Table of contents for Multihull Power & Sail Summer 2025 in SAIL

If there isn’t an international sport of bareboat chartering, there should be. The Olympic committee doesn’t recognize it, but watching other boaters struggle to anchor, pick up mooring balls, or Med moor is a favorite late afternoon spectator sport for anyone already happily settled for the evening. Add a charter boat they’re not used to, an anchorage or mooring field they’ve never seen before, and a boat full of well meaning but inexperienced crew, and you’ve got hours of entertainment. From the security of your own boat, you can hear the increasingly heated invectives flung from cockpit to foredeck (and back!) as well as the roaring of their engine in reverse and forward. You can watch the hopeless lunges with a boat hook, the resetting of the anchor or the…

The body of water between Australia and New Zealand has a few names. It was first Te Moana-o-Rēhua, or Sea of Rehua, a star god to the Māori people of New Zealand whose guidance you may need for safe passage in the dangerous currents. Modern charts label it the Tasman Sea. It borders—or battles—the South Pacific Ocean, resulting in swells over 25 feet high. Aussies and Kiwis alike have a third name: The Ditch. Not as in “last-ditch,” but “crossing the ditch,” the common term for braving the 1,000-mile open water passage. When British expat Mark Heeley decided to buy a power cat, he knew exactly what he wanted. Filling his particular design brief, however, would be a tall order—60 feet long and 1,200 miles away, to be exact. He…

Time to put on your sunnies and your best sailing Stetson, because we’re going to Galveston! Why? Ultra reliable southerlies (10 to 15 knots), friendly bayous, the freshest shrimp you’ve ever had, a trio of big glass pyramids, pirate Jean Lafitte’s house, and the oldest drug store in Texas. (Is that important? I don’t know, it’s just a fact.) And, of course, delightful boating too. This island city of 500,000 has been hit hard time and time again by hurricanes. The worst was the 1900 hurricane, which still holds the U.S. record for greatest loss of life in a natural disaster (6,000-8,000 deaths). But Galvestonians picked up the pieces, raised the town up 5 or 6 feet, jacked up the houses, built a 12-foot floodwall, and started all over again.…

Fifty years ago, a group of young men gathered at a beachfront on the windward side of Oahu and launched a canoe based on traditional Hawaiian designs. The modern fiberglass hulls were lashed together with ancient techniques—and six miles of cordage—a marriage of new and old that continued to be present at the core of everything the boat and her community would go on to achieve. The plan was to make it from Hawaii to Tahiti for America’s 1976 bicentennial celebration. The guys on the beach that day didn’t know it at the time, but Hōkūle‘a would still be voyaging half a century later, one of the most iconic Polynesian voyaging crafts and a symbol for Hawaii’s heritage. It wasn’t as simple as commissioning and building a canoe to cross…

Boatbuilding is hard, dirty, technical, often tedious, unforgiving work. So, one could fairly pose the question to Matt and Jessica Johnson, who are four years into a DIY build of a 44-foot catamaran, if it wouldn’t have made more sense to just buy one and go sailing. It’s not like they are newbies to the cruising life. They’ve already owned two other boats, a 1989 Sabre 34 on which they did two transatlantics and sailed the East Coast, Bahamas, Cuba, and Central America, and a 1983 Trisalu 37, an aluminum monohull they spent two years gutting and completely refitting, then sailing to Portugal, Ireland, the Arctic Circle, and Norway. With tens of thousands of miles under their keels in some pretty distant waters, they have walked the walk. So why…

A high school dropout at the age of 15, Lex Raas says his father’s boatyard was his university, a proving ground where a lifelong fascination with building better boats began. A young South African with a love of being on the water and a chip on his shoulder, Raas’ earliest sailing cats were relatively simple craft. Yet those first experiences were formidable and would lead him to go on to form the catamaran giants Leopard and Aquila. He’s too humble to say it himself so I’ll do it for him: No single person has advanced this category of power boat like Raas. The father of the modern power cat? I’m not sure anyone in the industry would argue with the title. MHP&S: Your resume is legendary, but how did you…

We’ve never seen anything like it,” says Mike Rees, Seawind Catamarans’ sales and marketing manager. He’s referring to the popular appeal of their new model, the Seawind 1370 that sold 90 hulls before the first one even launched. “It’s absolutely the right product for our brand at the right time.” The new 45-footer designed by Richard Ward launched in 2023 and quickly gathered a community of prospective and current owners on WhatsApp, Rees says, “and they all talk to each other about upgrades and modifications and say, ‘I want what they have!’” The boat is indeed proving irresistible, and for good reasons. First, she has the same cocoon feel as other Seawinds, which gives the impression of instant safety aboard. Nothing’s too high, too exposed, or too unwieldy to handle.…

It feels like we live in an era when technology and design are evolving at breakneck speed. And no category of yacht, in my opinion, has evolved faster in recent years than the power-cat segment. About eight years ago, I was with colleagues aboard an Aquila 44 and a Leopard 40 that cruised through the BVI in the wake of Hurricane Irma. Neither vessel was a thing of beauty, but they were perfect for our purposes: stable, efficient, with enough privacy for colleagues to not get squirmy. Functional to the highest degree, we spent more of our time aboard the boat looking out at the scenery; it was the other boaters, we joked, that had to look at us, as the almost synonymous saying goes. Power cats in general have…

When imagining the white dot of a vessel traversing a vast blue ocean, people usually picture a boat with mast and sails slowly reeling off the miles. Cruising the middle of the ocean is usually the purview of sailors and their infinite range, thanks to the wind for endless propulsion. Yet long-distance passage-making is exactly what Keith Richards decided to do after purchasing his Leopard 53 Powercat, Kekada. With ambitions of cruising the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas, it seemed to Keith that moving the boat on its own bottom would be a practical, maybe even cost-saving, choice. Built by South Africa’s Robertson and Caine, the cat’s first destination was the Bahamas, which meant an Atlantic crossing. Keith was unperturbed: “When I was younger, my parents did a circumnavigation in a…