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VIDEO: Multihull Expert: Why I Love Catamarans

January 13, 2017 10:06 am

Sailing catamarans and multihulls make great cruising and bluewater boats. Although the principles of sailing are the same for both catamarans and monohulls, there are some enormous advantages to safety and comfort for sailing catamarans. Join us as we take a look at some of the benefits of multihulls in this video:

Hi, I’m Matthew Bryant, yacht broker with Denison Yacht Sales, out of our San Diego, California office. In the sailing world, there’s a multihulls and monohulls, and I really gravitated toward the multihulls for a number of reasons.

There’s a couple of inherent differences between them, and one of the big things is that multihull’s stability comes from the width between the two hulls and not a keel under the boat. And in practical terms, that means that the multihulls sail flat, that the maximum stability is at rest, at the dock.

Privilege 615 sailing catamaran multihull

And in a monohull you have to heel the boat over 15-20 plus degrees until you achieve stability. It changes your whole world when you’re sailing for a long time at 20 degrees – a heel and everything you do is 20 degrees off. It just changes things quite a bit.

So multihull’s really cool that way, a bit more comfortable. The space per foot on a multihull versus a monohull allows a lot more creature comfort of accommodation. You can really get a little much bigger platform in a 40-foot, let’s say a catamaran than you can a 40-foot monohull. And that leads to all kinds of lifestyle choices. You can bring all kinds of stuff that you want, toys that you want and really not have to make too many compromises once you leave the dock, which is pretty cool.

Charter - Arion Catamaran by Lagoon Yacht

Another thing about multihulls is that they’re fast. Their stability comes from the width, not weight. Weight is the enemy of speed. So in general multihulls are bit faster. In practical terms too, if you’re making a passage and you can do 300-mile days instead of 150-mile days, you get there twice as fast, twice as much time to enjoy the islands or whatever you’re going to do.

Just like in a powerboat with twin screw, you have two motors in a multihull or in a catamaran that are set a fair distance apart. Having that twin screw ability means that you can pivot the boat really on a dime. You can use the two motors against themselves and get the catamarans in and out of quite tight spaces.

Privilege Series 5 catamaran

It takes a little bit of practice, just like anything else, but once people get the hang of that, that really is a big benefit in multihull. It’s rare to see boats with bow thrusters unless you get much up over 50 or 60 feet, and even in some boats over that size, they opt not to because you do have a fair amount of control with twin screws being set at 20-plus feet apart.

Multihulls are coming online with production builds and really legitimate designs, legitimate construction techniques and really changed and opened up the whole world of production multihull, ownership and/or buying.

I’m Matthew Bryant, yacht broker with Denison Yacht Sales, out of our San Diego, California office.

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