Some of our readers seem to have a difficult time understanding how someone (me in this case) who was a passionate advocate for multihulls back in the day is mostly lukewarm on the subject in 2010...
It's not that I'm anti-multihulls these days, it's simply that as far as I am concerned, a lot of the promise of multihulls has been squandered in pandering to the greed factor, resulting in much of what passes for cruising multihulls not making a lot of sense.
In the not so long distant past there were a lot of designers who saw multihulls as a way of doing more with less, as opposed to how to get the maximum income and hype out of a project. I'm pretty sure in the late 70's if I told James Wharram or Jim Brown that the average fifty-foot cruising cat would now cost nearly a million dollars, they'd have pointed me to the nearest facility with padded rooms and a detox center... How times change!
An oft repeated reason for losing the ballast in those days and going with a cat or a tri was that they were more easily driven and you needed less sail or horsepower to drive them, which in my mind still makes a lot of sense... Fast forward to today and I notice that a forty-foot cat is more likely to have a taller rig, more sail area, and more HP than a forty-something monohull that they are anchored next to. Kind of makes you think...
Actually I'm not here today to rant about what is wrong with cats and tris but to point out a neat project that Eric Henseval has on his drawing board and a cat design that show great promise...
This design is sensible in packing in what you need in an eight-meter envelope and for a couple with simple tastes would be a magic carpet both willing and able to take them wherever they wanted to go... Kinda says it all!
Sadly, there is no rig shown and this is an area that I usually find problematic on designs vectored at home builders, as the designer after drawing a great hull and interior throws it all away by designing an expensive higher-tech-than-needful rig that winds up making the homebuilt boat simply unaffordable or impractical for the sort of people who'd actually build one. Hopefully Mr Henseval will not follow suit and come up with a reasonable and simple rig that such a simple catamaran cries out for...
The question I know I'll get in the mailbag tomorrow is would I build and cruise one of these? The short answer is if there was a 10-meter version (we need the space for guitars) with a simple, sensible, and able to be self built rig, it would be right at the top of my list...
