wrote in message
...
On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:15:32 -0400, "Wilbur Hubbard"
wrote:


wrote in message
. ..
On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 09:24:14 -0400, "Wilbur Hubbard"
wrote:

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

Hey Willy,

You know, every high speed ferry sailing out of Singapore is a cat.
If
the catamaran hull form is so unstable how come all the
classification
societies will classify them as passenger carriers?


I'm talking sailing cats. Not motor cats. Motor cats are heavy, heavy
and heavy. And they don't have the leverage effect of spars and sails
to
turn them over.

Wilbur Hubbard

Well, given that nearly all, if not all, l of the high speed catamaran
ferries I've been on are aluminum I'd have to say that displacement
must play some part of their planing, probably to get them as light as
possible.

The other point that you seem to disregard was that the cat mentioned
in the original post was anchored in a 170 MPH wind. And it flipped
over. During the same hurricane a large number of mono hulls were
sunk. Kinda sounds as though maybe the cat is the better solution when
we view the difference between a bottom side up catamaran and a sunken
mono hull.

By the way Willie, have you ever been out in 170 MPH winds? Do you
think your house trailer will survive 170 MPH winds? Or even a house,
if you owned one? Or perhaps you have traveled through the cyclone
belt and wondered why all those stupid people have cyclone cellars.

If you only knew . . . When it comes to tropical cyclones you can't
even come close to my intimacy with them.

My fine blue water yacht and I have been through 4 tropical storms and
12 hurricanes to date. Been aboard each and every time. The worst winds
were in Andrew and Wilma. Wilma's were stronger because I was in the
core up the Little Shark river in the Everglades. Sustained winds of
over 100 knots. Gusts to 120knots. Ten foot storm surge that had the
river running backwards and sideways over the banks with approximately a
5 knot current. Trees were snapping off like toothpicks and there's some
of the largest mangroves in the world up there. 80 feet tall in some
places. My fine yacht survived without a scratch. The worst thing she
suffered was some temporary staining from the tannic acid in the leaves
and small branches that were turned to mulch and deposited all over the
deck.

My yacht didn't turn upside down nor did she get sunk. She rode every
storm out and took them in stride. The worst any storm ever did was a
lightning strike which would have burned her to the waterline had I not
been aboard at the time to put out the fire that started in the bilge
from burning wiring and an exploded bottle of rum that fed the fire.

Real sailboats don't 'flip over' in high winds. No anchored monohull
worth a darn is going to be sunk unless it's neglected or abandoned.
It's only if the anchors drag or the mooring carries away and the boat
gets washed up on the rocks or laid on its beam ends along the shore
line when the storm surge comes in. You're attempting to fault monohulls
for the faults of their inept crew. When I see a monohull spinning like
a top in the air at the end of her anchor line then and only then will I
say the darned thing's not seaworthy. I've even been hit by a couple of
water spouts that had the spreaders in the water and she bobbed right
back up. No problem. That's the way a sailboat is supposed to react to
winds.

Catamarans are a joke!

Wilbur Hubbard