Quote:
Originally Posted by conchaway
Cutting through all the Barbra Streisand, here's the truth: Although most "sailors" today crawl around in "safe water", when you are in a "rage sea", here's the difference-- In a mono hull, If you are battened down, and get "knocked down", you will come up (lead keel, etc.). If you get knocked down in a catamaran, you will go upside down, stay down, and probably drown like a rat. Simple physics. It's happened many times before. Hurry and read this before the politically correct censors delete it. They will probably bar me from the site, but the truth is the truth.
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Sorry, not the “truth”. But keep believing it if that makes you happy.
(Some) Cats react very differently to gusts and seas than monohulls: rather then heeling or rolling to spill the energy, they slide sideways and squirt forwards to absorb the energy. Sailing beam to breaking seas is fine (up to force 9 in open waters in our experience), as the cat easily absorbs the
wind and seas through dynamic movement. And we can sail well with very little sail area up, often making our sail plan 30-40
knot gust-proof. As an external real world example, refer to the reports about the 1994 Queen’s Birthday Storm: the cats, even the abandoned one, performed better than most of the monohulls.
https://pangolin.co.nz/queens-birthday-storm/
You have to hold on of course, and there are occasional loud bridgedeck strikes or breaking
water over the
cabin, but it’s a quite different motion, relatively level (allowing for the angle on the swells) and arguably more comfortable than a radically heeling mono in the same conditions. And perfectly safe. Note, I’m not referring to storm conditions. In that case, I’d be running with/across the seas and deploying our JSD when running is no longer safe.
As a side note, we have never (in our admittedly relatively small 3.5 year coastal and short passages
history with our cat) felt the need to heave to for rest,
cooking, going to the
head, or any of the other reasons given by mono sailors. Slowing down by easing, reefing, or removing the full batten main instantly calms everything down.
Our cat is exhilarating to sail when powered up (depending on our angle to the wind, that starts at 7-8 knots true wind speed), especially in seas when she starts to dance. Our cat stays on top of the
water, so it’s more like a jitterbug than a waltz, and you either get used to that kind of motion or you don’t. Just as with a mono you get used to living at 10-25 degrees of heel and associate a certain heel and motion with a certain speed.
With our cat, it’s the sound of the wake that’s the clearest indication of speed, but in flatter water there’s very little to distinguish 12 knots boat speed from 5 knots boat speed. In seas there’s a clear difference in comfort and movement between average speeds in the teens and average 8-9 knots. Unlike the common misconception, cats do indicate when they’re over-pressed and it’s not just a numbers
game. However, the signs are much more subtle than for a mono - leeward hull pressure,
rigging tension, feel of the rudders, water and structure sounds, windward hull ventilation, etc.
I cruised and raced monohulls extensively in my younger years and absolutely remember the type of boat movements and of living life on a heeled platform with no flat surface except for gimbals. And occasionally when we’re
power reaching or close hauled in the cat I wish for that steady heel and chugging through, not over, the seas. But my first time on a 40 foot
offshore racing cat with an open bridgedeck and 20 knots of tradewinds and seas was a revelation. Upwind like a bucking bronco at twice the speed of the equivalent-sized IOR and IMS
boats I raced, and downwind like a scalded cat at speeds I’d only ever gone in a car previously. Wow.
So years later when my wife and I were looking for a
live aboard cruising boat, and sailing on a wide variety of monohulls and a few
charter cats, we quickly decided on a performance-oriented cruising cat. Almost as much pure sailing fun as an equivalent performance-oriented cruising monohull, without the heel. To remove the ‘almost’ in the previous sentence, I’m adding a separate
steering circuit and tillers - fingertip control in all conditions will be awesome.
Sure, it costs more to buy (though I would argue that for our older performance-oriented cat the difference with roughly equivalent accommodation/carrying capacity and speed capable monohulls there’s not much difference in price), marginally if any more to maintain (two engines and drivetrains yes, but everything else the same and generally smaller than the equivalent-length mono), leaving marina berthing and hauling as the largest cost differences. But hauling doesn’t happen very often and marina berths can be avoided or found cheaper, so I’d call that a wash as well.
YMMV