Our whistle-stop tour of French multihull builders begins in Bordeaux, famous first and foremost for its viticulture and also as the home of Lagoon Catamarans. If you’ve never experienced a major boatbuilding operation in its pomp, the row of aircraft hangar-sized buildings that ...read more
It was a dark and stormy night—OK, not really dark since it was day, but pretty stormy—when we cruised into Salt Whistle Bay on the Caribbean island of Mayreau aboard Indigo, our 46ft Leopard catamaran. We had just sailed north from Union Island heading for the Tobago Cays, but ...read more
Annie Gardner & Eric WittePort of Origin: San Diego, CaliforniaBoat: Catana 472, El GatoBlog:ElGatoAdventures.comLifelong sailors and racers who always dreamed of extensive cruising, we married two and half years ago and are finally doing it together. We both grew up in sailing ...read more
You almost have to pinch yourself sailing around Thailand’s Phang Nga Bay. It’s like entering a lost world in a Hollywood movie. Rising dramatically from an emerald sea are surreal, gravity-defying limestone towers (karsts) which have been sculpted by millennia of monsoon rain ...read more
Bali Catamarans is creating quite a lot of buzz in the sailing community with its unique layouts and chameleon convertibility. But there is more to the new Bali 4.0 than just novelty. It’s also a real sailboat.CONSTRUCTIONBali’s parent company, Catana, builds the Bali 4.0 of ...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
Four decades after his time drifting about the islands of Caribbean, a lifelong sailor returns to the waters he once loved so much.Read the story A Multihull Boat Delivery to St. Maarten here ...read more
In the late 1970s, I spent a few months cruising the Windward and Leeward islands, gunkholing remote anchorages and living off the land, fish and fruit mostly. Sure, I was broke, but I was living like a king. Earlier in the year, I had raced across the South Atlantic from Cape ...read more
Multihulls are famously stable. But the fact that they don’t heel also means their rigs carry higher loads. Unlike a monohull rig, a multihull rig must stand up to gusts and changes in wind direction. With regard to running rigging, most modern catamarans now also sport large ...read more
The Cat Sailor’s Bucket ListHere are some ideas that will get you to some new cruising grounds that are guaranteed to make your twin-hulled excursion an adventure.Click here for details and links to these exciting travel destinationsby Zuzana ProchazkaMHS Fall 2016 ...read more
A great pioneer of multihull voyaging, James Wharram sailed from Las Palmas toward Trinidad two days before Christmas 1955. His crew consisted of two girls, Ruth and Jutta, and Pepe the dog. His boat was the 23ft catamaran Tangaroa, which he had designed and built himself. ...read more
An eye-opening East Coast delivery aboard a performance trimaranBy Adam CortSeptember 2016 ...read more
Doo Wah Diddy DiddyLike many sailors, my dream was to retire and live on a boat, spending winters in sunny, warm, exotic places. My wife, Kathy, was unsure about this, but I was able to convince her that living and traveling onboard a boat would almost be like the camping trips ...read more
If you haven’t heard of the most outrageous boat race in North America, it’s time to get with the program. It’s the Race to Alaska, a 750-mile epic up the Inside Passage from Port Townsend, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska, with a stopover in Victoria, British Columbia.Beset with ...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
As sailors, every day we survive school, our jobs, the monthly bills—and some of us may eventually face disease, crippling accidents or some other crisis. Still, nobody wants to obsess about surviving at sea. Nobody wants to spend a fortune on a liferaft or other safety ...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
The first time I laid eyes on Phoenix, my 1976 Mark II Telstar trimaran, she was being smashed against a concrete harbor wall near my home in Emsworth, England, during a Force 10 storm in January 1990. Declared a total loss by her insurers, the boat was rescued by a keen ...read more
NEEL TRIMARANSNEEL Trimarans is designing and building cruising Trimarans. We offer a new and unique concept in cruising: All the sensations of a monohull with the comfort of a multihull (fine helming, exhilarating performance and generous interior volume on single deck layout). ...read more
Within the past decade, there has been a momentous shift among cruising sailors from monohulls to multis, for the simple reason that catamarans and trimarans offer a number of very real advantages: speed, space and shallow draft among them. However, it’s important to remember, as ...read more
September 1 marks the beginning of lobster season in the Grenadines. I’ll never forget that, because it was on September 1 that I ate a most unforgettable lobster. It came out on a massive platter: a half-dozen fire-red crustaceans piled high, served beside mounds of steamed ...read more
From a trainer cat with attitude to a crop of all-carbon, high-performance cruisers, the diversity and quality of the latest new designs from the world’s builders illustrates the strength of the multihull scene.Gunboat 78The third in the new line of Gunboats designed by Nigel ...read more