Table of contents for Multihull Sailor Winter 2023 in SAIL

The Paris 2024 Olympics are right around the corner, and though favorites like gymnastics, diving, and swimming promise to be the most viewed highlights, don’t forget to check out the sailing as well. Over 300 competitors in 10 classes will race for gold, including one fleet aboard small cats called NA-CRA 17s. Here’s everything you need to know about their road to the Olympics. Sailing’s been on the summer games’ schedule since the beginning—in fact, a sailor named Hélène de Pourtalès became the first woman to ever win an Olympic gold medal back in 1900. But it wasn’t until 1976 that a catamaran class was added to the event for the first time in the form of a sporty, 20-foot long, doublehanded boat called a Tornado. The Tornado class got…

The new Rapido 40 trimaran is designed by Morrelli & Melvin, whose portfolio includes multihull rockets ranging from America’s Cup contenders to Steve Fossett’s Playstation, so no surprise that performance is in its DNA. But it’s also a cruising multihull that’s light, strong, easy to sail, and designed to fit into a standard slip with retractable amas. The smallest in the Vietnamese-built Rapido line, this tri combines bright above-waterline living with efficient sailing and easy singlehanding with a self-tacking jib. Multiple watertight bulkheads offer a measure of safety in case of collision, and the carbon/foam construction keeps the boat light and agile. At just under 12,000 pounds, it’s half the weight of a 40-foot catamaran, but with an equivalent sailplan that helps her slip along at wind speed even in…

One thing that is often at the forefront of my mind as I climb through boats, particularly at the three major South Florida shows, is how the model will fare as a Bahamas cruiser. To check boxes as an enviable vessel to get you from Palm Beach to the Out Islands, a boat needs a few things, including a shallow draft, a seaworthy hull to get across the Gulf Stream, and enough on board volume to keep even the closest of friends and family from driving each other crazy. Enter the Horizon PC68, which I boarded at this year’s Palm Beach International Boat Show, and which has all those qualities and then some. A 68-footer with a 24-foot, 6-inch beam, this catamaran is more comparable in volume to a 90-foot…

Approximately 99 locks, one marine railway, 3,827 geese, more than 100 tiny towns, and countless new friends and acquaintances. That’s just a small portion of what we en-countered on our three-month, 1,600-nautical-mile summer cruise through portions of Canada’s Great Lakes and historic canals: from the Erie Canal into Lake Ontario and the Thousand Islands archipelago, the Rideau Canal to Ottawa, the Trent-Severn Waterway, Georgian Bay and the North Channel of Lake Huron, before re-entering the United States and proceeding to Lake Michigan. Canada’s inland waterways are renowned as some of the most beautiful cruising in North America. Generally speaking, the water is crystal clear and tends to be deep, often dropping to 50 or more feet within yards of the shoreline. Despite the depth, many of the most popular cruising…

Here’s my advice: Get on your boat right now and take a cruise to Fernandina Beach, Florida. Not only is this a great destination for history, food and drink, and laid-back, old-Florida vibe, its location on the Intra-coastal Waterway (ICW), accessibility to one of the best inlets on this part of the East Coast, and range of accommodations for boats with more than one hull make it a top multihull stopover. This little town is eminently walkable and charming—without being a parody of charming. You could even say it’s adorable, with its shady streets and nifty Victorian cottages. Of course, it’s loaded with a wide variety of restaurants, with more than enough fresh seafood to go around, Timoti’s Seafood Shack and Salty Pelican, to name just two favorites. It has…

The ubiquity of smartphones means we all have a powerful tool for protecting the environment right in our pockets—if we stock them with the right apps. Ghost Gear Reporter is one app that sailors would do well to have on hand. It allows folks to log the location of derelict fishing gear discovered along the shoreline, on the water, or on the seabed via a simple, user-friendly form. The app relays that information to local conservation organizations for clean-up, where possible. An estimated 800,000 tons of commercial fishing gear winds up in the ocean annually, and it routinely ensnares sea life. The app lets users specify the location, type, and details of the gear, including simple diagrams and definitions to help users provide the most clear and useful assessment information…

Back in early December, I joined a crew of my colleagues from Soundings and Passagemaker magazines in Cape Town, South Africa. There, we met the folks from Robertson & Caine Yachts and were given not only a spectacular tour of the country but a granular look at where and how Leopard/Moorings catamarans—among the most popular multihulls on earth—are built. We also had ample opportunity to drive Leopard/Moorings 46- and 53-footers into ripping winds and confused, sizeable seas off this “Cape of Storms.” Not surprisingly, the boats are designed to handle with aplomb the sorts of conditions the southern oceans regularly deliver, and the cats pounded through the chop with solid, quiet authority. But the one quarry that eluded us on that trip was R&C’s newest build, the Leopard 40PC. Also…

With heavy backpacks and our hands laden with as many grocery bags as we could carry, we trudged down the steep hill to our dinghy. I tried to settle my nerves. We were in Santa Cruz, one of the Galápagos islands, gathering last-minute provisions for what would be our longest-ever ocean passage. Our next stop was French Polynesia. Over the past month, my partner Jim and I hiked dormant volcanoes, surfed alongside swooping sea lions, dove with hammerhead sharks, admired 150-year-old land tortoises, and even spotted penguins hanging out near our boat. The mist that hung persistently over the Galápagos made me think of Ireland, where I am from, but I was thousands of miles away from home. We’d grown fond of the place and its fascinating ecosystems that had…

“This just came in the mail,” says Gino Morrelli excitedly as he runs into the kitchen of his California home. In his hand is a booklet that may or may not grant him the International Proficiency Certificate (IPC) that is required to charter a bareboat in Croatia. “Now we can go on vacation in September!” Morrelli, one half of the design power team Morrelli & Melvin, is one of the minds responsible for boats like the Rapido trimarans (see pg. 22), multiple Leopards including the 47 PC and award-winning 38 and 44, HH catamarans, Invincible powerboats, the NACRA 17 (see pg. 16), and even the Windcat workboats that service offshore wind farms. If that weren’t enough, he also had a hand in designing for elite racers like America’s Cup campaigns…

Who knew that Elvis was a boating guy? He clearly knew boats because one of his most popular songs was “Love Me Tender.” Every skipper quickly learns that good tenders mean great adventures, bad tenders mean you’re stuck at a dock for shore access. A large part of the good/bad equation is tender management. Multihulls, either power or sail, offer an eclectic choice of systems to handle launching, storing, and retrieving tenders. For those of you who have invested sweat and barked knuckles rasslin’ a tender on board a monohull, even when using a boom or halyard, the biggest effort you’ll face with a catamaran is pushing the button that magically causes the tender to rise out of (or into) the water. Additionally, catamarans have an immense beam. A 45-foot…

As the push for more renewable energy grows, the need for high-capacity, long-life battery storage becomes more essential. Everybody and their uncle seems to want to transition to lithium batteries onboard, and in most cases, it’s a done deal that lithium is what’s needed to power all of the goodies on new boats. Until now, though, there was little serviceability or recyclability in the life cycle of these batteries, making the claim that they’re “greener” a rather dubious Catch-22. Enter the Aceleron Essential battery, which won the first-ever citation in the environmental design category at the DAME Design Awards announced at the annual METS show in Amsterdam last fall. Unlike other lithium batteries, which must be completely replaced when a cell fails, this cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate battery is built…

French catamaran builder Lagoon has launched a new 51-footer that is an evolution of the best features from previous models. With a new rig and an open interior, this swanky cat should find a solid target market in both charter and private use. Like its predecessor, the Lagoon 50, the 51 is the work of VPLP and Patrick Le Quément, and in fact it shares the same hulls with a slightly different bridge deck. The new model gained two feet in LOA thanks to longer swim plat-forms and also slimmed down by about 2,000 pounds. Lagoon’s nod to sustainability now includestion using recyclable hemp instead of traditional fiberglass and the addition of flexible Solbian solar panels on the bimini and coachroof that add a total of 2,728 watts for more…

When I first cranked up my marine-magazine career eons ago, most of the big magazines dispatched editors every year to the Chicago International Boat Show. And toward the end of the festivities in 1989, in a crowded aisle of the McCormick Place convention center, a wild-haired guy approached me, got within ear-whispering distance and said, “Hey Bill, you wanna see something unusual?” What ensued was an event that had nothing to do with the show itself. I was soon shown a newly hatched power cat—an outboard-energized 30-something with a cabin—that was stashed at a ramshackle dock, a lengthy cab ride away from the show. A trio of true believers wanted me to drive the boat, look her over, and tell them if she was marketable. At the time, a vessel…