Hi
I currently own a
Beneteau 393
monohull. My wife and three
kids (8, 6 and 3) just completed our first trip from Tampa to Conception Island (just past Geoergetown Bahamas) and back via the Old Bahama channel - all in about 1300nm. Of those miles we purely sailed about 50 miles, the rest was half motorsailing and half just motoring.
We love the cruising lifestyle, the people you meet, the
depth of friendships that spring up amazingly quick and the places you see. The worst part of cruising for us has been the travel days. We pick
weather windows where the sea state is going to be as comfortable as possible, this usually means light winds and motoring. On a travel day the only thing we want is to get there as fast as possible so we can chill at the beach, visit some buddies and cook some great
food.
Boiling this down we have three main issues on travel days:
1) We can't sail a
monohull to its potential because we don't like heeling past 25 degrees which when you add 5 to 10 degrees of wave roll limits our speed to about 5-6 knots, 4 knots at night. This is both a comfort and a
safety thing with our crew composition.
2) When motoring because there is no
wind the
boat rolls way too much from swell. The main just doesn't dampen the motion enough at apparent
wind of 8 or less.
3) When our
destination is directly upwind because we need to hide from a front or storm, we usually just pound through under
power because we don't want to deal with the heel associated with sailing there. On the
Beneteau this limits us to an average speed of about 4 knots, getting up to 6 before a wave slows us back to 2.
4) When
passage planning we use a speed of 5 or 6 knots to determine duration and set departure time.
We are planning to switch boats to either a
trawler or a
catamaran to alleviate these issues:
- Both of these should complete passages faster, have better living quarters when at
anchor and have the built in redundancy with two engines.
- Operating cost will be higher on a monthly basis for a
trawler but big ticket items like
rigging and sail
repairs likely will even this out a bit.
- The
catamaran will (?) be easier to sell later down the road unless we score a major deal on the
purchase of our trawler and can afford to "give it away".
My questions for the forum are this:
1) What is the real world sailing performance of a 42 foot catamaran like Fontaine Pajot Venezia 42?
2) Is my assumption that a catamaran will hold its value better and be easier to sell than a trawler correct?
3) How wet is sailing a catamaran when
weather gets a little nasty compared to a monohull?
Thanks
Richard