The memories are vivid. Dolphins and diesel fumes. A blood-orange moon rising to starboard as engine trouble loomed to port. A spinnaker like a taut, glowing veil before a sun that shone down later on its wet, shredded remains. We were 30 days at sea, a virgin ocean-crossing crew ...read more
Vraiment Incroyable! It’s official, we have now truly entered a “Brave New World” of sailing; either that or the world has truly lost its mind.This past fall, SAIL magazine first covered the Brest Ultime Challenge, a singlehanded nonstop round-the-world event set to take place in ...read more
A quartet of Morrelli & Melvin-designed Gunboats hits the racecourse in Antigua. Photo by Billy BlackWith the right mix of bleeding-edge technology and cheeky attitude, Gino Morrelli and Pete Melvin have spent more than two decades creating a cult of personality. Starting with ...read more
Five Farangs in ThailandA motley crew explores Thailand’s fabled Andaman Sea on a charter catamaranRead Paul Gelder's full story HERE. ...read more
The 8th edition of the International Multihull Boat Show at La Grande Motte in the South of France (from April 19-23) showcased around 60 catamarans and trimarans, with a couple of world premieres. What makes this small, intimate show unique, compared to Cannes and other ...read more
This exciting new cruising catamaran from South Africa is loosely based on a Dean 5000 cat that a Hungarian cruiser/entrepreneur, Tamas Hamor, sailed around the world and managed in the charter trade with his wife, Sara. After Dean failed as a business, Hamor worked with ex-Dean ...read more
The new Bavaria Nautitech 46 Fly does not take its name from an ability to become airborne, but is the flybridge version of the original 46 Open. The flybridge opens a spacious area for skipper and passengers, provides excellent visibility in all directions and consolidates ...read more
The growing popularity of catamarans for bluewater sailing has spawned a number of designs aimed at sailors who want some speed along with their comfort, yet either don’t want, or can’t afford to go down the high-tech carbon-fiber route. Builders like Catana and Outremer are the ...read more
Who, except two crazy old guys—skipper Tony Smith was 71 and I was 68—would trail a 28ft trimaran 7,000 miles across America to go sailing for a few days among icebergs, breaching whales, soaring eagles and those pesky grizzlies? Our long-planned, once-in-a-lifetime adventure to ...read more
If you want to get your catamaran vacation fix this winter (or next summer) and want a unique experience, consider one of the following 10 destinations. Maybe you’ve only got a week and want to stay close to home. Or perhaps you have loads of time off and don’t mind a long ...read more
Just when it seemed impossible for another event to describe itself as the “Everest of round-the-world yacht races,” one has popped up on the radar that is, well, the Everest of round-the-world yacht races.The Brest Ultime Challenge is due to take place in 2019 and will be like ...read more
In an excerpt from his recently published memoir Fun Times in Boats, Blocks & Business, Harken Inc. co-founder Olaf Harken recalls the time his company helped try to break the world sailing speed recordMy brother, Peter, and I have a common philosophy regarding future major ...read more
An eye-opening East Coast delivery aboard a performance trimaranBy Adam CortSeptember 2016 ...read more
A newcomer to the production multihull scene could easily be led to believe that there are two kinds of large multihulls in this world: high-performance speedsters and relatively heavy-displacement charter-style cats in which performance necessarily takes a back seat to comfort ...read more
Most of us are not keen on sailing, mooring or paying for more boat than we need, or than we can handle. Therefore, the shift to smaller, couple-sized cats is a welcome one as more builders focus on this segment of the market. The newest addition is the Fountaine Pajot Lucia 40, ...read more
Are you the sort of person who asks boatbuilders for performance polar diagrams? Do you measure a catamaran’s power-to-weight ratio? Do you spend hours poring over multihull-related owner’s blogs or forums? Do you know the difference between various foam cores, glass materials ...read more
What does a pair of enthusiastic Texans do when they can’t find anyone to race against aboard their full-foiling Flying Phantom catamaran? Go where people are racing them, in the south of France. This past April, John Tomko and Jonathan Atwood, both of the Lone Star State, made ...read more
Last November, while most people were sitting around the table with friends and family digging into a Thanksgiving turkey, I was putting my bags down for the first time in three days in a little bungalow overlooking Knysna Lagoon on South Africa’s southern shore. I had arrived ...read more
Leave it to Catana to come up with something new. This time, it’s a production 43ft catamaran that bears little resemblance to the company’s racy voyagers. They call the new boat the Bali 4.3, and it includes a host of unique features that had attendees lining up on the dock at ...read more
This latest offering from Denmark’s Quorning Boats, which won a nod from SAIL’s 2016 Best Boats judges as their Best Small Cruiser, is the smallest boat in the builder’s current line of folding “Swing Wing” trimarans, which range all the way up to 40ft in length. Quorning, ...read more
The brainchild of veteran multihull maven Jens Quorning, managing director of the Danish boatbuilder Quorning Boats, the Dragonfly 32 is the latest in a long list of trimarans providing a combination of exciting performance and more-than-adequate accommodation space for cruising ...read more
