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Catamaran

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Large, experimental, high-speed military catamaran.

HSC Tarifa Jet, Large, commercial high-speed catamaran ferry.

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 can be sail- or engine-powered. The catamaran was the invention of the paravas, a fishing community in the southern coast of Tamil Nadu, India. Catamarans were used by the ancient Tamil Chola dynasty as early as the 5th century AD for moving their fleets to conquer such Southeast Asian regions as Burma, Indonesia and Malaysia.

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. Catamarans have been met by a degree of scepticism from some sailors accustomed to more "traditional" designs.
Contents

1 History
2 Catamaran sailing
3 Catamaran designs
4 Catamarans for passenger transport
5 Powered catamarans
6 Mega catamarans
7 Misc. Designs
8 See also
9 Notes

History

A traditional Tamil catamaran on a Chennai beach.

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. He was the first to write in English about a kind of vessel he observed there. It was little more than a raft made of logs. "On the coast of Coromandel," he wrote in 1697, "they call them Catamarans. These are but one Log, or two, sometimes of a sort of light Wood ... so small, that they carry but one Man, whose legs and breech are always in the Water."

A Polynesian catamaran

A present scull training on catamaran

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. The speed and stability of these catamarans soon made them popular pleasure craft, with their popularity really taking off in Europe, and was followed soon thereafter in America. Currently, most individually owned catamarans are built in France, South Africa, and Australia.

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. Their Shearwater catamarans won races easily against the single hulled yachts.

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. That boat remains in production, with more than 100,000 made in the past three decades.

Presently the catamaran market is the fastest growing segment of the entire boating industry. The world's largest distributor of twin hulled vessels is The Catamaran Company[citation needed]. 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

Stars & Stripes, a racing catamaran

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. Correct use of the jib sail is often essential in successfully completing a tack without ending up stuck in irons (pointing dead into the wind and sailing backwards, see: No Go Zone).
They have a higher average speed.
Catamarans are less likely to capsize in the classic 'beam-wise' manner but often have a tendency to 'pole-axe' (or 'pitchpole') instead - where the leeward (downwind) bow sinks into the water and the boat 'trips' over forward, leading to a capsize.

Teaching for new sailors is usually carried out in monohulls as they are thought easier to learn to sail, a mixture of all the differences mentioned probably contributes to this.

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 unit 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 heel (lean) over.

A catamaran is most likely to achieve its maximum speed when its forward motion is not unduly disturbed by wave action. This is achieved in waters where the wavelength of the waves is somewhat greater than the waterline length of the hulls, or it is achieved by the design piercing the waves. In either case pitching (rocking horse-like motion) is reduced. This has led to it being said that catamarans are especially favourable in coastal waters, where the often sheltered waters permit the boat to reach and maintain its maximum speed.

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. It went round the earth in 62 days at an average speed of eighteen knots.

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

The Victoria Clipper IV is a catamaran that provides ferry service between Victoria and Seattle

The HSC Halunder Jet is a catamaran that provides ferry service between Hamburg, Wedel, Cuxhaven and Heligoland

The Stena Voyager is a catamaran that provides a fast ferry service across the Irish sea. The Stena HSS is the worlds largest fast ferry traveling at a speed of 40 Knots

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. They could achieve speeds comparable to the hydrofoils that it replaced, and was much more tolerant to foul water and wave conditions.

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. The 'power' version incorporates the best features of a motor yacht and combines it with the traditional sailing characteristics of a multihull.

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. This vessel has now been introduced to a number of charter fleets in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean and is becoming an increasingly common sight.

Smaller powered catamarans are becoming quite common in the United States with several manufacturers producing quality boats. A small "cat" will almost certainly have 2 engines while a similar sized mono-hull would only one engine. All mid-size and larger cats will have 2 engines.

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. Due to the prize money and prestige associated with this event, four new catamarans (and two highly modified ones) over 100' in length were built to compete. The largest, PlayStation, owned by Steve Fossett, was 125' long and had a mast which was 147' above the water. Virtually all of the new mega cats were built of pre-preg carbon fiber for strength and the lowest possible weight. Top speeds of these boats can approach 50 knots.

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.

Misc. Designs

Mysterious Spider Boat Appears Out of the Fog - Antrim Associates is testing a new concept of ocean-going catamaran.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Catamarans

Hokule'a
International Catamaran Challenge Trophy
International C-Class Catamaran Championship
Multihull
SWATH, another twin hull design
Trimaran
Woods Designs Designs of cruising catamarans for home build

Notes

Hokulea

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H?k?le?a is a full-scale replica of a wooden sailing vessel (Polynesian voyaging canoe) used in ancient Hawai?i. Its name means "star of gladness" in Hawaiian, and the name refers to the star Arcturus, a guiding zenith star for Hawaiian navigators, which falls directly overhead at Hawai?i's latitude.

It was built in 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and is best known for its 1976 voyage from Hawai?i to Tahiti, performed without modern navigational instruments. Since then H?k?le?a has completed seven voyages to various destinations in Polynesia and the United States, all using ancient wayfinding techniques of celestial navigation.

When it is not on a voyage, H?k?le?a is moored at the Hawai?i Maritime Center in Honolulu Harbor.

List of voyages

1976: H?k?le?a, led by Satawalese navigator Mau Piailug, traveled from Hawai?i to Tahiti and back.
1978: A second attempted voyage to Tahiti was aborted when the canoe swamped south of the island of Moloka?i. Eddie Aikau is lost at sea on this voyage.
1980: Native Hawaiian Navigator Nainoa Thompson recreated the 1976 voyage, becoming the first Native Hawaiian in modern times to guide a canoe without instruments.
1985: Known as the Voyage of Rediscovery, H?k?le?a traveled a total distance of 16,000 miles to various destinations in Polynesia.
1992: H?k?le?a sailed to Rarotonga and back via Tahiti. The voyage included an educational component where Hawaii students could track the progress of the canoe through daily radio reports.
1995 spring: H?k?le?a, along with sister ships Hawai?iloa and Makali?i, sailed from Hawai?i to the Marquesas Islands and back via Tahiti.
1995 summer: H?k?le?a and Hawai?iloa sailed the West Coast of the United States from Seattle to San Diego.
1999: H?k?le?a sailed from Hawai?i to Rapa Nui and back.
2004: H?k?le?a's most recent voyage took place in June 2004, when navigator Thompson led a training voyage through the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

2007: Hokule'a will sail to Micronesia and then to Japan.