Sommaire pour Multihull Sailor Summer 2023 de SAIL

Most sailors take months or more to learn a new boat since, truth is, most of us have limited or sporadic time to devote to our education. David and Alison Lennarz, on the other hand, fast-tracked their learning when they took delivery of their new Balance 526 in St. Francis, South Africa, and made a 6,500-nautical-mile, midsummer transatlantic to Grenada as their shakedown passage. It was an eye-opening voyage on many levels for the couple, both lifelong sailors whose previous boats had included a Melonseed skiff, a Pearson 33, and, most recently, a 26-foot Herreshoff Alerion, which they still sail in the Chesapeake Bay. Making 20 knots under a scrap of storm jib in the Atlantic, essentially surfing on a 52-foot surfboard, was a helluva long way from weekend trips…

I first saw Beneteau’s Excess brand of sailing catamarans in 2019 in Düsseldorf, Germany, with a room full of marine journalists, some of whom, like me, weren’t convinced of the brand’s vision. Most were perplexed, some got snarky. The models were based on modified Lagoon designs, and none of line made sense—not the marketing, positioning, or design. But two years later, Beneteau revamped the brand’s management and messaging and launched the Excess 11, which was new from the keels up. Fast forward another two years and another from-scratch hull in the form of the Excess 14, which made its U.S. debut at the Miami boat show in February, and now it’s safe to say that the brand has evolved and is living up to its initial promise. The design by…

My brother Rik and his wife, Anne, have had a long love affair. They met in high school, and even though Anne never shared Rik’s passion for boating, during 37 years of marriage she has always happily gone along as he pursued his lust for boats. When they married in 1986, Rik already owned a 24-foot Pearson Lark. That sailboat was followed by numerous canoes, a Lightning, a WoodPussy, an International DN iceboat, a 22-foot inboard-powered Seabright skiff, and in 2019 the mother of all boat purchases, a 1989 Transworld 50 fantail trawler. Because Anne had always taken care of everything at their home, she agreed to the trawler purchase on one condition: She wouldn’t have to do a thing aboard the boat. That was fine by Rik, who would…

Whether you’re chartering in paradise or upgrading in your home waters, a boat you’re not used to comes with a steep learning curve, especially if you’re captaining a cat for the first time. The reality is that they can be as playful as a kitten with yarn, particularly with a bit of breeze in the anchorage. There are a few basic tenets of seamanship unique to catamarans that come into play when anchoring or picking up a mooring buoy. The problem is four-fold. First, a cat is wider than a similar-length monohull, so the wind has more to grab. Second, it’s lighter, so it moves easily. Third, the shallow draft may be great for anchoring close to shore (rather than out in a breezy roadstead), but it provides little to…

XQUISITE 30 SPORTCAT Xquisite cataramans are well known as comfortable, well-built long-distance cruising cats, with all of the luxury and accouterments one would expect—the antithesis, in other words, of minimalism. Which is why Xquisite’s new offering, the 30 Sportcat designed by François Perus, causes a double take of neck-twinging proportions. With a rotating carbon mast, carbon deck beams, displacement of just 1,872 pounds, North 3Di sails, an interior whose greatest luxury is a mattress, and a construction methodology that lets it be dismantled and fit onto a trailer or inside a 40-foot shipping container, this little rocket is just begging to be sailed fast—and that is precisely its purpose, according to Tamas Hamor, Xquisite’s founder and CEO. “That was the goal—the best training boat for people to learn how to…

Fountaine Pajot knows a thing or two about the mid-40-foot sweet spot for cruising multihulls, and with the launch of the new Tanna 47 cat, they’ve dialed in their eight-model lineup, which has massive appeal to both private owners and charterers. I stepped aboard in Annapolis for a test sail and thorough walkthrough. The new model is based on (and shares the same hull design with) its predecessor, the Saona 47. That said, the Tanna isn’t just a tweak or refresh. It benefits from smart changes including a completely new deck and bimini design. It also has an expanded solar array, a generous flybridge that’s 40% larger, a redesigned salon/galley with increased storage, a helm station with better ergonomics and access for line handling, longer genoa tracks, a standard Lewmar…

Then looked upon from the dock, the first thing that strikes you about the Fountaine Pajot Power 67 is her sheer width. Tied up stern-to at the Miami boat show among her brethren, she appeared to me as some mystical winged leviathan, poised to take to flight. Credit goes to the big feline’s beam of more than 32 feet and the large, tall hulls that protrude high above the sea. The view from the dock also told me the France-based builder nailed her proportions, with two stairwells that led to the aft cockpit flanking a large hydraulic swim platform and continuing as wide side decks to the bow. Boarding via a passerelle and into the aft cockpit, I was charmed by the pair of staterooms, accessed in the forward bulkhead.…

What do you do on a boat for days on end if you’re not constantly tweaking the sails to get an inch ahead of the boat next to you? For cruisers and powerboaters, it probably seems like a dumb question, but when I arrived in Sint Maarten for the Caribbean Multihull Challenge Rally in February, I genuinely wasn’t sure. I’d never been cruising—unless you count a single night moored off an island after a race. Judging purely by the number of designated sunbathing spots on some cats, I assumed there’d be a lot of sitting around cultivating skin cancer and not much else. That’s my secret: As a lifelong racer, cruising never appealed to me much. Nevertheless, it was hard not to be excited when I arrived at Dream Yacht…

When I was a child, I always dreamed of becoming a fireman. That didn’t happen for me. But wearing a fire-red, survival-style offshore jacket around the frozen food section of a grocery store wasn’t the consolation prize I was expecting. My boss sent me some foul weather gear to test—the Gill OS2 offshore jacket ($375) in an eye-watering red, complete with a highlighter-yellow hood and white reflective strips across the shoulders, just in case I didn’t already stick out enough in this beauty (admittedly a good thing if I ever found myself overboard). I tried it on. The fit wasn’t too bad, but the Velcro cuffs would be necessary to adjust the slightly long sleeves. With a collar that went past the tip of my nose, I looked like a…

On a bright Wednesday morning in Miami, while the subtropical city was still stretching its arms, I was dashing across the docks of the Venetian Marina, racing the clock to get to the global debut of the Aquila 42. I hadn’t intended to rush, but my colleague Jeff Moser (being the high-maintenance New Yorker that he is) demanded that we get coffee beforehand. “I’m not a coffee drinker,” I told him, but within 10 minutes we were at the local café, coffees and croissants in hand. Just beating the buzzer, we got our bearings as Aquila’s storied Raas family ushered journalists to the stern of the boat, mic in hand. They ran through their informative formalities and eventually we were welcomed aboard. As I stepped into the cockpit and got…

“Vous parlez Français?” An elderly man was addressing me over breakfast at an inn in the French seaside village of La Trinite-Sur-Mer. “No, désolé, just English e un po’ d’Italiano.” I made an apologetic face. He shrugged, and I poured myself some tea. The quilt of fog from the day before had blown out to sea, and we stared at the round October moon in companionable silence for awhile. “Vous êtes en vacances? Vacation?” He tried again. “No, I’m a writer.” He looked at me blankly, so I gestured like I was holding a pen. “Ah! Une écrivaine! Comme Agatha Christie!” “Oui, sort of,” I laughed. “But I write articles.” He gave me another blank look. “I write for a magazine about sailboats.” “Ah! Sailboat! We have a sailboat very…

It wasn’t until we’d reached the rhinos that I thought maybe we needed to get the heck off this South African savanna. The rhinos themselves weren’t the issue. The trio of dinosaurian pachyderms stood contentedly munching on hay, ignoring not only our vintage six-wheel-drive Land Rover, but a looming desert thunderstorm. The storm, though, was impossible to ignore. Colleagues Jeff Moser, Pim Van Hemmen, and I had joined a crew from Cape Town’s Robertson and Caine, builders of Leopard power and sailing catamarans, for a safari in the spectacular 28,000-acre Inverdoorn Game Reserve. Gray clouds that had threatened for the previous couple of hours as we trekked through the unusually muddy backcountry had now organized into a formidable gust front that tumbled down the mountains to our northwest and torched…