I guess I'm guilty of having been a closet lurker here for the past month or two, so I apologize for my lack of input. I too went to the Annapolis powerboat show for the specific purpose of seeing what power cats really look like. I attended the Thursday show by myself, and took my wife back on Sunday to let her see what I had already "scoped out." There was a nice showing of boats as everyone has already commented on, but I really would like to have seen some larger boats. A 60' - any 60' plus - would have made the trip more fulfilling. Prices at the show were all over the place with one 40' or so cat priced at $1.2 million while the one right next to it, of a similar size, was priced at about $400,000 or so. The visible differences, at least to my unpracticed eye, were not sufficiently dramatic to account for the price difference. We hope to buy a boat in about 2 years, so for us, this is all fact-finding operation for the time being. Having once owned a 25' "cabin cruiser" and being terminally cramped with no air conditioning (and older and, well maybe not wiser), we're casting an appraising eye on boats for their livability, specifically, do they have enough room for both of us to be engaged in something without having to be within arms reach at all times (we've found during our 23 happy years of marriage that not being joined at the hip 24/7 is one of the things that has made it last so long). We think (disregarding price which may dictate that our desires and our finances reach a realistic compromise) we might be interested in something closer to 60' where beams are wider, galleys have real ovens refrigerators, ice-makers, dishwashers, and trash compactors, large uncluttered saloons, washer/dryers, and engine rooms that are walk-around rather than crawl-around or worse yet, reach-around more suits our fancy. One memory from our 25' reminds me that an engine room should be air-conditioned and heated so that the mechanic on the boat (that would probably be me) doesn't have to work in a sauna set to high to do normal maintenance. One of our pet peeves with power cats is that no matter how large or small the cat, designers seem to find it necessary to have bunks or mattresses in almost every available place on the boat. The Prowler 480 at the Annapolis show took things to the extreme, having the owner's king-size bed and the guest king-size bed side-by-side, butted up against one another with no partition - nothing - separating them. The boat is manufactured in South Africa which doesn't explain the arrangement to me in any meaningful way. There were also two other staterooms aft. Other boats in the 40' range, and even smaller boats than that, had three or more staterooms, and "en suite" each which makes me think that owning a boat, one must take out as many overnight guests as one can at every possible opportunity, all of whom will shower frequently and shouldn't have to share heads. We'd kind of like to live aboard for extended cruises, perhaps the "Great Circle" with the occasional "outlaw" visiting for brief periods, and would much rather a walk-around master with lots of hanging and storage space so that we can have more than three never-wrinkle tops, three pairs of shorts each and one pair of long pants. I don't recall seeing an ironing board on any ship we looked at, come to think of it. Anyway, we'd rather have office space for our computers (I'm a stock trader and my wife is a writer) than accommodations for 12 any day. Do people buy boats with the idea that "when we go to sell it, the more cabins we have will make it more desirable to the next owners" or are there others like ourselves who truly fancy taking long cruises where having a private place for computers and work materials would allow us to get work done interrupted? Are there perhaps design considerations that make beds almost the only thing that go in a sponson (or is hull the correct word) that would help us understand the situation better? And, oh, by the way, a walk-around master in California King would be heaven as I'm 6' 2" and a regular king is more width than two people can use, but not quite long enough that my toes don't poke the bottom! We're pretty green here, so any information or advice that anyone can provide would really be appreciated. Speaking of usable space, we looked at a very nice Seastrand 65' or so trawler that the owner agreed to show for the manufacturer at the show (he was not selling his boat). A very nice gentleman, he had the boat built to his specifications. As it was being built, every time he saw a space that was about to be covered up, he had them put in a door to access it, and shelves. I also noticed, ex-Navy that I am, that on every ladder there was an overhead grab-bar that could be used going down ladders. This is one of those virtual necessities that I noticed was strikingly absent on nearly all of the cats, if not, in fact, all of them. Cats had a lot of railings though, perhaps instead. Railings on my stairs in my house are appropriate because the stairs are tall, but wide and deep, whereas on all boats, ladders tend to be narrow, shallow and steep. My wife had a difficult time getting down from every fly bridge we were on, electing to go down "backwards" in most cases, and even in the interior of many boats it was impossible to actually walk down ladders facing forward without reaching for a grab-rail where there invariable was none. On Navy ships, overhead grab-bars serve two purposes. First, they provide for very fast descents. About five steps down the ladder, you can grab the grab-bar, swing your feet out from under you, and land on the deck below in no time flat. But more importantly, and in a more direct relationship to cats and other personal craft, they proved a safe way to navigate down ladders during rough waters. Yes, even 1,000' aircraft carriers can buck, rock roll and sway, and that grab-bar is the only way to safely move down a ladder to the deck below. I should think that grab-bars on cats would serve the same purpose, that is, safe movement to the deck below, or from the fly bridge to the cockpit, especially considering those little shallow steps that I can't even get my toes on without twisting my foot almost 90 degrees. Has anyone else had similar experiences or similar thoughts? Is there a practical reason that grab bars aren't routinely installed on cats in particular? I visited Mr. Tenant's site and read every one of your articles, and was extremely fascinated by your depth of knowledge and the way you presented it so that even a novice such as myself could learn a lot from it. If I remember correctly, you noted some disfavor with cats with hydrofoils, but I don't recall the precise reasons. I seem to recall that you favored displacement hulls as being both more economical and better riding than planning hull cats; perhaps that was the reason for disliking hydrofoil-equipped cats? One manufacturer that I don't think had a boat at Annapolis did have a brochure in the tent where they were selling "The Power of Catamarans" magazine describing their hydrofoil design, noting that it got better mileage than either planning or displacement hull cats (and undoubtedly claimed that it rode better too - don't they all?). I suspect that your articles were written some years back (I just received my package of back issues of Power of Catamarans!), and I wondered if you could comment on the advisability of hydrofoils with today's cats and whether you would have a different opinion today than back then. I learned more about hulls that I ever thought existed through your articles incidentally; truly enlightening! And now I know why cats are so economical: length versus width! I also read the online log of a gentleman who took his own company's 43' power cat on a 5,000 mile journey down the east coast, around Florida to Pensacola, back down around Florida again stopping at the show in either Ft. Lauderdale or Miami and then back up to the northeast. While I don't remember the manufacturer (the gentleman was the owner or CEO), it was a rear-cabin cat, and was shown at the Annapolis boat show. Two things in his log caught my attention. One was that he posted a graph of fuel usage versus speed, and amateur that I am, I was unable to interpret it except that it seemed to indicate, and the article also seemed to imply, that at almost any speed, he was using about one gallon of diesel per mile, which I know from reading the writings of Mr. Tennant seems unlikely. And secondly, he indicated that when he got outside of the intra-coastal waterway, three to four foot seas made for unpleasant cruising, which I found somewhat distressing. Our old Renken 25' would plane in three to four foot seas quite nicely, with little bouncing. I don't think this sea-worthiness is typical of all 43' cats, but I would like to hear from owners whether this is or is not typical of a cat in the 40' to 50' range, or not. One manufacturer at the show flatly stated that their boat, ignoring the capacity to carry sufficient fuel for a full ocean crossing, was not really a blue-water ocean craft at all and was meant for more protected waters. I assume that some 40' cats are more seaworthy than others. Is there really that much difference between cats of a similar size and where does one find that kind of information? Maybe there should be some kind of rating system stamped on the hull for identification. '1' for "suitable for small farm ponds, '2' for fine on all US lakes, except for the Great Lakes, '3' for good for the ICW, but stay out of Pamlico Sound on windy days, all the way up to '10' for suitable for, and carries enough fuel to circumnavigate the globe, single-handedly; includes automatic washed-overboard cargo container detection and avoidance system. Wouldn't that be nice! A note on boat size and why we're thinking big. We picked up two copies of "Circumnavigator," the Nordhavn boat magazine. One article was about a crossing of the Atlantic that they sponsored and a number of private boats participated in. One of the private boats, a 40 footer, managed to get sideways on a swell and took a nasty roll sufficient to put water over their port side, which managed to get into the engine room and fry their inverter, hence, disabling their auto-pilot. I know about trawlers and their round bottoms (I served on a US Navy research vessel that was a converted liberty ship), though why anyone would choose to go out on a ship with that round bottom profile is beyond me. To me, it was obvious that I don't think I'd like to cross the ocean in anything that small, even with an experienced crew, and, crossing the Atlantic or circumnavigating is a dream that we might someday wish to fulfill. Would it be the general consensus among cat owners that 40' is not an ocean-going cat? What size would you recommend and why? The inverter failure raised a question in my mind about general boat electronics. Since I associate inverters with blenders, TVs, stereos and microwave ovens, is it common to equip boats with navigation and other necessary electronics that will only run on 110 VAC? What types of equipment? Even the ubiquitous PC is at its heart is a device that coverts 110 VAC in normal home use to the 5 VDC and plus and minus 12 VDC that the computer actually runs on (likewise for thin-screen monitors). But in the PCs case, since most are used in the home, this makes sense (although I could easily see the utility in a marine-version PC that runs on 12 VDC not unlike a laptop when running on its battery). I know we've been away from boats for a few years, but does today's boating electronics commonly run on 110 VAC or is that unusual? Well, from a man who has been a lurker for quite some time, I guess I'm making up for lost time with all the questions in this email! Thank you for the very informative notes and suggestions that appear on this list, and good boating to all. I really do enjoy reading the digest everyday, and it's about the only reason I now check my email daily! Before, once a week was about often enough to clean out the junk mail and see if anything truly useful had come in! Best regards to everyone and good boating! Paul Sutton