By David Schmidt

I’ve sailed aboard fast monohulls most of my life, but my sailing path never led me toward multihulls. Until 2008.

Cruising, racing, just messing about, it now seems I can’t go more than a few months without stepping aboard a boat with more than one hull. This somehow fits a trend, what with the twists and turns of America’s Cup sailing—we're apparently headed toward a Cup in giant trimarans—to say nothing of the iShares Cup Extreme 40 catamaran circuit for which certain billionaires are training sailors and testing techniques for the next battle of the mega-ego.

America's Cup complications aside, the bright news is that multihull sailing is on. The spotlight for now is on catamarans, and it is more than possible that somewhere, out there, is a cat capable of drawing your attention away from boats of the single-hull persuasion.

Come along, and I'll share some impressions of my year on cats.

First it was a weeklong charter with family in St. Lucia and Martinique on—you guessed it—a charter-service catamaran. While it was as wide as it was long and wasn't the speediest boat I've ever sailed to windward, it proved to be perfect for our group and great to live aboard once the anchor hit the Caribbean’s sandy bottom. After a few days of bashing to weather, we got a shot at off-wind sailing with big following seas. Here, the cat lit up, allowing me to briefly tickle 12.5 knots on the fun meter, all the while providing a fairly level platform. In similar conditions, most monohulls would be pitching and yawing, but not this trusty feline. She wasn’t built for the sort of surfing expeditions that we pressed on her, but she rose to the occasion and even impressed my dad, perhaps the most ardent of monohull sailors. My wife just smiled. She's had plenty of time on cats.

Add a month, and I found myself aboard a Gunboat 48 at Antigua Sailing Week. The boat is built of carbon fiber with “luxury speed” as its ethos. I was impressed with the powerful rig, the exotic sail inventory, the pit area (directly behind the mast) that is beautifully thought out, the high-visibility helm station, and the stunning good looks.

The cabin featured glossy hardwood veneers applied to an ultra-lightweight synthetic core material, yielding elegant, understated good looks at a fraction of the weight of solid woods. Even the sinks are carbon fiber. But good looks on a mooring account for only so much, and the monohull sailor in me was looking for reasons to doubt this boat. Until we set sail.

Picture two crisp wake lines streaming astern as we rolled one big monohull after another. We were racing with the big guys at Antigua Sailing Week (the Gunboats had their own class), sharing the starting area with the hot-shot IRC monohulls, and we even flew a hull for a few brief moments as we charged up the reach, our massive masthead Code-0 generating amazing speeds.

Then it hit me: While the GB48 is super-quick, it harbors all the wonderful cruising attributes of our charter cat. Both offer palatial party space; the GB48, at a price, also lets you beat up on much larger monohulls. Given that they are built in South Africa (a country known for quality composite boats and spars), then tested and proved by being delivered on their own bottom(s), the Gunboats also come with a Confidence Package standard.

Three days later I was blasting around solo on a dual-trapeze Hobie cat. The breeze was fairly light and I’m a bit of a lead balloon, so I was able to hold the boat down by myself, flying a full main and a jib. This got interesting as the windward hull lifted and I stepped out onto the trap for the first time. Trust me, hanging it out on a wire, a tiller extension slung over your shoulder, the mainsheet in one hand, the jibsheet in the other, keeps you busy mentally and physically. But I was grinning ear to ear, feeling a sense of pure sailing joy that normally takes me 30 knots to achieve.

The lurking, 800-pound gorilla is the 33rd America’s Cup. After a year of bickering, suing, appealing, bickering, and more appealing, it is now understood that the next Cup will be a Deed of Gift Challenge fought out between the challenger, BMW Oracle Racing, and the defender, Alinghi, in 90-foot-by-90-foot multihulls (probably trimarans). While this will be a far cry from the nail-biting racing we enjoyed in the summer of 2007, the stakes are high. Thus far, Alinghi and BMW Oracle have both flipped an ORMA 60 apiece. Alinghi also managed to capsize an Extreme 40 cat at the Lugano, Switzerland, iShares Cup. For some of the world’s fastest sailors to display bottom paint proves to me that fast cats pack a big punch. There are teeth to match the purr (Russell Coutts, skipper of BMW Oracle Racing, sustained a nasty cut to his leg in recovering from BMW Oracle’s capsize).

Now, imagine scaling up from 40 feet to 90 feet. Remember those shivers of delight that I experienced on the Hobie? Mere child’s play compared to the shivers that 8,100 square feet of platform can deliver.

So has my thinking changed about catamarans? Yes. Would I trade one hull for two? It depends. Our charter cat was great for chartering, assuming that most charterers are more into high comfort than high performance. A Hobie cat to blast around in? Yes. A Gunboat 48 (or bigger, they’re building a 90-footer)? Absolutely yes, without a second thought.

For the long-term future of the America’s Cup, however, the best answer lies with the Cup’s most famous quote, spoken to the 19th Century's most famous queen: “Madam, there is no second [hull].”