Rod & Denny, Thanks. Sounds like catamarans' time has come. Rod- you mentioned that there have been some cat designs utilizing bulbous bows. That brings up the question of hull design on the individual hulls. I have seen ads for a few passagemaking catamarans that advertise full displacement hull forms. Are there some passagemaking cats designed to get up on a plane or do all of these long range cats use full displacement? On cats that do 20 kts or better, the speeds are not consistent with the max theoretical speed of a full displacement boat even taking twice the length (of a mono hull) at the water line into account. On the other hand, because of the inherent stability of a cat, it may not need the sea worthiness provided by a full displacement mono hull. Phil Eslinger