Catamaran on open seas

I actually agree with Fred. This whole idea of cross atlantic sailing on a
passanger catamaran seem to be one bad idea. I know the north atlantic ocean myselfe, we get some bad dogass weather up here, so the most of the walking you do onboard is manly on walls. And like Fred said the structure is not build for braking waves (brot) The portholes are partially square and are covering much erea. But I have to convince my people about this and have you ever tried to describe or convince a landlobber about what it is like to
cross an open sea in heavy weather. Most of them think they can just jump
into the sea if things get tough... you know what I mean !!!!
daniel

 

If it's built as an inshore passenger ferry, it won't fare too well in the North Atlantic, whether it has 1, 2, 3 or 7 hulls. And there are monos, cats and tris that can cross, and have crossed, oceans safely. It is a matter of running a boat that is designed to take the conditions in which it is run.

Whatever refits you do to this boat, have a qualified naval architect and an engineer analyze the vessel before and after the proposed changes. See if you still like what you see after you have the stability report and the structural report.

 

I would venture that experience/skill in seamanship should be a factor. A novice to the steep seas would be less likely to get in trouble with a monohull than a multihull. Which doesn't make the multihull a bad boat, just not as forgiving a boat for fools.

Kelly Cook

 

"just not as forgiving a boat for fools."

Usually the autopilot or self steering gear is at the helm for cruisers offshore passagemaking.

Yes, it usually does a better job of steering than most crews,

but to hope its IQ is high enough to prevent a capsize?

Bring your Prayer book!

FAST FRED

 

Back to which will survive a capsize. In the small sizes, under 20'. How many sailing twin hulls HAVE to be towed to shore before they can be righted? Almost everyone at our reservoir has helped them everytime. The monos are never helped unless the person is weak or banged up. Fact of life.

 

Huh?!?! I thought this thread was about a "32m passanger ferry". Which I would assume is a power boat, not sailboat.

Kelly

 

You are right KCook it is about a 32m passanger ferry. A near shore
vessel a catamaran with a passanger facility made by Tetrapak
sweden. I had to find out and ask you people about if this ship can be
modified for a transatlantic crusing and I think I have been convinsed
that this is a bad idea.
daniel

 

Mr Speer
You should come to Scotland or Norway with your multihull and try the North sea.

I know that multihulls have been broken-up by heavy weather including one aluminium passenger ferry , a few sailing ones that have been upside down for a period with several deaths from hyperthermia within the inverted hull. I have found several accounts in the shipping news.

3 years back I looked inside one 45 foot sailing twin hull that had been inverted for a couple of days off the Norwegian coast. The hull was lifted onto a rig service barge but it was so damaged nothing was salvagable. The crew took to the liferaft after an hour and were rescued , the craft was lifted out 2 days later. It may as well have sunk for all the use it was to the people aboard.

Seems people dont appreciate how terrible it is to be in one of these when it is upside down and half full of water. The water sloshes about inside with great force and soaks everything, the furniture gets broken off the hull and it all floats around inside along with the engine oil, diesel fuel and anything else in tanks (or stomachs and bowels). Nowhere inside is safe. If the water is cold then it is a lethal scene.

That an inverted multihull makes an effective and safe platform in heavy weather is a marketing myth that should be dispelled.

Many monohulls even after being abandoned with open hatches and with the bilges awash with seawater are recovered after the storm with little damage to the essentials .

Seems the fatal flaw has to have warm calm water a good fast efficient rescue service and a fully insured boat, or you could just buy a monohull.

 

JimCooper. Your argument seems to be that a multihull is as bad as an monohull if wrecked. So why should I rather have a mono?

 

Fat Cat's and trying Tri's.

It sems that whenevery anyone talks about multi's in general or cats in particular, they are talking about present day descendants from '50's and '60's speed machines that were first perfected by Rudy Choy and Arthur Piver. Actually, its somewhat unfair to mention Arthur in this. His 'loadstar' was not designed primarily for speed (hence the better rep for tri's). Later boats, however were. It seems that the entire developement of multi's over the last 30 to 40 years has been almost exclusively for speed.

The consequence of this are airplane like structures that not only sit on top of the water rather than in it but are also extremely limited in payload capcity as well. A further consequence of this are structures so light that wind getting under their connecting decks can lift them clean off the water, like hydroplanes, and flip them at will.

It seems that most of the multi capsizes I've heard of have been racing machines that were not only pushed well past prudence but were so extreme in design (like some mono's I know of) that they were arguiably inherently unsafe as well.

I think that it is usefull to remember that the original multi's were built by stone age people and were, like the original mono's, relatively heavy work boats. They tended to have modest sail areas for their size and almost never had solid 'wing decks' (at least ones that looked like wings). The heaviest Cat I know of was the 'Rehu Moana' or something like that. It's D/L was in the order of over 300. Needless to say, it was no speedster. It was, as it was intended to be, a floating home capable of going offshore in 'reasonably horrible weather' I think it even rounded the 'horn'.

I think a modern cat designed to those principles would be as likely to be capsized by a rogue wave as a simularily heavy mono would be to be sunk by it. The sea's power to destroy man made objects is pracically unlimited. I think that it is relatively easy to design a multi that can carry your stuff...as long as it is not expected to go much past 'hull speed'.

Bob

 

The multihull is a ship of the southern hemisphere, the Pacific to be precise. I have noticed that speedsailers ( circumnavigation recordsetters) truly hate the Indian Ocean, and never show themselves up the North-Atlantic. Neither are they any useful in ice.
Rest me to say, although I have a tiny bit of experience in sailing cat's, they make me feel highly uncomfortable, as I cannot swim and the sheer horror that I have to sit on an inverted hull, if capsized by an unexpected blast.
Also that in heavy traffic lanes I can't go anywhere as they have very little pointing to windward capacities.
The catamaran ferry between the UK en Holland cannot go out in conditions with waves over 13' or 4 mtrs.
On the other hand, there are a number of people like the Dutch Henk de Velde who are capable to cope with those handicaps as I see them and still try to brake another ones's record.
We are plastered with all those recordsetting attempts that needs to be sponsored otherwise no ship and no record, so that the multihull scene is another scene than the monohull scene, separated by their own races.

A multihull is faster, definately - but only under certain circumstances. Take those away and you will see that their perfomance will drop back substantially. Upwind they are next to useless. Well, a boat that cannot go upwind is in our environment a useless boat. Therefore you won't find them in the Northern waters.

Let's organise a new kind of race, where only the strogest ships will survive.

Let's say from San Francisco or Los Angeles to Plymouth, UK via the Denmark Strait.
Let's see what the multihulls can do.

 

Hm...
These guys must have missed these important facts:
Round Island race


Anders M
F-25A trimaran owner in Sweden, northen hemispere, and never beaten upwind (or downwind) during this summer by a mono...

 

Hardy serious......

 

In the late 80s (I think) an Alden Boothbay 57 and Walter Green's racing catamatan were in the same storm. The pilothouse windows of the Boothbay were stove in and she sank. I think one of the two female survivors has written a book about it. Walter Green's cat (or trimaran, I'm not certain) flipped, and Walter had to be rescued from the overturned vessel. At first Walter swore off offshore multihulls, but after considering the fate of the Boothbay, Walter decided the missing element was the ability to self-right the multihull. Walter's next boat was a catamaran with one cored hull and one solid skin hull. The latter could be flooded and sunk, then blown bouyant again to right the vessel.

 

An old fisherman's ruling say that a boat that is impermeable cannot sink. A yacht with stoved-in windows is an example of that saying; proved by the cat that capsized.
Neither both of them good examples of what a ship should be.
I am not perjudiced, I know that many cat's and tri's are going around the world; I find a tri - specifically the larger ones - itriguing machines. I believe you have to grow up with them to understand their mechanism. In the late seventies I was highly inspired and intrigued by the designs of Lock Crowther ( Kraken & Spindrift-cat), probably one of the men of the first hour to advocate the advantages of the multihull next to Arthur Piver was before him; did I have had the chance to fight off my wife's allergy to everything that floats at that moment, I would have been now most probably the multihull's most ferocious protagonist.
Nontheless, it is as it is.
You are not going with a cat or a tri through the Bering Strait.
They are the creatures of the southern hemisphere, where the winds are in their favour.