Homework

So that’s how the journey goes on: spending hours on boatyards’ website, all specializing in all-roads aluminium boats, reading blog stories of sailors commenting their choices, good or bad, taking notes of the mistakes they made and the issues they encountered, and how they overcame them. Putting quite a few new destinations on this on-going Google map project of ours.

In the process, we get the feeling that this little venture is getting increasingly popular, not only within the sailing community, but as well for rookie sailors either looking for a radical lifestyle change, or with the digital flexibility to keep working while aboard. In fact, for some millennials, off-the-beaten-tracks seem to be the new normal, and going to Antarctica or through the NW Passage on a sailboat is now on the same list as would be climbing the Kilimanjaro, or the Mt Blanc for the less adventurous ones. So much for the Ravello, Goa and Bali of the previous generations. Not only is the “adventure” or “expedition” boat in high demand, but even such catamarans are now being featured.

At some point there were too many of them, so we started a small database to compare their key specs, such as displacement, sail area, LOA, LWL, and so forth. At the end of the day, apart from the purpose-built one-offs, most of these boats would come out of a handful of boat yards, each with the proven experience for this specific kind of sailing program.

Coming from the composite world with our current catamaran, we included into this table some composite boats as well (Lagoon 55, Discovery 50BW, Outremer 55 and Balance 526), for benchmark purpose, and to validate that above a certain size, aluminium construction, supposedly heavier, is in fact more weight efficient.

In this respect, the Outremer 55 and the Balance 526 are both clear outliers with identical ratios (12.4 sqm/t | 0.8 t/LOA m) and obviously performance-oriented, while the Lagoon 55, launched in 2021, seems more comfort-oriented (and Vaan’s R5 project design-award-oriented).

Setting up a 8.5 sqm/t. threshold of upwind sail area, two very different potential performing boats appear, both bearing more or less the same upwind sail sqm (circa 150 sqm), but the leading group being 50% above the lagging in this respect. In terms of t/m (LOA), the leading group is nearly 30% lighter.

We drilled down into the group for which we managed to gather light displacement weight and LOA information, both for catamarans and monohull, per size brackets:

We can see that in the 15-17m LOA range (19 boats in this benchmark), catamarans are 4% lighter compared to their monohull counterparts (that’s for both hulls of course :-), but bear 9% more sail sqm (14% more sqm/t) for equal LOA, all metrics which relates into some speed advantage under sail. We’d love to have the wetted surface to rank them in regard to light wind conditions, but this information is harder to get.

Now, only keeping the aluminium production within the <17m LOA range with relevant data (30 units in this benchmark), we can see that catamaran and monohull have nearly the same LOA, 9% lighter displacement for the 7 catamarans, but these bearing 7% more sail sqm (15% more sqm/t).

And if we focus on all 11 catamaran in this <17m group, 7 aluminium and 4 GRP, we notice that the aluminium ones will be lighter (adjusted with their size), and this is despite the Outremer 55 and Balance 526, which are both very light at 0.8 t/m.

It seems that above a size threshold which we estimate between 45 and 50 feet, aluminium construction looks like the wise choice for a rugged all-road catamaran. Of course while we can check that Garcia’s Explocat 52’s bells and whistles compares with Balance’s, Lagoon’s or Outremer’s, it’s impossible to do so with the Ovnicat 48, the Eyecat 55 and the Coast 50, for which we couldn’t read any detailed specifications above their basic design information.

So, as one seems to convincingly appear in this benchmark, is there the off-chance that a catamaran could fit an adjusted high latitude program ?

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Architect, yards & boat references

All in all, we reviewed over 50 boats within our size brackets and with off-roads or even advertised high latitude features. Along the way, it appeared the top four (KM, Garcia, Boreal and Alubat) seemed to suit our needs best.

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