Maintenance of a catamaran

[Stella Polaris]

Being a mono-hull sailor about to make the jump over to a catamaran, I must say that all that fiberglass seems like a daunting task to maintain. My last boat was a Bavaria 40 Ocean, but now I'll probably buy a cat in the 38-44 ft range. The cat I buy will either be new or less than 5 years old.

I'm planning a circumnavigation, but the idea is to see the places I go to and not to be stuck doing maintenance chores more than strictly necessary. With this I mean, keeping the cat looking nice and new with the appliances on board in working order.

I'm interested in hearing how much time, on an average, cat owners spend on maintaining their boats.

I'm also interested in hearing about the costs.

Naturally it would also be nice if some mono-hullers threw in their opinions.

[dana-tenacity]

Keep systems to minimum, they are the problem, give the glass a wax at every haulout and it'll be fine. The time and money go into engines, gensets, hot & cold running water, AC, electronics, none of which are actually necessary.

[northerncat]

deja vu im sure i saw this exact same topic 4 mths ago
sean

[cnj]

As a monohuller that just bought a Catamaran, I have to tell you fiberglass is great! Most of my time was spent keeping all the wood work nice, and there's not much of that now. The inside of my 35 footer takes me an hour to clean. I use Soft Scrub for hard to remove spots and Fantastic for the rest. The Outside to scrub down takes about 2 hours. It doesn't need to be done every week though. When we're out at sea we ususally don't bother with the outside unless it needs it. We usually spend part of the day before we make land to really clean up the boat so it looks nice and then do the outside again while we're there because we can use fresh water. It doesn't need anything expensive.

[colemj]

Not having woodwork on the catamaran cut my maintenance time down a lot. As for waxing the hulls, mostly this is just done on the outward side of each hull since the inward sides are not visible and don't see much sun. So this is equivalent to a monohull. There is a lot more deck area to maintain than a monohull.

Like mentioned earlier, it is the systems that take all of your time.

Mark

[schoonerdog]

my boat has 24 opening hatches, about 10 of which need to be reseated and resealed (that's typical after 8 years or so). So I would assume some things like that are far more than a monohull with only 4 opening hatches. I figure it will take about 20 days of effort to do them all. It takes about 4 hours to wash the topsides every other week when it's warm. I would say wiring and plumbing is far more lengthy than a mono.