Which Cats can actually sail?

[smj]

Originally Posted by donradcliffe

Trying to get out from under your cat, are you?

1. The multihulls don't come out and play with the monos in Santa Cruz, even for the Wednesday night beer can races. So, I'll have to go with something from out of town, like the 2023 SoCal 300 race, which is mostly reaching and running.

https://yachtscoring.com/event_resul...er=1&eID=15549

First to finish was a TP 52 in 23 hours and 45 minutes. Five HOURS behind the Class A monos was a Gunboat 62.

2. The cost of a high performance cat is 2 or 3 times the cost of a high performance mono.

3. The higher performance and more fun to sail the cat is, the more likely
it is to capsize in a gust unless it is reefed down. That is why you don't see many 200+ miles per day cat passages.

https://www.yachtingworld.com/all-la...nd-race-152084
First boat in, a Gunboat 80. Absolutely thrashed a TP 52. About 25% faster? My guess is the TP had a hard time handling the high winds.

[donradcliffe]

Originally Posted by smj

https://www.yachtingworld.com/all-la...nd-race-152084
First boat in, a Gunboat 80. Absolutely thrashed a TP 52. About 25% faster? My guess is the TP had a hard time handling the high winds.

Gnarly conditions. Only 3 multihull entries finished out of 18 entries. In IRC 0, 11 out of 27 entries finished. Wonder who had more trouble with the high winds?

A Gunboat 80 costs over $10 million. A top of the line TP52 is $2 million.

[Snore]

Originally Posted by Tupaia

There are so many misconceptions here.



Written by someone who has never really sailed a real performance cat. Leaward engine to go to windward is just baloney.



.

Got a punch of miles behind me, while getting paid good money to move boats. My boats ONLY run leeward engine. Why? Because if a large wave lifts the windward side, I never have to worry about sucking air.

[smj]

Originally Posted by donradcliffe

Gnarly conditions. Only 3 multihull entries finished out of 18 entries. In IRC 0, 11 out of 27 entries finished. Wonder who had more trouble with the high winds?

Obviously the TP52 since the Gunboat spanked its ass! �� And first and second place went to multihulls.

[BobFord]

I have always owned cats because my women will sail in them . Simples !! Anyhow ,my previous was a Crowther 45 and was arguably , the best ,all round ,performer. Today ,I sail a 32 tonne that needs a good breeze / gale , to sail well. You can't have it all in a cat !

[Kettlewell]

Back to cruising cats. I've cruised in company with similar-sized cruising cats heavily laden for actual cruising and there is very little difference in speed between a similar-sized mono. That's for day sailing and short passages of a few days down in the Caribbean where the wind blows pretty good. Yes, if headed downwind the cats do well, but get the wind forward of the beam in 6-8 foot seas for a bit and they drop back. Most cruisers will throttle back when going to windward, and even if your cat can go fast that way do you really want to be leaping off the wave tops and crashing along at 12 knots? Yes, there are faster cats, but those aren't the big, comfy cats loaded up with all the cruising gear. Even when they are faster there isn't the same feel as a good sailing mono.

[Tupaia]

Originally Posted by donradcliffe

2. The cost of a high performance cat is 2 or 3 times the cost of a high performance mono.

There we have it in a nutshell affordability is the primary reason everybody doesn't sail cats.

[fxykty]

Our performance cat is heavily loaded - that is, we’ve put enough stuff on board to live the life we want to that we’ve lowered the boat to her fully loaded waterlines. That’s 3500kg of stuff into a light ship hull. We do have a lot of waterline, and bought an older boat to start with so that we could afford the waterline.

We passage plan on 200 mile days, 230 if we know there’s going to be beam reaching (TWA). The boat is so easily driven that 8 to 10 knots is effortless on nearly every sail angle in anything over 10 knots TWS. The joy of an easily driven cat is that we can reef down extensively and still sail within a half knot of our average unreefed speed - the reefing removes the high speed surfs into the high teens/low 20s but doesn’t affect the 8-10 knots average boat speed. And that gives us 30-40 knots of gust resistance, which is helpful to reduce stress levels in stronger winds and/or unsettled conditions. When passaging, we reef to the gusts and don’t unreef during the lulls.

Yes, we sometimes slow down for comfort.Then we sail 7-8 knots boat speed.

We NEVER need to run an engine to keep the boat sailing, regardless of the sailing angle. We do run an engine or both if we want to keep our passage speed up and the winds are light. If we don’t care about passage time, we’ll sail slower without resorting to the engines. Going 2 knots boat speed is very exciting after several hours of 1.5 knots, when it’s blowing 3-4 knots TWS.

The new designs (specifically referring to Outremer, but the others in that category are generally not much different) are heavier and more powerful with flatter hulls. This gives them higher top and average speeds and more sail area to maintain speed in lower winds, but their passage averages are not much different from ours as you still need to reef down for comfortable two-up cruising. Coastal cruising when you can push a bit for a short period of time they’re faster than us.

But if you want to talk larger performance (cruising?) cats like Gunboats and custom ones like Roger Hills, those boats can be easily pushed to 500+ mile days, but require skilled crews that are always ‘on’. The Roger Hill designed Kotuku https://powercatsnz.com/index.cfm/de...ing-catamaran/ was a marina neighbour of ours and one year sailed Auckland - Denerau in 2 days 4 hours (1200 miles) riding the back of a front. They had six professional crew plus the owner and his wife - three crew per watch, hand steering and hand held main sheet. On the way back to NZ a few months later from Fiji the owner decided he wanted to visit Minerva Reefs, a 600 mile diversion to windward. That added a day to the passage back, not including the day they spent at the reef. You’ll never find performance and comfort like that in any sort of monohull, not even the (ocean racing) foiling ones.

[fcftampa]

I´d like to share this charts I've downloaded somewhere a while ago. Sorry can't find who to credit for creating them.

[Kinkircating]

Originally Posted by fcftampa

I´d like to share this charts I've downloaded somewhere a while ago. Sorry can't find who to credit for creating them.

Charts are super helpful reference points, but I’d strongly recommend doing your own due diligence as no two boats are built exactly the same and certainly there are more than a few manufacturers who are nowhere close to their published lightship displacement numbers. Also need to make sure you are comparing apples to apples when they state their SA/D ratios as it’s never as easy as just reading what is published on their website.

It’s a decent starting point though, realistically very few boats sail to their polars the designer originally published.

[catsketcher]

Don has his reference point of racing, but I can use the reference point of 4 years coastal cruising my 38 daggerboard cat. The number of times we got passed by monos under sail was 4 times in about 15 000 miles. The number of monos we passed was immense - upwind and down.

We got passed by
- Wild thing - delivering with big crew to Hamilton Island in a 25 knot blow - they were stonking and we were taking it easy.
- A Cole 43 in light dead downwind conditions - they had a full masthead spinnaker up and did us to rights.
- a couple of other racers being delivered to the Whitsundays for race week.

As for not being able to carry your stuff - that is totally incorrect. We lived as a family of four with enough water and food for months, and kids toys and surfboards and two dinghies and the boat still sailed really well. You can't take everything with you but you can certainly take enough - it is good to learn what enough is and it is not everything. It's a great life lesson.

People who haven't lived and cruised on proper daggerboard cats don't know what they can do. The aim is not to do 20 knots, but to do 7 knots in 9 knots of breeze under Code zero, or lope to windward with the kids making lego on the table and still get to the anchorage. Or get it on when the conditions are just right, or sail to windward when all the monos, and fat cats, are motor sailing.

Don't listen to people who haven't sailed them. Get on board a cheap Woods Eclipse or a Crowther Windspeed - you don't need heaps of money to get a lovely performance cat - again that is just dead wrong. You just need to listen to those who know them.

[CarlF]

Having bought a cat (a Leopard 50) three years ago after having spent over 40 years sailing monohulls, I have a pretty good perspective on this.

First - charter cats are miserably slow for four reasons

1) Props - charter cats have fixed props rather than folding/feathering. This takes off 1kt or more of speed.

2) Sails - The charter sails are cross cut dacron that can't hold the shape needed for good upwind speed. My trip-radial crimpless sails give the boat remarkably good upwind performance. In 17kt apparent wind I can do 7+ knots at 32 degrees AWA with a tacking angle of 110 degrees (measured off the track on the chartplotter so it included leeway). This is better than many cruising monohulls can do.

3) No downwind sails are provided on charter cats. The cat main can't be let out much on a run because of the swept back spreaders. And the genoa is small. We have an Oxley Levante parasail which makes the cat faster downwind than any cruising mono I've owned. It's sailed with both the mainsail and genoa furled. 8kts boat speed with 8kt apparent wind is typical.

3) Sail trim - It took a year for this monohull sailor and sometimes racer to learn how to trim a cat. The large big roach main requires much more attention to getting the leach right (battens aligned with the boom). And most charter sails are too stretchy to ever be trimmed right.


Of course, many of the other previous comments are true. Not overloading the boat is critical. That's one reason we went with a 50' so we could put in toys like washing machines and multiple freezers without overloading. And the extra waterline length helps a lot. I can keep up with and sometimes pass 45ft so called "performance cruising cats" that cost $500k-$1.5M more than my boat.

[Tupaia]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1ndFGEhBc

[Leadfree]

The ability of a boat is largely dependent on the ability of the sailor.

[FlyingScot]

I would echo what many say here.
Take any catamaran from the big 3 builders.
Add: Folding/Feathering props, expensive sails that also include a screecher and a spinnaker of some sort. Then add a knowledgeable catamaran sailor and it will sail well enough.