Two Hobie catamarans, showing the typical Hobie
raised platform joining the two hulls, and tall mast.
Catamarans are a relatively recent design of boat for both leisure and sport sailing, although they have been used for many centuries by the Polynesian culture, as essential transport in their island economy. Catamarans have been met by a degree of scepticism from modern sailors, being used to more 'traditional' designs.
Although the principles of sailing are the same for both catamarans and monohulls there are some 'peculiarities' to sailing catamarans. For example:
- Catamarans can be harder to tack (turn through the wind). Because they are lighter in proportion to their sail size, they have less momentum to carry them through the turn when they are head to wind.
- They have a higher average speed.
- All boats sail faster when travelling in certain directions relative to the wind the best speeds typically being achieved when heading away from the wind at about 135 degrees. This effect is much more noticeable with catamarans, even to the extent that it can be more efficient to jibe ('tack' downwind) in zig zags, rather than heading directly away from the wind as a monohull would.
- Catamarans are less likely to capsize in the classic 'beam-wise' manner but often have a tendency to 'pole-axe' instead - where the bow sinks into the water and the boat 'trips' over forward.
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 are lighter due to the fact there is no keel counterweight.
- 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 metre of length than an equivalent monohull.
- the greater stability means that the sail is more likely to stay upright in a gust, drawing more power than a monohull's sail which is more likely to lean over.
Popular small racing catamarans include:
- The Hobie cats
- Dart 15 and 18
- Tornado, Olympic class racing catamaran.
multihull, Dinghy sailing, trimaran