Introduction

Since the 1990s, boating magazines have contained a great amount of facts and figures about modern cruising multihull sailboats - catamarans and trimarans. I am fascinated by sailboats, especially multihulls, and wondered what I could learn by analyzing the data that was available about them. This curiosity prompted me to dig out a book published by the Amateur Yacht Research Society in 1976 entitled "Design for Fast Sailing", by the late Edmond Bruce and Henry A Morss, Jr. Bruce was a very practical and highly analytical yacht design hobbyist who, along with other AYRS members, was seeking the ideal yacht design that was both fast (fun) and stable (safe). I also sought information on classical boat design from Skenes Elements of Yacht Design and other books.

After refreshing my memory on principles and equations from these sources, I used the data, augmented with some assumptions where data was missing, and did a comparison of 36 of the catamarans. This work was published as Ratios and Cruising Catamarans in Multihulls World no. 23, April/May 1994. As time went on, I added data for a total of over 100 cruising catamarans from various magazines, revised the analysis and submitted it for publication as Theory and Statistics for Cruising Multihulls in Multihulls Magazine vol. 23, no. 2, March/April 1997.

Curious about what some prominent designers were doing, I repeated the analysis on several of the designs of Brett Crowther, Kurt Hughes, Derek Kelsall and John Shuttleworth as published in their respective design books. This work was published as Four Kinds of Cats in Multihulls Magazine, vol. 25, no. 1, January/February 1999.

I have since received feedback from several people who were in the process of buying cruising catamarans indicating that the analysis was useful to them in sorting fact from fiction in brochures and marketing material. There is a legitimate complaint that designers and manufacturers do not disclose information comparing their boats with those of their competitors. And I think there is another legitimate complaint that boat magazines do not press their advertisers to provide comparative information, nor do they do valid comparisons in sail-offs at boat shows and other gatherings. Race results are informative, but can be misleading with respect to crew skill, boat preparation and outfitting, etc. Really valid, controlled comparisons are just not readily available. So an analytical tool is understandably useful.

I also got feedback from the articles on analytical methodology, especially with regard to performance and stability. For the article in the 1994 Multihulls Magazine, I derived a performance index that considered sail area, displacement and length. For the 1999 article, I used a similar index by Derek Kelsall called the Kelsall Sailing Performance Number. Richard Boehmer wrote to me after that article and offered an index called Base Speed^TM, an empirically-derived indicator of the distance a given boat could travel in 24 hours under a variety of conditions. It can be used to compare speed potential of one or more boats and has been used for handicapping boat races involving a variety of boat types. The widely-used Texel Rating is a derivative of it.

Another index I derived from first principles was a capsize stability index that considered sail area and arrangement, displacement and beam. This appeared in the 1997 MM article. I refined the index to use the spacing between the centerlines of the hulls rather than overall beam for the 1999 MM article, but found that beam centerline data was nearly impossible to obtain. So I scaled drawings in magazines for an approximation that will allow boat-to-boat comparisons. John Shuttleworth in Multihull Designs by John Shuttleworth Yacht Designs, Ltd., 1998 presents a similar formula for static stability in flat water and says it gives the wind speed at which a skipper should reduce sail. These formulas are presented in the article.

Until this present revision of my work, I have avoided trimarans. There is a complexity to trimarans that doesnt exist with catamarans, i.e., the outriggers. There is such a wide variety of approaches to designing the outriggers of trimarans that I have been hesitant to perform even a first order comparative analysis as I have done with catamarans. After all, the two hulls of a catamaran are always either identical or mirror images of each other. However, I have included a chapter here for trimarans, with the analysis based on the main hull and the assumption that the main hull is designed to carry the full displacement of the boat. Analysis of the outriggers is ignored. More on this in the chapter on Cruising Trimarans.

A qualifying statement must be made about the analysis used. Its precision is limited by the lack of precision in the basic data available on the boats. Advertised weights and displacements are questionable. Area used for the sails is for the main and 100% fore-triangle as much as possible. Height of the center of effort of the sails and distance of hull center of effort below the waterline are rarely available, so they are approximated for stability index calculations.

Hull design and the layout of hull lifting devices (keels, centerboards, daggerboards, outriggers of trimarans, etc.) can significantly affect many performance matters. However, details about them are rarely available and so are not considered in the analyses. Nonetheless, first order evaluations can certainly be done with the data and analysis available.

Boat Data

The tables and graphs contained in this article are the result of years of data gathering and analysis. In the database, the lengths, overall beams, displacements and sail areas came from magazines and the design books and web sites of various boat designers and sellers. Length at the waterline (Lwl), hull beam (Bh) and beam at hull centerlines (Bcl) had to be estimated for most boats, since they were not usually stated. Float details for trimarans are not included except as they contribute to overall beam of the boats. Lwl and Bcl were scaled from photos and drawings in many cases. Hull beam, and thus hull length-to-beam ratio were estimated as discussed below. The performance and stability numbers are calculated using the formulas described and discussed below.

The graphs placed in the catamaran chapter show data points for only a small sample from the database to illustrate the various parameters being discussed. (Graphs showing the entire catamaran database of over 750 boats are included as Appendix C. The graphs in the trimaran chapter include data points for the 95 boat data base. Boats mentioned in the article are highlighted on the graphs. Trend lines included in the graphs represent the entire database of cruising and racing catamarans and trimarans in their respective types.