Something I'm looking forward to reading, a better way to build surfboards, and in the "Disappointing but not unexpected" department...
I'm in the middle of writing a longish article for VolksCruiser on multihulls of a VolksCruiserish bent (spelled affordable) that should be ready in a couple of days and, as it happens, I happen to have this boat on my desktop.
It's the Prout Sirocco which for some time I seriously considered buying a hull and deck to finish off to become our chosen boat to go cruising in. At the time, after some intensive research, the Sirocco seemed to deliver just about all of our needs in an affordable 26-foot package.
I still think it is, just maybe, the best design Prout ever did.
While we were on the French canals going down to the Med we crossed paths with a French family who were on a Sirocco that they'd built up from a hull and deck. We had a great time checking out the boat, discussing boatbuilding and trading cunning plans to cruise the world.
One thing I noticed about the Sirocco was that the bridgedeck escape hatch had a fish eating weed off the hatch. I accounted for the boat being very low on the waterline as a temporary thing as the family still had a lot of shore side gear and were still transitioning from city life to sea life.
About a year later in Lanzarote our paths crossed again. The Sirocco, along with a gaggle of French monohulls, came in to our harbor. The French group had been buddy boating from the Med, North Africa, down to the Canaries, and were now getting ready to sail across the Atlantic headed for Martinique.
They were a fun group and their radio interplay was often the best entertainment around with a recurring theme on the speed differential between monohulls and multihulls. Sadly our friend on his Sirocco was the butt of the ongoing theme as his boat was painfully slow and always last into an anchorage. Considering that one of the boats in the group, a Philippe Harlé designed Cognac (a 24-foot monohull) consistently beat him to each anchorage had to be embarrassing.
But that's the thing about multihulls. Add an extra thousand pounds they're not designed to carry and all of a sudden that speedy catamaran becomes a four knot tortoise.
But, like I said, I still think that the Sirocco is the best Prout they ever designed or built and would make a great boat for a couple to go cruising in and, if they leaned that way, circumnavigate.
Better yet, as it's low on the whole catamaran popularity ladder they're rather affordable if you can find one but, still a bit dear for VolksCruiserish folks at between $15-25K.
Listening to Ruel Vincent van Dijk cover Lenny Kravitz
So it goes...
