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Catamarans have something extra....
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 |
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