DNA A Class Catamaran

[Doug Lord]

Pretty sharp looking A Class Cat with lifting foils: http://www.dnacat.blogspot.com/

Generally excellent thread on SA regarding curved foils in the A Class: http://forums.sailinganarchy.com/ind...ic=108776&st=0

[Doug Lord]

Interesting comment from "A Class USA 230" on SA:

The DNA is a very well designed boat that was conceived by a group of experienced Dutch A-Class sailors. They have been able to fund some pretty sophisticated tooling to put together an impressive manufacturing facility. They are not the first to integrate the main and rear beams into the hull. Several have done this but they are the first to do it using pre-preg carbon with a honeycomb core resulting in a very stiff structure. The DNA is probably the best design to date integrating these ideas with curved blades. The boat does appear to perform very strongly in strong breeze. The aft sections of the boat are flatter with a straighter rocker line so it's probably not as optimized for light air even though the best sailors will make it work.

There is development going on elsewhere. In the US, Ben Hall and Peter Cogan continue to develop their Barracuda design and a couple of US sailors (me included) who bought ASG3's from Ashby Sailcraft have done some significant modifications to improve some issues they felt the boat had that prevented it from being a good all around performer. Will these boats be as fast as DNA's, not sure. We sail in mostly light to medium air in North America and the A-Cat designs that have come out of this country sometimes reflect that type of sailing (most recently the A2/A3 from Pete Melvin which is a rocket ship in light to medium winds). DNA's will probably make it to the US sometime this year. Hopefully there will be a couple at the 2011 NAC.

[airwinona]

There is a lot of talk about how large the hulls are on the DNA. Does anyone know what the actual max hieght and width are and what the max widtha and height is at the transome. It would be nice to be ablt to compare this to the sizes of other designs to see just how much larger it really is. Also does anyone know the true reason the designer went with partially flat bottoms instead of cirlular. Does this not cause more turbulence as the boat moves sideways throught he water (leeway).

airwinona