"Jim Young" Designs Website

The cat that became a tri

I now own this cat, it has been mounted to a Richard Woods Strike 18 main hull to create an awesome little trimaran. This was done before I got hold of it.

I'd love to know more about the cat, as a tri ama it planes very easily, and I feel she must've been a fast cat. it was quite heavily built, but that doesn't seem to hurt performance much.

 

Here's some of the written text from the Jim Young book relating to his early catamarans.

32. Kitty: New Zealand's first international racing catamaran

AND THEN CAME the extremely popular 12-foot Kitty. In 1958, John Peet, an Auckland schoolmaster, and dinghy sailer, asked me how I thought a 12-foot cat would go in the Inter-Dominion unrestricted 12-foot championships for the Australasian Silasec Trophy. With his expertise in both sailing and building, I told him I was positive a cat would defeat the current high technology monohulls, known locally as Q Class. But he would first have to gain acceptance to race with the class. So he approached the Q Class classifiers. The response,
"Sure, we can accept a cat if you're mad enough to try."
It was all on.
In designing the 12-foot cat which became the Kitty, I built on my 16- footer cat experience. Obviously each hull had to have sufficient volume to support the whole craft, rig and crew when it was sailing at full power with the windward hull flying – as they do today. It required a comparatively fat hull with a beam to length ratio of 8 to 1. In practice though, the transom sterns left a long hole in the water astern and that represented extra length but without skin friction. But with such a short overall length the power from the wide overall beam was a problem; it could tend to drive the leeward bow under.


Apprentice Frank Blackburn showing the lightness of a Kitty hull Young Collection

I set the Kitty overall beam at seven feet, as wide as I thought such a short craft could stand without burying its nose. It was also for this reason that I kept the rig well aft, and not too high, with the boom extending well past the sterns. The entire structure had to be quite rigid so that moving crew weight aft on the windward hull would lift the leeward bow. The design needed only two thin (2 mm) diagonal skins and no keel. Had they been fastened and not glued, they wouldn't have lasted five minutes; it was the glued surfaces that made the very strong, light hull possible, and with one daggerboard in each hull. I also put a big roach in Kitty's fully battened mainsail, so that with a mast that can bend slightly the mainsail can

First Kitty: hollow wooden mast, rig well aft to avoid tripping, hollow fore-spar - grinning "Kitty" by cartoonist Minhinnick Young Collection

be feathered without causing drag through flapping. The big roach also causes 85 the sail to twist and flatten towards the top as the mast bends, so that the rig can "breathe," just like the square top mainsails of today.
Kitty, with John and his son David, out-sailed the best of both Australia and New Zealand and easily won the Inter-Dominion Championship – she won every race except the one where they broke the mast, her performance so dominating the fleet that it was decided to ban catamarans from future contests. If cats had not been banned then all future 12-footers might have had to be catamarans! Kitty even won the annual Cock o' the Harbour race against the flat-out unrestricted racing 18-footers. It was an amazing achievement for a twelve-foot boat. Such was her impact that very soon there was a fleet of them and sail numbers grew to over 150. Racing everywhere in New Zealand and Australia, forming their own class, they were popular and highly successful little boats.
The main problem with the Kitty was that it was fine for a lightweight crew, but needlessly short for two average-sized adults. Had it been a metre longer it would have made for a more suitable and exciting day sailer. But people wanted the cat that had been a winner of the 12-Foot Inter-Dominions, not a larger boat like

Plans for 12-foot Kitty catamaran, 1958 Young Collection

Whirlwind design, ironically a far more suitable fast, light-weight and exciting day sailer. Also it was easy to build with the stitch and tape system whereas the
Kitty was extremely fiddly because of their lightness. We built about 20 and didn't make money on any of them. It also didn't help our bottom line that if we were faced with someone wanting a cat, and specifically a Kitty, we had little choice but to build it. And at the same time we were acutely aware that there was a limit to what we could charge in a highly competitive market. A major cost was with the hollow wooden mast that required careful and precise work.
I next drew the Mark II Kitty which was built from 3 mm sheet ply, a much simpler boat to build than the double veneer skinned original which needed a solid mould. It was also extremely fast and Chris Bouzaid won the National Championship in one. But the demons once more reigned over the class and it was changed from one design to restricted, which allowed for scope in design. Some monstrosities resulted and after a decade or two, the class had become virtually extinct in New Zealand, although there was a fleet still racing in Victoria, Australia
Bruce Farr recalls the Kitty with much fondness and remembers the thrill of sailing on one briefly as a 13-year old, through a chance meeting on the beach.

Frank Young sailing 10-foot mini cat, 1962


Kitty Mark II hull cross section, bow profile, 3 mm sheet ply Young Collection

There was a small demand for a 20-foot cat to fit the new B Class restrictions. I designed the 20 x 10 foot beam Typhoon and made it so it could be hinged along the centreline to reduce beam when trailering. We built about six of them and I'm sure that with the latest sails the Typhoon could foot it with the international Tornado. It has the same weight, length and beam and can be built cheaply at home. When we first sailed Typhoon we thought we were on ice – and that was back in 1963!
Sailing multihulls is a lot of fun. Gil Hedges, a well-known yachtsman who used to race an IOR pot- belly, offshore plodder, summed up his philosophy of sailing once,
"Oh well, I find sailing boring so that's why I race."
I don't know whether Hedges ever sailed a multihull, but I thought his philosophy (then) spot on.


Australian Kitty off Williamstown, Melbourne

Sail and mast plan, 20x10 ft.Typhoon B Class catamaran; sheet ply construction

Typhoon under construction in 1964 – folds down the middle to reduce beam for trailering
(Young Collection)