On Sat, 16 Jun 2007 09:54:57 -0500, Vic Smith wrote:

On Sat, 16 Jun 2007 10:10:39 -0400, Jeff wrote:

* stormtactic wrote, On 6/16/2007 9:30 AM:
Hi

I have read a fair amount of hype about the sailing performance of the
Gemini 34Mc Catamaran.

Anybody around sails one, does it live to the expectation?

I don't know much about that particular cat; we bought a PDQ after
rejecting the Gemini on "mediocre construction" grounds. It really
isn't that bad, but we want to go a bit upscale on this boat.

I can say that cat performance is highly dependent on loading. Our boat
easily lived up to the "more than half the wind speed" expectation,
including easily doing 12 knots in a 20-22 knot breeze when it was new.
But now with 8 year of accumulated crap, its been a while since we've
been much over 10 knots.

One thing good about overloading a tri, I guess - you can't unless you
want to sleep in the cockpit!
I've given some thought to the space/overloading qualities of a cat, and
while really liking that space from the livability/openess view, it does
seem that many owners really slow them down when cruising. I have
thought that the cat storage capacity is best utilized for what I see as
cruising "essentials" - fuel, batteries, genset, watermaker, just
adequate food/beer reefer, etc, and keep sailing speed up within those
constraints. Of course all that is very easy for me to say, having no
cruising experience.
I sometimes see in cruising logs that some cruisers carry lots of
weighty canned food, book libraries and other seemingly unecessary or
lighter-weight-substitutable items which add quite a bit of weight. I
haven't seen a "cruising light" site that covers this type of logistical
planning for cruising cats. Not that it isn't out there somewhere.
Given your cat experience, what are your views on this, and what have
you learned?
I know junk piles up - all I have to do is glance around my basement or
garage. I have dealt with this, and know the solution to fixing it and
preventing it.
But how is it different on a boat?

It's not!

A few years ago one of the magazines (Sail?) did a sailing comparison of
the Gemini and a similar-sized/priced mono. IIRC, the cat was faster
downwind, but slower upwind and wouldn't point as high, and was less
satisfying to sail because of a dull helm.

Lighter, performance-oriented multis certainly do not suffer from this,
but they don't have the same cruising amenities either.

Otherwise the Gemini seemed like a good alternative to the mono,
depending on what the owner was looking for.

Matt O.