Some years ago when you started ranting about catamarans, I made a
simple claim that you would have trouble finding any cases of
catamaran capsizes that met the following criteria: It had to be a
modern production cruising cat, not of the "crossbeam" style, or
homemade, or 40 years old; it had to be at least the size of my cat
(36'3") with appropriate beam and cruising rig; it had to be being
used for cruising, not racing or delivery. I even admitted that you
might find a few, but that it would likely be in conditions that would
put any monohull at severe risk, and that generally catamaran capsizes
end up as a story of survival, not loss.

And what have you come up with? You've scoured the web for years and
posted every story you could find, but as predicted the pickings have
been slim indeed. In fact, not a single incident you've reported fit
the criteria. Several have been 30 feet, which is generally
considered too small for serious weather. One of those was a racing
cat, and another was an very old design with a beam so narrow that it
could hardly be called a cat nowadays. Another was a crossbeam
design, with a known structural flaw. One was at anchor in a Category
5 hurricane, where many of the monohulls sank. You've even posted
links to Hobie capsizes! The Fountain Pajot Tobago 35 was close but
small and with a SA/Disp of almost 30 its rig is quite aggressive for
a cruising cat.

Further, with one exception, there was no loss of life in any of these
incidents. In that exception, a delivery crew left port and sailed
into one of the worst storms in Pacific Northwest history. Even so,
it appears everyone was on deck at the time of the capsize, and anyone
below would have survived. In fact, its possible that had someone
below activated the EPIRB (or had it been rig to automatically
activate) someone on deck might have been rescued.

And you completely ignore the fact that every year there are a number
of monohulls that sink or go missing, and that monohulls sink every
day in inland situations, even at the dock. Also, monohull sailors
are at risk every time they go forward; not so on cats. Almost all
monohulls are at great risk from collisions with logs, containers, and
whales; multihulls generally survive such episode long enough for
rescue. Incidents such as the loss of "Morning Dew" in Charleston
would be very unlikely in a modern catamaran.

On top of this, the vast majority of sailors, whether mono- or
multihull never, or very infrequently, actually go offshore, and of
those that do, most avoid the worst weather. For instance, for all of
your talk, you've never been more than 50 miles away from land; you've
never encountered conditions that could potentially overwhelm a larger
cat.

So you can rant about how you'd never sail a cat; that's fine by me.
Personally, nothing could make me spend more than a week on a 26
footer, let alone live on it for years. Why don't you explain to us
how you lost that boat?




* Wilbur Hubbard wrote, On 8/16/2007 9:24 AM:
Yes, cruising catamarans have something extra. As a simple Google and
YouTube search using capsize and catamaran will reveal, the something
extra is the remarkable ease with which catamarans turn turtle.

With this in mind, any potential catamaran buyer must ask himself if the
paltry advantages of a catamaran - things such as small heel angles,
slightly faster speeds downwind, more elbow room below (but not load
carrying capacity), shallow draft and largish cockpit - outweigh the
fact that sooner or later the whole shebang is going to end up
upside-down and swamped. Don't even think about what happens if you get
trapped under the thing and drown. Just think about upside-down. In
other words, everything is ruined.

Why put up with a boat that has a designed-in flaw of being more stable
upside-down than rightside-up? Is the trade-off between a platform that
doesn't heel quite as much and an upside-down platform worth it? Only
you can answer that question. It depends upon how much you love your
life and the lives of your loved ones.

I wonder when the Coast Guard is going to get some balls and declare any
and all cruising catamaran ocean voyages "manifestly unsafe voyages"
and put a stop to them?

Wilbur Hubbard