Multihull cruiserr

Designed by Van Peteghem and Lauriot Prevost, the Lagoon 570 is possibly the perfect charter platform. Overall beam is 30 feet and draft is 4 feet, 7 inches. You can practically snuggle this baby right up to the beach. The rudder is well forward on this design. The keel is a strange looking thing, but I don't suspect that VMG to windward was too high on the design parameter list.

Individual hull waterline maximum beam is about 6 feet, 3 inches. If you divide this number into the DWL you get 8.32. This puts the Lagoon in the relatively beamy category. The hulls are very shapely, with arclike sections aft and marked deadrise forward. Once again, overhangs have been minimized. The D/L is 105. Clearance from the water to the underside of the bridgedeck or "slam pan" is 36 inches. Photos of the 570 sailing in a good breeze show no discernable heel angle.

Lagoon builds several different interiors ranging from a five-stateroom charter layout with skipper's cabin to a three-stateroom "owner's layout." Three of the layouts share the same saloon and galley arrangement with the galley down in the port hull while one layout features the galley in the "up" location to starboard in the saloon. As the cook, this "up" version appeals to me. This way I can be included in the festivities as I do my meal preparation. "Now where did I put the Vegemite?" If you go with the galley down, you open up the saloon for a more expansive conversation area and nobody will see the cook tasting the sauce. "More Vegemite!"

You can get lots of heads on your Lagoon, but if you want a shower stall you will have to go with the "owner's version." I think you just shower on deck in the BVIs. The photos show this layout to be spectacularly finished. The wood appears to be teak, and there is lots of it. By any standard this is a great interior.

The sailplan shows the big cat in two dimensions and cats seldom look good in this drawing. What jumps out at me are those vertical saloon windows. They are hard to ignore. But as aesthetically brutal as they are, they do offer pragmatic advantages in that they maximize interior volume without reducing room on deck. They also reduce the greenhouse effect and that's very important in sunny areas. Look where the mast comes down. It's deck-stepped and as close to the front of the house as physically possible. The rig is big and uses a heavy air staysail on a Solent stay inside the working genoa. There are Benson struts on the boom to help prevent the lazy jacks from interfering with the mainsail shape.

Water capacity is 264 gallons with 198 gallons of fuel for the two 56-horsepower diesels.

I'm sitting here in Seattle looking out the window at rain. Lots of rain. The brochures in front of me are a combination of charter promo material and sales material for the Lagoon 570. In the brochures the people are smiling, wearing shorts or bikinis, donning scuba gear, leaping into the water, dining on sumptuous, multi-course meals and toasting each other with apparent wild abandon.

What do I get? The sound of tires in the rain.