catamaran - History, Catamaran sailing, Catamaran designs, Catamarans for passenger transport, Powered catamarans, Mega catamarans

A twin-hulled vessel of Tamil origin, offering advantages in speed and stability. Propelled nowadays either by sail or power, it has become very popular as a yacht design in the past 25 years, and the advantages of the design have also proved attractive to firms introducing a new generation of car/passenger ferries.

A catamaran (from Tamil kattu "to tie" and maram "wood, tree") is a type of boat or ship consisting of two hulls joined by a frame.

Catamarans are a relatively recent design of boat for both leisure and sport sailing, although they have been used for millennia in Oceania, where Polynesian catamarans and outrigger canoes allowed seafaring Polynesians to settle the world's most far-flung islands.

History

The English adventurer and pirate William Dampier, travelling around the world in the 1690s in search of business opportunities, once found himself on the southeastern coast of India, in Tamil Nadu on the Bay of Bengal.

While the name came from Tamil, the modern catamaran came from the South Pacific. English visitors applied the Tamil name catamaran to the swift, stable sail and paddle boats made out of two widely separated logs and used by Polynesian natives to get from one island to another.

The design remained relatively unknown in the West for almost another 200 years, when an American, Nathanael Herreshoff, began to build catamaran boats to his own design.

In the twentieth century, the catamaran inspired an even more popular sailboat. The Prout Brothers, Roland and Francis, experimented with catamarans in 1949 and converted their 1935 boat factory in Canvey, Essex (England) to catamaran production in 1954.

Later, in California, a maker of surfboards, Hobie Alter produced (1967) the 250-pound Hobie Cat 14, and two years later the larger and even more successful Hobie 16.

Presently the catamaran market is the fastest growing segment of the entire boating industry. Other important builders of catamarans are Austal and Incat both of Australia, best known for building large catamarans both as civilian ferries and as naval vessels.

Catamaran sailing

Although the principles of sailing are the same for both catamarans and monohulls, there are some "peculiarities"to sailing catamarans.

Catamarans, and multihulls in general, are normally faster than single-hull boats for four reasons:

each hull of a catamaran is (typically) thinner in cross section than those of monohulls; catamarans have a wider beam (the distance from one side of the boat to the other), which makes them more stable and therefore able to carry more sail area per unit of length than an equivalent monohull.

A catamaran is most likely to achieve its maximum speed when its forward motion is not unduly disturbed by wave action.

Catamarans make good cruising and long distance boats: The Race (around the world, in 2001) was won by the giant catamaran Club Med skippered by Grant Dalton.

Catamaran designs

Popular small racing catamaran sailboats include:

The Hobie cats (especially the 16-foot long Hobie 16, as well as many other designs including 14, 17, 18, and 20 ft models.) TOPCAT® Nacras Prindles International A-Class (open design; length 5.49 m (18 ft), beam 2.3 m (7 ft 6.5 in), weight 75 kg, sail 13.94 m² (150 ft²)) Formula classes (F16, F18, F20) Dart 15 and Dart 18 Tornado, Olympic class racing catamaran.

Small sailing catamarans that are mass-produced, trailerable, and can be beached on sandy shores are commonly called "beach cats".

Catamarans for passenger transport

An increasing trend is the deployment of a catamaran as a high speed ferry.

The use of catamaran for high speed passenger transport was pioneered by Westermoen Hydrofoil in Mandal, Norway, who lauched the Westamaran design in 1973. The Westamarans, and later design, some of them consisting of a catamaran hull resting on an air cushion between the hulls, became dominant for all high speed connections along the Norwegian coast.

There is a List of catamaran ferry routes documenting the growing number of routes.

Powered catamarans

A recent development in catamaran design has been the introduction of the power catamaran.

Usually, the power catamaran is devoid of any sailing apparatus as demonstrated by one of the top-selling models in the United States, the Lagoon Power 43.

Smaller powered catamarans are becoming quite common in the United States with several manufacturers producing quality boats.

Mega catamarans

One of the biggest developments over the last decade in the yachting arena has been the rise of the super catamaran - a multihull over 60 feet in length which come in semi-custom and custom designs.

Various international manufacturers are leading the way in this area including Yapluka, Sunreef, Lagoon and Privilege. A catamaran over 145 feet in length is reportedly under construction on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

The emergence of the super or mega catamaran is a relatively new event which is akin to the rise of the mega or super yacht which was used to describe the huge growth in luxury, large motor yachts in the French Riviera and Floridian Coast.

One of the reasons for increased mega catamaran construction was The Race, a circumnavigation challenge which departed from Barcelona, Spain, on New Year's Eve, 2000.

It takes up to one year to complete construction of one of these super catamarans and represent state-of-the-art design breakthroughs in the catamaran sector.