Multihull cruiserr

When Peter Johnstone, a longtime monohull sailer, wanted a boat for world cruising he turned to Morelli and Melvin to design him a cruising cat. Peter had owned a large monohull, a racing sled he had converted to a cruising boat before he felt the comfort and stability aspects of the big cat were more to his family's liking. Peter has sailed on a lot of big cats, including PlayStation and Team Adventure, so he knew exactly what he was getting into. Soon there were two other people interested in sisterships and the Gunboat 62 was born as a semi-production model built in South Africa by Jaz Marine.

This is a pretty bland looking big cat. I would have liked to see a little more styling effort put into it. The sheer is a dead straight line. While this is not aesthetically very satisfying it is practical considering the great expanse of deck you are dealing with here. The cabintrunk is pretty ordinary in profile but there is a cockpit cut into the front of the house that will add some three-dimensional variety to the shape.

Let's look at that forward cockpit. There are doors leading from the saloon on each side of the inside steering station to this cockpit. Halyard winches flank the cockpit and the windlass is just forward of the cockpit. You can work here in safety. The doors will have to be strong and extra watertight as they will see some serious spray. The axle for the inside wheel can be run through the bulkhead and you can have another wheel in the forward cockpit. Hull No. 2 of the 62 is built that way.

In fact, this is not hull No.1, Peter's boat. This layout is for hull No. 3. There are four staterooms, and three of them have double berths. I presume the owner's stateroom is to starboard and forward. This stateroom has a mini "office" attached with desk and file drawers. The most interesting feature to this layout is the lone aft head in the starboard hull. You can enter this head from the swim step. There are twin washbasins and twin showerheads. The galley is up in the saloon. All interiors for the Gunboat 62 are owner customized.

The hulls show an L/B of 9.0 when I scale the individual hull beam at 2.1 meters. L/BOA is 2.2 and 28 feet of beam buys you a lot of stability. The canoe body rocker shows the hull depth quite shallow forward with the forefoot knuckle above the DWL. This indicates that the longitudinal center of buoyancy may be aft, which suggests the boat needed volume aft to float the accommodation and mechanical weights. The D/L is 77.62 if I use the "max load" displacement. The retractable rudders are the cassette type, and with them retracted, the boat will float in less than 2 feet of water. Note that the saildrives are twisted off vertically so they protrude through the side of the hull at a diagonal angle, thus reducing prop draft and vulnerability to prop damage while also helping to reduce minimum draft.

The rig is pretty standard for a big cat. Marstrom of Sweden is building all the spars in carbon. Standing rigging is all Aramid covered in PVC and all halyards are Vectran. All blocks are lashed to the spars with Spectra lashings and all running rigging is "tapered." The jib is self-tacking and the beam of the cat makes it possible to have a very wide sheeting angle if needed for the self-tacking jib lead. This is always a problem with monohulls. A masthead screecher will add a lot of sail area. There is too much roach to this main to just use E and P for our SA/D so I have multiplied the .5E by P number by 1.4 to account for this roach-added sail area. This gives a mainsail area of 930 square feet and a SA/D of 29.45.

Gunboat has already sold three of these big cats.