------ Original Message ------
Received: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 12:25:12 AM EDT
From: "Paul Sutton" <psutton@nc.rr.com>
To: <power-catamaran@lists.samurai.com>
Subject: [PCW] Annapolis Boat show and hull designs Paul's original posting comments in black. Mine responses in blue.

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.”

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I think that was a great idea as wives can get a little bored with the process of really going into the details on each vessel.

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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.

Didn’t Ted hood have one of his 50’ plus vessels there? Show exhibits get pretty expensive, and when you factor in the ‘smallness’ of the market for multihulls in the scheme of things, a manufacture has to weight the expenses spent on print ads verses how many different shows they might attend, verses efforts to get the targeted ‘ready’ clients to the vessel in person and out on a test sail.

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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.

Reference your two year comment. In that period of time you will find a show that has the larger vessels, and/or you will target a few manufactures/dealers to pay an in-person inspection trip.

I understand your desires (and very likely your wife’s) for all of these convenience items you’ve outlined here. Just keep in mind that all of this equipment will need some maintenance (more than home units), and that responsibility might fall upon yourself if you can’t pay or find someone in a remote area to do it.

Air-cond of the engine room is very impractical.

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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.

That ‘cramming everything in’ is often not the designers but rather the manufacturers/marketing folk

That side-by-side king set up on the Prowler cat was likely just for show purposes. A partition between the berths could easily be provided here.

It’s the marketing folks who feel that each of these vessels must provid the max number of berths and a private head with each berth. Think maintaining one head was enough, try four or more.

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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

I’m affair you might have it write, if the ‘space’ is there fill it up. And I do think some of these folks think about the resale look this as they do not expect to have any one vessel for some significant number of years….shame.

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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?

Interesting observations. I spent a little time on some Navy boats as well. These rails are very handy but I think they are designed for youth. I don’t think you would find most grown women likely to use them as they are intended to be used.

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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 assume you are referring to the HYSUCAT foils. Generally speaking these foils are only effective above 20 knts, and as such are not good candidates for ‘cruising’ vessels.

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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?

That 43 power cat you speak of is the Lagoon 43. It does appear to have some problems with ‘excessive sneezing’ as reported early in this forum. One of the things we hope to learn on this forum is the true performance of these various vessels as opposed to those attributes claimed by the manufactures and or sales people. Actual recorded fuel usage is more difficult to dispute than theory.

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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?

You might pay a visit to this discussion of roll stabilizers and a picture of that vessel you speak of http://boatdesign.net/forums/showthread.php?t=633&page=2&highlight=stabilizer

Crossing the Atlantic in a strictly power vessel is not to be taking lightly. It not so much the seaworthiness of the vessel(s) and the designs, although that must be given considerable due, but rather the straight forward consideration of fuel capacity. Just keep in mind that one of the foundations of the multihull form is light displacement, long thin hull shapes. It is much more difficult to include big fuel reserves in these hull forms than a full displacement monohull trawler. Better yet if you really want an ocean capable vessel you should consider a MotorSailer. You might visit these two discussions:

http://boatdesign.net/forums/showpost.php?p=43251&postcount=25

http://boatdesign.net/forums/showthread.php?t=4499&highlight=motorsailer

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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?

I agree with your concern about electronics in the sea atmosphere, but it’s invariably an electronics world today. I think we are on the verge of a big switch in the electric systems on vessels from sine-wave AC systems to DC systems. This emerging hybrid technology and the diesel-electric technologies all point in that direction. There is lots to read on the subject if you type in “diesel-electric” in the search button at BoatDesign.net

http://boatdesign.net/forums/search.php?searchid=395239

http://boatdesign.net/forums/showpost.php?p=34794&postcount=13

Brian Eiland

beiland@usa.net
www.RunningTideYachts.com
distinctive expedition yachts