It's horses for courses here. The Farr 40 will crush your St. Francis
or my Atlantic 42 in a windward - leeward race with full crew. Also,
the cutting edge of the cruising mono fleet has gotten very much faster
in the last decade. And, when you're looking at long passages the fact
that most cruising mono's of our length carry three times as much fuel
as we do means that they motor faster and more often than we and that
levels the long term speeds a lot. Too, I'd guess you're not sailing
against racing monohulls 'cause you will not be passing them. I
wouldn't bet a dollar against a hundred that I could beat a well sailed
melges 24 on any given day, but I would against a St. Francis...

On the other hand, my non-sailing girl friend and I have surfed this
boat to about 20 knots under white sails with full cruising kit while
in the remote sw pacific and felt pretty in control. We typically reef
when we start seeing high teens and that's farily common. We had one
passage where we did 200 miles or more point to point every day from
0300z to 0300z for over 1100 miles. All this in a boat that we have
lived on full time for five years, much of that in the third world.
And, while I get a kick out of all of that, it doesn't mean a thing.
As a recovering racer it's taken me a while to learn this (there was
one passage early in my cruising career where I averaged 11 sail
changes a day), but there's no glory and no pratical adavantage to
cruising "fast" on most passages. Cruisers spend pratically all of
their time at anchor and cats are ideal for that. If I really wanted
to go fast I'd get an old Newick tri and keep it light. In the dollars
for knots race they are unbeatable, but I like to be comfortable at sea
and at anchor and at those things my cat does very well indeed.

-- Tom.