No one is more passionate about their version of sailing than a multihull sailor. It is as if they know something that the rest of us are missing. One avid friend has introduced hundreds of guests to her timeless Newick Val 31 and its unbounded speed. I’ve never gone faster under sail than when we hit an effortless 24 knots on a Sunday afternoon cruise. My friend tries bettering that mark every time she can assemble a crew.

Another friend has declared that he’ll never set foot aboard a monohull again. “They’re just too slow and tippy and they can’t go where I want to go or sail when I want to sail.” He’s been seen ramp-launching his trailerable trimaran during a Wisconsin blizzard on a quest to set the local New Year’s Day speed record, an unofficial benchmark that he has owned and bettered for decades. To be sure, no one else is competing. He’s on a solitary self-scored speed mission.

My friends are not the only multihull sailors obsessed with records. When it was reported that the course record for the 2024 Chicago to Mackinac Race had been smashed by Maverick, a monohull finishing in under 23 hours, a group of avid multihull sailors began firing off texts and Instagram comments to correct the record, reminding any friend or follower that the famed catamaran Stars & Stripes had sailed the same course more than four hours faster in the 1998 race, and Areté, a 60-foot trimaran, covered the 289 nautical miles in an astonishing 12 hours and 30 minutes during a special non-race record attempt transit of the course in 2021. One multihull sailor wrote, “a boat’s a boat and a record’s a record.”

In fact, most of sailing’s speed records are owned by multihulls. According to the World Sailing Speed Record Council, the keeper of these data, a trimaran or catamaran holds two-thirds of all of the notable sailing records. If you remove races that exclude participation by multihulls, that number pops to 83%. It turns out, monohulls only set records when multihulls are not invited. Multihulls have sailed faster than anyone else on routes and in races including the Sydney to Hobart, around the world singlehanded, transatlantic west to east, Newport to Bermuda, the Fastnet Race, the transpacific west to east, New York to San Francisco; and they hold 41 other ratified world records.

Yet in many racing venues, multihulls are vanishing. For example, just one multihull sailed this year’s fast Chicago to Mackinac Race and there was just one entry in the multihull division of the 2024 Newport to Bermuda Race. We might assume that waning interest in multihull racing will translate to declining sales of new boats with more than one hull, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The passion for multihulls has never been greater, but it is changing as fast as popping corn. Record speed is out. Record space is in. Whereas a 40-foot monohull carries a midboat beam of about 11 feet, has one small place in the back to sit, and its passenger’s knees are below the waterline when down below; a new 40-foot cruising catamaran can be more than 24 feet wide across most of its length, has a commanding bridge and a spacious saloon with a 360-degree view leading to an aft deck that doubles as a dive platform rivaling an Olympic pool. Whereas the galley on a monohull has straps to hold the cook between the two-burner stove and the cooler; the counters, cabinets and triangular workflow in a cruising multihull would make Paul Hollywood blush. Whereas monohull sailors expect to be uncomfortable—it’s part of the drill—these new multihulls offer their crew a rockstar’s touring bus, a villa, a spa, an open concept condo with a view and a waterpark/playground all in one.

But there are a few compromises. First, windage is a thing and upwind sailing is not. You need a lot of auxiliary horsepower to get one of these cats home when the weather is forward of the beam, and sometimes it won’t be enough. Second, finding a slip in a classic American marina will be hard. Pilings are 15 feet apart when monohulls are the norm. And finally, don’t expect a cruising cat to set any course records soon, although the race to the lido deck is real, and it is on.