April 27/2022:  No, my friends, this is not one of those “concept” yachts, where a bored designer comes up with some really fanciful, crazy idea for a boat that will never ever get built. This is a real fanciful, crazy boat that exists in the real world, and if you really want you can buy...

Dec. 18/2020:  James Wharram, who first came to notice back in the 1950s after sailing a crude homemade catamaran across the Atlantic from England to Trinidad with two occasionally (and famously) unclad women, has cut a unique trail through the firmament of modern yacht design. He has always planted his flag far outside the boundaries...

This is a high-end performance cruising catamaran from France that tries to split the difference between high-speed sailing and posh liveaboard comfort. The design by Christophe Barreau includes all the important features that keep cats sailing their best--narrow hulls, high bridgedeck clearance, very little solid structure forward of the mast, plus high-aspect daggerboards instead of...

We all knew this day was coming. With the recent launch and test-sailing of the new Neel 65 the concept of "cruising trimaran" has officially metastasized into the upper stratosphere. I was impressed with its smaller sibling, the Neel 45, when I got a chance to sail one in France a few years ago, and...

Our most recent ruminations on this topic focused on some of the popular dedicated cruising-sailboat designs that dominated mass-production boatbuilding as the industry started growing and maturing through the 1970s. It is important to remember, however, that even as fiberglass production techniques were thrusting sailboats into the heart of the 20th-century consumer economy, some cruising...

Word has it that Dick Newick, one of the great pioneer multihull designers, passed away on Wednesday night. I met Newick a few years ago here in Portsmouth (he once maintained a home across the river in Kittery Point, Maine) and was struck by a fundamental boat-design axiom of his that he shared with me....

I spent a day hanging out with multihull designer Chris White a while back and came away all buzzed up over his latest idea. The basic concept, as you can see in the image from his website up top, is pretty simple: two jibs and no mainsail. What isn't immediately clear from the photo is...

It’s time to think a bit more about how we can use numbers and math to evaluate different sailboats. I’ve already explained the two most popular performance parameters--the displacement/length and sail-area/displacement ratios. These numbers, which estimate a boat’s speed potential and available sailpower, are the ones most commonly used to quantify how a sailboat behaves....

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...

  I went windsurfing exactly once in my life about 20 years ago. The guy who rented me the thing, on a beach in Greece, groaned a bit when I explained I'd never sailed one before. He complained he'd be towing me back upwind with his skiff after my hour was up. I stuck my...