaway and fast. From the sensible but powerful cruising rig that can be handled by a solo watchkeeper to the advanced energy system built around solar energy and the new Mastervolt Lithium Ion batteries, the boat is set up for long distance cruising and living aboard. M&M have partnered with West Coast builders Westerly Marine to offer the M&M 65 on a semi-custom basis. 

The Moxie 61 “Tosca”

 

MOXIE 61

The new 61-foot cruising cat from Moxie Yachts in South Africa is a distinct design that will stand out in any anchorage. Most noticeable is the aft-stepped mast and huge fore triangle. The relatively small mainsail flies from a tall, all-carbon fiber wing mast. The headsails are all on roller furling units, so you can sail with a small jib, the 100 percent Solent, the reacher or a free-flying asymmetrical spinnaker. All of these, except the spinnaker, can be controlled from the cockpit. The hulls have narrow entries and daggerboards for enhanced upwind performance.

The second innovation you will notice is the full beam coach roof. The designers—VPLP from France—have done away with side decks, so you climb to the coach roof to go forward. This opens a huge amount of interior volume so the galley can be a real kitchen that is separate from the living and eating areas. The living spaces flow through two round doorways to the cockpit or patio aft. With the saloon spanning the full beam, the sleeping cabins are below decks. The standard layout has three double cabins with en suite heads and crew quarters. The Moxie 61 is new and completely unique. Learn more about it at www.moxieyachts.com.

SMG 50PLUS

Holding nothing back, the designers at SMG Multihull South Africa, a company that is managed by its Austrian owners, offer the unique and innovative SMG 50plus as a fast, comfortable performance cruising catamaran. The cat sports an A-mast instead of the standard single spar. The A-mast is mounted atop the outboard hulls; all sails are on roller furling systems, including the mainsail, which has no boom and is trimmed like a genoa. The deck layout is somewhat unique, with the open cockpit forward of the cabin house.

You will see this on Gunboats and Atlantic cats. All lines and sheets run to the cockpit so the helmsman can operate the boat singlehanded. The interior has the dinette and nav station in the raised cabin and the galley and sleeping cabins in the two hulls. There is no aft cockpit, so all outdoor living will be forward. SMG offers the 50plus with a diesel-electric power package, an advanced hybrid system that will reduce the boat’s energy footprint. For more information on the unique SMG 50plus, visit www.smg-multihull.com.

KNYSNA 480

The new Knysna 480, also built in South Africa, follows in the wake of the successful K 440. Designed by Angelo Lavranos, the new 480-foot catamaran has quite a different look than many of the cats out there today.

The bow and stern are sharply angled forward, visible chines run the length of the hull above the waterline, and the cabintop extends aft to become the hard bimini top over the open cockpit. Because of the way the bimini was designed, the steering station is basically a man hold.

From the helmsman’s seat, you can look out over the cabintop for a full 360-degree view. The steering position has a little hardtop of its own so you can sit at the helm somewhat out of the sun. The aft cockpit is huge. The boat can be set up for chartering, so storage space has been allocated for diving gear, iceboxes and fishing gear.

The rig itself is simplicity, with a high roach, full-battened mainsail and fractional jib. You can add a roller furling reacher and a spinnaker if you are looking for downwind performance. The interior can be configured for the “owner’s” version or the “charter” version. And you can have the boat with the galley in the saloon or positioned down in one hull. For more on the new Knysna 480, visit www.knysnayachtco.com.

RADICAL BAY 8000

As the name indicates, this is not a plain vanilla cruising cat. The Radical Bay 8000 is a radical take on how to rig a cruising catamaran.

The “biplane” rig has been experimented with for years and has worked well on boats designed to break speed records. That’s not exactly the brief for a home-built 26-foot family cat, but the rig does simplify the sail plan by eliminating stays and flying the sails on freestanding carbon tubes with fixed booms.

On deck, the boat has a cockpit in each hull and either a rigid bridgedeck between them or just simple netting. The boat is steered with tillers that are linked. Daggerboards in both hulls will enhance windward performance. The port hull has the head aft, the below decks seating and table amidships, and a single berth forward. The starboard hull has the galley amidships with a double berth aft and a single berth forward.

The Radical 8000 was designed to be home built, either from the raw plans or kit supplied by the designers. For less than $30,000 (not counting the 1500 hours it takes to build it), the boat is a very affordable and fun little cruising cat, with an unusual but useful rig. For more information on the design, visit www.schionningdesigns.com.au (do not omit the .au…trust us).

The boat is now being built commercially by Radical Catamarans in Virginia. For more information on how to buy a finished Radical Bay 8000, go to www.sailradical.com.

About Multihulls Quarterly

This article was originally published in 2011 and is being used with permission by Multihulls Quarterly and Blue Water Sailing.

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