* Vic Smith wrote, On 6/16/2007 10:54 AM:
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.

The problem is that a 36 for cat like mine has the weight carrying
capability of a a 36 foot mono (or maybe even a tad smaller) but it
has the space of a 45-50 footer. It isn't so much that the cat get
easily overloaded, its that it is easy to overload a cat!


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.

"Unnecessary" is in the eye of the beholder. Every cat owner
understands the issue, its that most aren't that concerned if they
don't have the sparkling performance of a new, unloaded boat.

When I cruise I do about 50 miles a day. I'll be do about 7.5-8 knots,
so that's about 6.5 hours. If I could lighten the boat and maybe
average an extra knot, I'd get in maybe 45 minutes quicker - certainly
nice, but usually not a huge advantage. However, when I got there I
wouldn't have my kayak to play on. And maybe I wouldn't have the
fixin's for a nice meal, or the tools to correct a problem, or the
water to take a shower.

The truth is even weighted down with loads of crap, I'm still faster
than most monohulls, so its isn't really a problem.

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.

Odd, I've never seen it either! There is mention of the issue at
times, and cat owners don't go out of their way to make the boat
heavy. A good example is ground tackle. Heavy displacement boaters
will often say "weight is great" and you'll see twin CQR's on all
chain rodes. A cat is more likely to have a high tech setup, such as
a Delta with a modest length of chain and a Fortress as a second
anchor. Saving a few hundred pounds, especially in the bows,is
important for a cat. BTW, both anchoring approaches work well - I
ditched the CQR/all chain when I had a heavy boat boat because I felt
it led to worse anchoring, not better, but that's a different thread.

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?

No difference at all. If there is a locker, it will get filled!