Table of contents for Multihull Sailor Winter 2022-2023 in SAIL

This past June, my wife, Shelly, our daughter, Bridget, and I did a week-long bareboat charter together in the British Virgin Islands. The fact that the three of us did so would not normally be an event of great note. As the wife and daughter of a sailing journalist, my poor long-suffering family has had to endure being dragged everywhere from the Upper Great Lakes to the Bahamas to go sailing—whether they liked it or not. This time around, though, things were a little different. On one hand, this would be the first time we would be paying a visit to the BVI since they were thrashed by Hurricane Irma in late 2017. Also, this would be our last charter together before Shelly and I dropped Bridget off for her…

Many power catamarans, particularly those from the Leopard brand, are designed with bareboat charter fleets in mind. This is good news for two reasons: First, the boats have what bareboat charterers want (which is no different from what most boat owners want), and second, the boats are designed for easy maintenance. Full disclosure: I am a Leopardholic. I’ve chartered many Leopards, usually from five to 10 days at a time, in Thailand and Greece, the British Virgins and the Abacos. The builder’s vessels have been uniformly wonderful to use. They handled impeccably in ferocious line squalls, and maneuvered well. Many earlier Leopard power cats looked like sailboats with the mast replaced by a flybridge. The new 46 Power Catamaran breaks new ground, with builders Robertson and Caine of South Africa…

I have to admit, I was partial to the Horizon PC60 from the jump. As I walked the docks of the Ft. Lauderdale boat show, it was the name emblazoned along her transom that reeled in my focus: Mangata. It’s a word that I first came across during some previous travels through Sweden, and it refers to the moon’s reflection on the water. (From an etymological perspective, it makes a lot of sense for a coastal people who spend months at a time in darkness to have a dedicated word for this phenomenon.) The owners of Mangata have a particularly deep connection to the appellation. “Our daughter-in-law is Swedish,” says the owner, “so she introduced us to the word. And we like to do our boating in remote places, way…

For most of their adult lives, April and Larry Smith had very little knowledge about boating. Aside from short stints on vessels in their 20s—with April serving as a crew member on an 86-foot yawl in Marina Del Rey and Larry spending nine months as first mate on a 43-foot trimaran—the couple hadn’t spent much time on the water at all. They were in their 60s and living on their 10-acre horse ranch in California when they almost decided to buy a sailing catamaran to keep in the British Virgin Islands. Then they heard about the Great Loop and their boating plans changed. “We ended up buying a monohull, because a catamaran is not your usual Loop boat,” April explains. “But the whole time we were doing the Loop on…

As a propulsion source for boating, hydrogen has a lot going for it. When coupled with a fuel cell, the lightest gas in existence provides a clean and high-efficiency means of electrically spinning a propeller. Over the last couple of years too, new technologies have emerged that allow hydrogen to be produced through electrolysis with seawater. One day soon, while out at sea with a solar array, you could literally end up refining your own endless source of fuel. Battery technology has of course, been getting the lion’s share of attention over the last few years, but batteries are heavy and in high-drag boats, fairly range limited. To address that, the Defender of the 37th America’s Cup has been going all-in on hydrogen as a fuel for its chase boats.…

HH44 The stylish new HH44 is designed with a purpose in mind: electric power. Details like moving the helm station from the coach roof to make more space for solar panels have been drawn in to the boat’s very design, making the sailor’s experience onboard as clean and quiet as possible without compromising on luxury. Headroom clocks in at 6ft 4in in the hulls and 6ft 6in in the salon, meaning that this boat has light and space to spare. When natural light isn’t available, changeable RGB lighting will ensure that this boat is both the place to party at any dock and also lit appropriately for night watches underway. Another key feature for the sailing experience is the curved daggerboards that provide impressive lift, giving the HH44 a close-hauled…

Riddle me this. What do you get when there’s a gale warning out of the west and a 13-year-ebb tide rushing out of the east? If you answered “a bad time” or “a washing machine,” you are correct. Such were the conditions on day 1 of the Race to Alaska (R2AK) that our half-Australian, half-American race team Vegemite Vigilantes faced on the start line. The new R2AK tattoos were still bloody on the arms of my fellow crewmates Scott Wallingford, Andrew (Andy) de Bruin, and Trevor (Zam) Bevan. As per R2AK tradition, the fresh ink was from a pop-up tattoo parlor that offers race participants free R2AK tats. The ink of my teammates sent a strong message: We’re getting to Alaska, hell or high water. Around 30 percent of racers…

Imagine a vessel steady enough to execute accurate hydrographic surveys in Lake Huron, high tech enough to analyze the ocean’s fish populations and pollution levels, and fast enough to chase off intruder vessels and protect Navy ships. Now imagine that vessel shaped like an insect and being completely autonomous. Mix all that together and you get the WAM-V. WAM-V stands for Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel. It’s the brainchild of Ugo Conti, the founder and chief technology officer of Marine Advanced Robotics in Richmond, California. Once a researcher at UC Berkley and, subsequently, the founder of ElectroMagnetic Instruments, Conti quit his job to sail the world with his wife, Isabella, and 4-year-old son, Maurice, for three and a half years. But he soon found how terribly seasick he became. “There’s got…

Boat builders refresh their designs all the time, and there’s usually a new version in the same length about every 10 years. However, French catamaran builder Lagoon took their time—34 years to be exact—to bring out a new version of their classic 55-footer. Add a year for the model to make it to this side of the Atlantic, and you have three and a half decades in between. I had the chance to take this model out for a spin in Miami and one thing was certain, things have changed quite a bit since the original debuted in 1987. Naval architecture firm VPLP (the same one used for the original 55) teamed up with designer Patrick Le Quément to dial in a good-looking boat with lots of amenities. The hull,…

If you can sell over 150 catamarans off-plan before the resin has even hit the fiberglass, you know you must be doing something right. Despite costing around $1.1 milion once fitted out and on the water, Fountaine Pajot’s new 51 has done just that. The French yard has been at it since 1986, and has built up an enviable reputation for soundly designed, bluewater catamarans. Buoyed by the recent purchase of Dufour Yachts, their business is booming. Livability is the key to the rise of the catamaran; the Aura 51 offers that and puts natural light and huge volume to good use. With the aft doors fully slid back, there is a 10-foot opening with the galley island in the middle. It naturally splits traffic between the galley and the…

Despite the way they are often marketed, electric boats are not new technology. They were in use as far back as 1839, when Russian electric-motor wizard Moritz von Jacobi, with financial backing from Czar Nicholas, built a 28-foot paddleboat powered by batteries. It could carry 14 passengers and had a top speed of 3 mph with an electric motor of Jacobi’s design, according to the University of Tartu Museum in Estonia. Since then, boatbuilders have been trying to figure out use-cases for boats that best suit electrification. A panel of marine industry experts from Brunswick Corp., Yamaha Marine, Torqeedo and Ingenity recently sat down at the American Boating Congress in Washington, D.C., to discuss the state of the electrification push in recreational boats, charging infrastructure and the challenges presented by…

Want to start a brawl in a waterfront pub? Just throw out the question: Which is better, sail or power? Full disclosure: This is not cats vs. monohulls. It’s purely about sailing cats vs. power cats, and we are taking electric cats out of the argument because they muddy the water. OK, I’ve got my flak jacket on, because I’m sure I’m going to step on a few toes here. When deciding for yourself, first define your needs. Do you plan on making short hops (Catalina, Block Island, Bimini) or do your dreams have the volcanic peaks of Moorea in them? Do you need speed (power cats) or range (sail)? Power cats allow you to beat everyone to the best moorings and dodge weather, while sail is better suited to…