Inhaltsverzeichnis für Summer 2018 in Multihull Sailor

While engaged in some heavy-duty procrastination one afternoon, surfing Google in quiet desperation in order to avoid writing an overdue article, I came across a mention of the once-famous foiler L’Hydroptère. It’s not just multihull aficionados who will remember the big trimaran—ten years ago, through the summer and fall of 2008 and into 2009, she made headlines not just in sailing magazines but in the mainstream press. She was, for quite some time, the fastest sailing craft in the world. Her creator, Alain Thébault, was a friend of legendary ocean racer Eric Tabarly, who eagerly embraced the concept of a big boat that could fly across oceans. Like most visionaries, Thébault endured his share of skepticism right from the time he built his first foiler in 1976. In the early…

Over the last 10 years the RORC Caribbean 600, a distance race that starts and finishes in Antigua and winds around the Leeward Islands from Guadeloupe in the south to Anguilla in the north, has grown to become a highlight of the island regatta season. It’s hotly contested by serious racing teams, and with changing weather conditions and plenty of islands and reefs to deal with, it’s a real test of navigation skills and crew work as well as outright boat speed. A record 11 multihulls were entered in this year’s race, which kicked off with a couple of days of big winds and waves that took their toll on both the mono and multihull fleets. There were many retirements, none as spectacular as that of the Paul Bieker-designed Fujin,…

The Leopard 50 is replacing the popular Leopard 48, but this constitutes an entirely new yacht, not just an upgrade of the older boat. The new 50 is 2ft longer than the 48, and the beam has been widened from 25ft to 26ft 5in. It is also available with a flybridge, and to minimize your suspense, it’s wonderful! Note that Leopard makes a point of calling it a “lounge” rather than a flybridge, and the version with said lounge is therefore called the Leopard 50L. There’s another version sans lounge called the 50P, for performance. Aside from the lounge seating on the hardtop abaft the helm, the only real difference on the L version is that the boom has been raised a bit, so no unwary guest gets whacked. DESIGN…

French catamaran builder Lagoon, created an unimaginable following when its launched its 380 nearly two decades ago. With over 800 of the boats built to date, it appealed both in size and price to couples with cruising dreams. No model launched since has been successful in pushing the queen off her pedestal. But that may change with Lagoon’s newest introduction, the Lagoon 40. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION The Lagoon 40 replaces the previous 39 and the 400 models. Designed by VPLP, the new cat adopted the styling of her larger siblings, including more angular transoms, longer rectangular hull ports to let light stream in below and a coachroof that flows into an upward-angled composite hardtop, which gives the boat an aggressive look. The wraparound windows are still vertical, but their elongated…

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 Eurpean shores to discover ours hundreds of years ago. So in 2007, rather than be retirees watching TV on a couch, my wife, Sue, and I cut all ties with our former land-based lives and chose to live aboard fulltime. We became amateur explorers by boat. Our boat, Angel Louise, is a 1987 40ft Catalac catamaran built in England. Having sailed her from the United States to London, we originally intended to cross to the Western Mediterranean via the French canals—only to find on arrival that she was 6in…

When François Gabart sailed his giant trimaran Macif across a line between England’s Lizard Point and Oussant in France on December 17 after 42 days at sea, the 35-year-old Frenchman not only set a new singlehanded round-the-world record, he cemented his place among the great sailors of all time. Gabart is widely recognized as one of the best, if not the best, singlehanded sailors in the world, and it’s an accolade he has worked extremely hard to earn. He started his winning ways at a very young age. At 14 he won the French nationals in the Optimist class, and two years later was the French national champion in the Moth class. By the time he was 20, Gabart was the Tornado Junior World Champion. Two years later he won…

Here’s a riddle: What is less than 50ft long, has two big hulls, three big cabins and four decks? Answer: The Fountaine Pajot Saona 47. Well, perhaps it’s even five levels if you count the large engine rooms. This boat is a space machine in every sense of the word. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION The Saona 47 maximizes living and entertaining space while retaining good speed by combining multi-decking, a minimum wetted surface and lots of flare at the chines. It’s tricky to put all that together, but the design staff at Berret Racoupeau has succeeded here, partly by extending the waterline to include integral stern platforms. The limitation will probably be loading—if the boat is carrying a lot of weight, the broader portions of the hulls will be submerged and…

LOA 24ft 3in LWL 23ft 7in BEAM 17ft 11in (amas out); 8ft 2in (amas in) DRAFT 1ft (board up); 5ft 3in (board down) DISPLACEMENT 1,795lb (lightship) SAIL AREA 435ft2 ENGINE 8hp outboard SA/D RATIO 47 D/L RATIO 60 BUILDER Corsair Marine, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, corsairmarine.com PRICE $69,990 (sailaway) We’d only been out on Miami’s Biscayne Bay aboard the Corsair 760R a few minutes when Corsair Marine marketing manager Shane Grover and I began bemoaning the fact neither of us had a GPS with us to determine our boatspeed. Moments later, though, we both came to the same conclusion: who the hell cares? At the time we were ripping our way back and forth under jib and full main in about 14 knots of breeze, and the boat was cookin’.…

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 Island Airport’s runway, the first shock was the sight of dozens of wrecked boats below strewn along Trellis Bay’s shoreline. A local marine surveyor estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the BVI’s charter fleet was damaged. Irma had also destroyed or damaged 85 percent of the island’s buildings, as well as much of the its infrastructure. Even after seeing news reports and YouTube videos, nothing prepared me for the scale of Irmageddon. “Worse than any war zone I’ve seen!” said one of the 200-plus…

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 Francisco? Incredible as it may seem, full-foiling has already become somewhat routine, with Moths, GD32s and even foiling kiteboards now regularly skimming across the likes of San Diego and Narragansett bays. Heck, even yours truly has now going foiling, on a beach cat no less. Still, there’s nothing routine about the current cutting edge of full-foiling performance—aboard France’s maxi-tri Ultime class, as part of the proposed Brest Ultime Challenge solo race around the world, set to kick…

LOA 41ft 4in (12.58m) BEAM 23ft 8in (7.20m) DRAFT 4ft 2in (1.25m) DISPLACEMENT 25,355lb (11,500kg) light ship FOUNTAINE PAJOT NEW 42 The French cat powerhouse has been on a roll these last few years, cranking out new models that not only replace their older line but take a step forward in design and user-friendliness. The New 42’s “real” name had not been revealed as we went to press, but we can be sure it will have the same island theme as its predecessors. Renderings of the Berret Racoupeau-designed cat show a handsomely styled package combining scads of room belowdecks with a functional deck and cockpit plan. The three-cabin Maestro version devotes one hull to the owner’s suite, while the four-cabin Quatuor will find its way into many charter fleets. Fountaine…

There’s no doubt about it, sales of production catamarans are booming, and it seems the old prejudices against multihulls have finally eroded away. Cruising trimarans remain a niche-within-a-niche, but if boats like the Neel 51 are anything to go by, the virtues of three hulls will quickly become apparent to a wider audience as well. DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION This is the fourth design for Neel by veteran mono- and multihull architects Michel Joubert and Bernard Nivelt. Neel founder Eric Bruneel, who spent many years on ocean-racing tris, is bullish about the advantanges of three hulls for cruising: he posits that a catamaran’s peak righting moment is reached at a mere 12 degrees of heel, at which point sail area must be reduced. By contrast, a trimaran’s peak is at 27…

It was the summer of 2013 and Aussie sailor Bill Macartney was in San Francisco for the 34th America’s Cup—the summer of “the Comeback” and the moment when the Cup officially took to the air thanks to the efforts of Emirates Team New Zealand. “Seeing Team New Zealand come roaring round the top mark,” Macartney says, “I looked at it and thought, we gotta do something. We have to do something.” Fair enough. A lot of people saw their worlds change in the course of that summer. Macartney, though, isn’t just any sailor. He also happens to be the ex-CEO of the 18-Foot Skiff Grand Prix of the 1990s, the iconic series of regattas featuring wildly over-canvased trapeze and outrigger-equipped three-man skiffs that paved the way for today’s stadium-style racing,…

Even as Irma was gathering strength, the Caribbean’s biggest charter base—the combined Moorings/Sunsail operation in Road Town, Tortola—was gearing up for what it thought would be the worstcase scenario. No one knew that they’d be hammered by the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic. Six days before Irma struck, Peter Cochrane, the vice-president of operations, flew down to the BVI to oversee preparations in line with the company’s standard operating procedures. All the bases in the region review their plans annually and with the many previous storms, all the teams were well versed in the process. “We were already well prepared, with Paraquita Bay being filled eventually to over 200 yachts, and we then immediately recalled 25 charter yachts back to base,” Cochrane said. Along with the Moorings and…