Multihull cruiserr

The design package for the Maine Cat 41 came with a lot of material. It's 95 percent advertising but it is passionate, well written, informative and it gives you a good look into the heart and soul of this design. I advise you to send for it if you are at all interested in this cat. It's a good read.

Speaking of good reads, if you are looking for a superb book to read while cruising this summer try Michael Tolkin's Under Radar. I loved it. It's full of things sailors like and its lacelike complexity is seductive. If you want a great CD to listen to while quietly anchored get Boz Scaggs new jazz ballad CD, "But Beautiful." It will surprise you. This is good jazz for romantic times, or if you are cruising by yourself it's music that can remind you of a time when you had reason to be romantic.

What separates the Maine Cat 41 from most other 41-foot cruising cats is the general layout of the deck and accommodations. This layout is called an open bridgedeck design. In short, there is no cockpit and there is no saloon spanning the two hulls. Cockpit and saloon have been morphed together into one large "great room"-15 feet, 6 inches long by 11 feet, 6 inches wide. I like this. For sunny weather cruising where shutting the boat up is not frequent this is perfect.

You have the option of closing the Strata glass acrylic windows that are set in Sunbrella frames but this is not like a rigid cabintrunk in terms of insulation. Still, when the weather is good this configuration allows you to open up the entire saloon while keeping sun and or rain protection overhead. This hard top is composite GRP set on aluminum tubing supports. It does not look very good on the two dimensional drawings but in the photos it virtually disappears and doesn't look bad at all. Being a Seattleite I'm more comfortable sitting in drizzle than I am sitting in the sun. I would like this arrangement.

From this great room you step down four steps into the hulls. The starboard hull is the owner's stateroom with the head aft and a double berth forward. There is a dressing area forward of the head and there is an office area forward of the double berth. There is a single berth in the bow of each hull. You can access these single berths through a deck hatch or you can walk through the other stateroom to get to them. Daggerboard trunks in the hulls interfere somewhat with access to the double berths, but what are you going to do? You must have decent daggerboards. Those stupid, stubby little molded in keels just do not work at all. The port hull has a very nice galley and another two staterooms.

The saloon and cockpit area has mirror image, large settees and a centerline console steering station. I can't tell from the drawings where the dining table comes from or if it is fixed. This is a cockpit/saloon capable of being a comfortable place to entertain a large group. Your Maine Cat will soon become the party boat.

Weight studies are probably the most boring part of any design project but they are possibly the most important. Careful construction detailing gives the Maine Cat a designed displacement of 12,200 pounds. Add to this a 7,000-pound payload to put the boat in cruising trim. I think we will use the sum of these two weights, 19,200 pounds, for our ratios. The D/L is 134 and the L/B for the individual hulls is 10.5 and L/BOA is 1.8. The prismatic is on the high side at .656. This insures plenty of volume in the ends of the hulls.

The next step is to put the printed information aside and sail this cat against its more conventionally laid out competition to see if this design approach rewards the owner with better sailing performance.