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.

The atlantic 42 is a beautiful boat! I loved the lines. I remember
in Georgetown, Exuma being on an Atlantic 42 in a storm and she was
rock stable. Much faster than ours, ours is definitely a cruiser, 4
heads, 4 births, large freezer, refrigerator, etc. The gunboat 48
takes some of her queues from the Atlantic in many respects. We were
trying to find a Shuttleworth 44 when shopping for a boat as we've
sailed and raced shuttleworths and loved the handling, but couldn't
find anything at the time.

And that's why I put in the actual polars of the boats. Many faster
boats out there, the polars allow a somewhat objective point of view
for a couple different types of cruising catamarans and can be compared
easily to other makes and models.

Cheers

Hey, I like the St Francis range, too! The 44 is WAY more boat than
the Atlantic 42. I'd guess you have more than twice the volume that we
have and it sounds like shes a pretty trick sailer as well.

Anyway, the polars are nice but in the absence of racing or certified
ratings they tend to be quite optimistic. FWIW, the Farr marketing
guys' vpp says the Farr 40 at 90 degrees true does 5.3 in 4 knots true
(YIKES!), 7.1 in 6, 7.95 in 8, 8.6 in 10 and tops out at 11.3 in 30
knots true all with white sails only. Based on those we're faster than
a tricked out Farr 40 when jib reaching in winds over 16 and have
nearly twice the top end speed but are much much slower in winds under
8... Let's not even look at the upwind VMGs. Of course, if you put
the same two tons of cruising gear on the Farr 40 that we carry and
take away all the crew things will look much different. The ARC data
certainly seems to suggest that anyway. I'm sticking with my original
assessment: all else being equal multi's are about 30% faster than
monos, but the multi fleet is very much more geared towards the charter
market than the mono fleet so average differences accross the cruising
fleets currently on the water tend to be small.

-- Tom

wrote:
Hey, I like the St Francis range, too! The 44 is WAY more boat than
the Atlantic 42. I'd guess you have more than twice the volume that we
have and it sounds like shes a pretty trick sailer as well.

Anyway, the polars are nice but in the absence of racing or certified
ratings they tend to be quite optimistic. FWIW, the Farr marketing
guys' vpp says the Farr 40 at 90 degrees true does 5.3 in 4 knots true
(YIKES!), 7.1 in 6, 7.95 in 8, 8.6 in 10 and tops out at 11.3 in 30
knots true all with white sails only. Based on those we're faster than
a tricked out Farr 40 when jib reaching in winds over 16 and have
nearly twice the top end speed but are much much slower in winds under
8... Let's not even look at the upwind VMGs. Of course, if you put
the same two tons of cruising gear on the Farr 40 that we carry and
take away all the crew things will look much different. The ARC data
certainly seems to suggest that anyway. I'm sticking with my original
assessment: all else being equal multi's are about 30% faster than
monos, but the multi fleet is very much more geared towards the charter
market than the mono fleet so average differences accross the cruising
fleets currently on the water tend to be small.

-- Tom


The Farr VPP is pretty accurate but doesn't do a good job of
accounting for waves at higher wind speeds. So the 11.3 knots in 30
knots is probably a bit high

Evan Gatehouse