Multihull Sailing News

A look at the thinking that went into the new Balance 442 performance-cruiser To say there’s a lot that goes into creating an all-new boat has got to be one of the world’s great understatements. And the job only becomes exponentially harder when boats get smaller, rather than ...read more

When you say “sailboat,” most people envision a lovely sloop with a tall mast and single hull. Say charter, though, and people think colorful brochures with catamarans anchored off some tropical island. Here’s why. Space Invaders Conventional wisdom says a catamaran has about ...read more

Sportscar builders say, “Speed costs, how fast do you want to go?” This is also true of boats. And if you can foot the bill, Hudson Yacht & Marine will be more than happy to provide you with all the speed, luxurious accommodations and outstanding construction you could ever want ...read more

Fresh from the 2020 Düsseldorf boat show where one of his boats won a number of major awards, you might have expected French naval architect Olivier Racoupeau to be taking a break. But when I catch up with him by phone, he sounds breathless and concerned about his next deadline, ...read more

Famed bluewater cruiser Jimmy Cornell has been forced to abandon his latest circumnavigation due to power-generation problems aboard his carbon-neutral catamaran. “In my long life I cannot remember ever abandoning a promising project, and it is very painful to accept failure ...read more

Walk around any boat show, and you’ll see a number of differences in the way designers and builders have decided to locate the steering stations aboard their cruising cats. Each position has its good points and bad, among them visibility, protection from the elements, ...read more

After the accident, as we were getting ready to put Zingaro, our Lock Crowther-designed Spindrift 38, up on the hard, clean her up and say goodbye, my partner, Kimmi, and I were more than a little overcome by nostalgia. Zingaro is my fourth boat, but my first catamaran. On her ...read more

It’s hard to be sure when things started to change, but I am pretty sure it was the evening of April 20, 1993. As the sunset, spluttering and sizzling into the Atlantic, the 86ft catamaran Commodore Explorer crossed an imaginary finish line near Île d’Ouessant off the northwest ...read more

When first introduced nearly a decade ago, Neel trimarans seemed little more than an oddity, an intriguing variation in an ever-burgeoning menu of cruising multihulls. Since then these unique, fixed-ama tris, with their immense solid bridgedecks reminiscent of the first plywood ...read more

It’s easy to run out of superlatives when you’re talking about sailing in Croatia: the 1,800 miles of coastline, arguably the most beautiful in the Mediterranean, stretching most of the length of the Adriatic; the hundreds of inlets and bays in the scores of islands that make it ...read more

Francis Joyon and crew aboard the maxi-tri IDEC Sport are fast approaching the halfway point in their attempt to break the “tea route” record from Hong Kong to England. The current 36-day, 2-hour, 37-minute record was set by Giovanni Soldini aboard the 70ft trimaran, Maserati, ...read more

Our driver, Dracula, has a thick slack body, and his head leans heavily to the right. One eye wanders and looks only up and left. The other is covered with an opaque membrane. His ungainly body is covered with a loose, soiled shirt and pants. It is a hot day in March 2007, and ...read more

If you Google the name Patrick Le Quément you’ll come up with some 194,000 hits, most attesting to the Frenchman’s long and successful career designing automobiles. Ford’s iconic (in Britain) Sierra? That’s one of his—at first nicknamed “the jellymold” by detractors, it went on ...read more

It was the last week of May and the hurricane season was fast approaching. My wife, Carla, and I made plans to take our Lagoon 40, Ocean Fox, west from Grenada to the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao—better known as the ABC Islands. The first leg from St. ...read more

I have been a sailor my whole life and knew the moment I accepted a job in Zanzibar that I would need to find my way onto a sailboat and into the sailing community there. This led me to Google, where I started searching for anything sailing-related in the area. Once I made it ...read more

HH50 The latest from Hudson Yacht Group, the Morrelli & Melvin-designed HH 50 is a bluewater-capable performance cruiser with sophisticated, yet simple-to-use systems, lightweight carbon construction, a spacious interior and a top-quality finish. The result is the best of all ...read more

It was sometime on day four that my resolve began to waver. It had held strong through the challenges of Charlotte Amalie, Road Town, Leverick Bay, Anegada and Cane Garden Bay; but now, sitting at a beachfront bar on Jost van Dyke, I had to face up to the sad fact that I just ...read more

From the outside, the cruising life can look like it’s all sunny sailing in a tropical paradise, but ask anyone who’s done it and they’ll tell you there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done before casting off. Four of the sailing community’s favorite multihull vloggers weigh ...read more

My heart still races when I think about that day. Nightmares haunted me for weeks afterward. The roar of big surf pounding on a reef tenses my entire body. My mind still sees the enormous waves next to me, and I imagine our boat broken to pieces on the surf-beaten coral. A lump ...read more

They say you can learn a lot about a sailor just by looking at the type of boat he or she owns. However, I’m not sure our boat, Spirit, reflects the personalities of my wife, Claudia, and me as we try to live a quiet and simple life, taking each day as it comes. Spirit very much ...read more

The other day I was thinking about the very first time I sailed a multihull. It was in New Zealand, of all places, on the Bay of Islands, midway through Christmas break at the school where I was then teaching as a Peace Corps volunteer in Western Samoa. Stranger still, I was ...read more

Cruisers aiming to transit the Panama Canal in 2020 are in for some sticker shock. The canal authority has doubled the minimum charge for small vessels in its first toll increase in many years. Sailors with boats under 50ft have every right to feel peeved at the increase. Until ...read more

If you’re looking for a new boat this winter, you should start making travel arrangements to visit one or both of the best displays of new multihulls in the world. Although it’s not billed as a multihull show, February’s Miami International Boat Show has become probably the best ...read more

Sailing at 19 knots in 15 knots of breeze is not an earth-shattering experience anymore. I was thinking about that on a perfect late summer day in Narragansett Bay while we were slicing along on the most technologically advanced cruising catamaran I’ve ever seen—the Eagle Class ...read more

. If there was ever any doubt as to the speed potential for the eye-popping Ultime maxi-trimaran class, the first 24 hours of the Brest Atlantiques race have surely put such doubts to rest. The drone footage above of Franck Cammas and Charles Caudrelier’s Gitana Edmond de ...read more

He might be the graybeard of the glamorous Ultime trimaran class, but veteran singlehander Francis Joyon is rocking his 60s with a new burst of record-seeking inspired by age-old trade routes. The 63-year-old, who currently holds the Jules Verne Trophy for the fastest crewed ...read more

“I own a yacht in the Caribbean.” It’s one of those things many of us would like to drop at a cocktail party but few can utter with any truthfulness. Maybe that’s why buying a boat and putting it into charter service (whether in the Caribbean or at dozens of destinations ...read more

Let’s face it—as much as we love the shiny topsides and new-boat smell of a brand-new catamaran, not everybody is ready to pay the premium such demands. You can save a lot of money by finding a well-equipped older boat in good condition. The classic catamarans mentioned here fall ...read more

With 118 islands and atolls stretching over 1,200 miles of the South Pacific Ocean, French Polynesia has a long and intimate relationship with the sea. When my photographer, Michaela, and I finally found time to put this epic destination into our sailing calendar, it was both a ...read more

Thirty-three years ago Jimmy Cornell launched a rally for boats crossing the Atlantic from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. The pitch was safety in numbers and resonated with sailors who were seeking adventure but also looking for a bit of a safety net. It was a monohull ...read more

If a boat show could be described as intimate, the annual Salon International du Multicoque in La Grande Motte, on France’s Mediterranean coast, is it. Held in the latter part of April, the multihulls-only in-water show is a boon for builders, because the people who attend come ...read more

Long ago, back in the last century, I had my first introduction to dinghy theft when we lost our new Achilles RIB and 20hp outboard in California’s Catalina Harbor on New Year’s Eve, 1984. It was the only one stolen among about 50 dinghies at the town docks that night. Maybe the ...read more

With all the rallies to choose from, there’s a perfect route for every sailor in every corner of the world. While all rallies take pride in creating community, providing logistical support and most of all making sailing safer for their participants, they each have their own ...read more

Variety is the spice of life. That said, surrounded by the seemingly endless variety of boats now plying the world’s oceans, it can be easy to take them for granted. It can also be easy to forget that many different sailboat types look the way they do not just “because,” but ...read more

Dragonfly 32 Evolution Denmark’s Quorning Boats has been systematically upgrading its line of folding, performance-cruiser trimarans in recent years as part of a long-term effort to incorporate the latest developments in yacht design, with the latest to receive this treatment ...read more

Many multihull aficionados are familiar with the sad tale of Donald Crowhurst, the ill-starred Englishman who took part in the 1967-68 Golden Globe round-the-world race on a trimaran. The story was told in an excellent book by a pair of British journalists called The Strange ...read more

If anyone doubted that the ocean racing multihull scene was a hotbed of innovation, the new Sodebo Ultim 3 trimaran will lay those questions to rest. The demand from Sodebo, sponsor of veteran solo sailor and sometime Jules Verne record holder Thomas Coville, was for a boat that ...read more

When I boarded Fountaine Pajot’s new flagship, the Alegria 67, at the Cannes boat show last September, the first thing I noticed was that several groups of people were carrying on private conversations in separate lounging and seating areas in the saloon—that’s how big this boat ...read more

It was after midnight when I realized my daysail with Tony Bullimore aboard his giant record-breaking catamaran, Team Legato, was not going to plan. The big cat was en route for a December dash from England across the Bay of Biscay to Barcelona and the start of a drag race ...read more

After completing the European Great Loop on our 1987 40ft Catalac catamaran, Angel Louise, my wife, Sue, and I sailed home to the States and spent two years sailing up and down East coast between Maine and Florida, like migratory waterfowl. Eventually, though, we decided to ...read more

Next time you climb on board a Lagoon in the Caribbean or spy a Prout bobbing in the harbor, spare a thought for James Wharram. Though this somewhat froward Englishman won’t thank me for saying so, he is partly responsible for both—and indeed, all the other modern catamarans now ...read more

As our boat was readied for our Tongan adventure, we sat at Mango, the waterfront restaurant at the Sunsail base. We were relishing the free Wi-Fi when the checkout manager, Raymond, came by our table, stuck his hand out to the nearest graybeard and said, “You must be the ...read more

Wondering what it’s like to cast off permanently? These full-time cruisers share a glimpse into life onboard Audrie & Seathan Smith Port of Origin: London, ENGLAND Boat: Rehua, Antares 44 It all started after a sailing holiday in Croatia in late October 2013 ...read more

Farrier F-22 New Zealander Ian Farrier ushered in a new genre of sailing with his folding-ama trailerable trimarans, the best-known of which are the Corsair designs. Farrier’s last project before he passed away last year was this sweet little tri. Available in three versions, ...read more

If you’re looking for a decent sub-40ft cruising cat, you have few choices when it comes to new-boat offerings. It is a well-known fact that the multihull market has taken off in a way very few could have predicted. Despite Hurricane Irma’s recent destruction of a large part of ...read more

Any time I put a helmet on I become hyper-aware of every step I take. Precaution means there’s an alternative to a happy ending. On one of my last rides of the 2018 summer season, the helmet was mandatory, as was the life jacket. A new, foiling trimaran called the TF10 was the ...read more

Never let it be said that the World Cruising Club (WCC) rests on its laurels. Always looking for fresh ways to add more spice to the world’s longest-running and most popular cruising rally—the first was held in 1986, and entries regularly exceed 200—the WCC this year added a ...read more

Flying into Tortola in the British Virgin Islands one December morning, three months after Hurricane Irma, I felt like a war correspondent dispatched to the battlefront rather than a sailing magazine writer on an assignment to go cruising. As my LIAT plane descended toward Beef ...read more

It’s hard to believe how far foiling has come since the Moth class figured out how to reliably take to the air in the early 2000s. Was it really only in 2013 that the America’s Cup was dragged kicking and screaming into the foiling world by Emirates Team New Zealand back in San ...read more

I always wanted to see with my own eyes the places where Western history was made. Since most of our forefathers were explorers by ship, it seemed fair for me, as an American, to discover those lands just as they’d left European shores to discover ours hundreds of years ago. So ...read more