On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:15:32 -0400, "Wilbur Hubbard"
wrote:


wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 09:24:14 -0400, "Wilbur Hubbard"
wrote:

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

Hey Willy,

You know, every high speed ferry sailing out of Singapore is a cat. If
the catamaran hull form is so unstable how come all the classification
societies will classify them as passenger carriers?


I'm talking sailing cats. Not motor cats. Motor cats are heavy, heavy
and heavy. And they don't have the leverage effect of spars and sails to
turn them over.

Wilbur Hubbard

Well, given that nearly all, if not all, l of the high speed catamaran
ferries I've been on are aluminum I'd have to say that displacement
must play some part of their planing, probably to get them as light as
possible.

The other point that you seem to disregard was that the cat mentioned
in the original post was anchored in a 170 MPH wind. And it flipped
over. During the same hurricane a large number of mono hulls were
sunk. Kinda sounds as though maybe the cat is the better solution when
we view the difference between a bottom side up catamaran and a sunken
mono hull.

By the way Willie, have you ever been out in 170 MPH winds? Do you
think your house trailer will survive 170 MPH winds? Or even a house,
if you owned one? Or perhaps you have traveled through the cyclone
belt and wondered why all those stupid people have cyclone cellars.




Bruce in Bangkok
(brucepaigeATgmailDOTcom)