Ever since I first talked to designer Chris White earlier this year about his new MastFoil rig I've been anxious to try it out. I've always been very interested in unconventional rigs, and this one seems particularly promising, so of course my outing aboard his new MastFoil-rigged Atlantic 47 apres-show in Annapolis last month was...
The Lagoon 380 is not the smallest Lagoon catamaran ever built--both the Lagoon 37, its immediate predecessor, and the Lagoon 35CCC were smaller--but it is the smallest Lagoon currently built and one of the smallest dedicated cruising cats that succeeds in combining both reasonable performance and a "big cat" accommodation plan in a single package....
MAYBE MY SAILfeed COLLEAGUE Pat Schulte of Bumfuzzle, who is in the midst of comparing cats and monohulls, can help us out with this one. The viddy comes courtesy of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which reported last week that a volunteer crew from the Mallaig Lifeboat Station in Scotland rescued seven survivors off the bottom of...
This year, for the first time, I got myself to the boat show here in Annapolis in the proper way--by boat. I only wish the entire passage down from Newport had been as a pleasant as what you see in the photo up top. Most of it instead was a mind-numbing motorsail dead to windward....
Now for some more bad news from the Piracy Desk. Several news outlets over the weekend have confirmed that a 55-year-old French cruiser, Christian Colombo, was killed by pirates off the coast of Yemen last week during an attack on a 56-foot French-flagged cruising catamaran, Tribal Kat. Subsequently, the victim's wife, Evelyne Colombo, was rescued...
The catamaran designs that British multihull pioneer James Wharram first created for amateur boatbuilders in the mid-1960s were influenced by the boats he built and voyaged upon during the 1950s. These “Classic” designs, as Wharram termed them, feature slab-sided, double-ended, V-bottomed plywood hulls with very flat sheerlines and simple triangular sections. The hulls are joined...
Kevin Knight at Scape Yachts in South Africa just dropped me a line to let me know they've recently launched their biggest boat yet, a new 51-footer. This is a big sister to their Scape 39, a boat I delivered across the South Atlantic a few years back. Like most boats built by Scape, hull...
The week following the Annapolis show I returned to the Chesapeake to test-sail four different boats for SAIL magazine. You'll be able to read detailed reviews in future issues of the comic, but I thought I'd share a little preview of my experience aboard the Radical Bay 8000, the unique new production catamaran with a...
Ian Morse of Radical Catamarans has just launched his very first boat and, man, it sure is… radical. I've always been intrigued by this sort of parallel, or biplane, rig, so I had lots of questions for him when we talked the other day. He was, however, a bit tentative about some of his answers,...
This is a Perry 43 catamaran named Saltonay coming in over the bar at the Southport Seaway entrance to Queensland's Gold Coast in Australia. If you watch the whole video you'll see these guys had one hell of an exciting ride. Bulletin boards on the net have been crackling with critiques of the skipper's...
