With increased stability, speed, and spaciousness, sailing catamarans are an excellent choice for comfortable and safe cruising, especially in shallow waters.

Sailing Catamarans

With increased stability, speed, and spaciousness, sailing catamarans are an excellent choice for comfortable and safe cruising, especially in shallow waters.

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Manufacturers of sailing Catamarans

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Category Description

A catamaran is one of the most popular types of sailboats for charter.

Offering twice as much space as a monohull of the same length and being much more stable, comfort is the key advantage of a sailing catamaran. A cat can take more people on board and accommodate the crew in separate cabins.

Catamarans don’t heel at extreme angles as monohulls do because of its very wide beam and minimized contact of the hulls with water. They have reversed low-buoyancy bows, which pierce through waves and therefore reduce pitch and roll.

On the contrary, catamaran hulls are very buoyant as they are made thin with a long waterline and carry no ballast. The absence of a long and heavy ballast keel also means shallow draft.

In practice, this means that your wine glass won't fall from the galley table and your clothes and deck will stay dry in high winds.

For inexperienced sailors, a cat is probably the safest option.

How are catamarans built?

The hulls of sailing catamarans are made from composite. In some cases, the hulls are laminated in one piece, without the need for additional joining laminates and tabbing. Other builders use three separate molds for hulls and bridgedeck.

In both cases, the sandwich construction method is used, with PVC foam or balsawood squeezed between layers of laminate. The makers of high-performance sailing catamarans use carbon reinforcement on structural elements or even fully laminate their hulls with carbon to reduce weight.

The mast, made from GRP or carbon, is attached after the hull is completed. The rigging is usually supplied by a third-party manufacturer, but some shipyards make masts in-house, such as Sunreef.

What types of engines are used on catamarans?

Smaller catamaran models that don't need a powerful motor often use the so-called sail drive. Unlike the traditional shaft drive, where the motor drives the prop via a straight shaft, the sail drive setup uses a vertical intermediate shaft that goes through the bottom of the hull and connects the motor inside the boat to the prop under the bottom.

Large sailing catamarans come with straight shaft drives.