A Sailing Catamaran Provides an Exciting Sport
___________________________________________________
Catamaran’s are a relatively new introduction to the
design of boats used both for leisure and sport sailing.
But they’ve been used forever among the Paravas, a
fishing community in the southern coast of Tamil Nadu,
India. Also they’ve been used in Oceania where
Polynesians catamarans allowed seafaring Polynesians to
settle the world’s most remote islands.
In recreational sailing, the
catamaran and multi-hulls
in general had been met with skepticism from Western
sailors accustomed to more “traditional” non-hull
designs. This was mainly because multi-hulls were based
on, to these sailors, very alien and strange concepts,
with balance based on geometry rather than weight and
distribution. The catamaran has arguably become the best
design for ferries, because of their speed, stability
and large capacity.
An English adventurer and buccaneer William Dampier
traveling the world in 1690’s searching for business
opportunities was on the southeast coast of India in
Tamil Nadu on the Bay of Bengal. He was the first to
write in England about a different kind of vessel he saw
there. They weren’t much more than a raft made of logs.
“They call them ‘catamarans.’” Dampier wrote. The name
catamaran was applied to the swift and stable boats made
of two widely separated logs used by Polynesian natives
to get from one island to the other.
The design was basically unknown to the West for almost
another 200 years. Then an American, Nathanael
Herreshoff, began to build one of his own design in
1877. He named her Amaryllis. She showed superior
capabilities at her maiden regatta (the Centennial
Regatta in June 1876 of NY’s Yacht Club’s Staten Island
Station). It was due to this event, though protested by
opponents, that the catamaran as a design was barred
from all the regular classes until the 1970’s.
This ban kept the vessel to being a novelty design until
1947 when Woody Brown and Alfred Kumale designed and
built the first modern ocean-going catamaran. Later
their assistant Rudy Choy founded the design firm
Choy/Seaman/Kumalae in 1957. This began the catamaran
movement.
The speed and stability of the catamaran quickly made
them a popular pleasure craft – really taking off in
Europe and soon after in America. Today most are built
in France, South Africa and Australia.
Catamaran’s are harder to tack if they don’t have dagger
boards or center boards. They have higher speed than
mono-hulls of the same size due to the more needle-like
shape. They’re also less likely to capsize in the
classic “beam-wise” manner, but will “pitch-pole”
instead. The leeward bow sinks into the water and the
boat sort of “trips” over forward, causing it to
capsize. But sailing a catamaran, to its enthusiasts, is
the most exciting water sport there is, requiring unique
and challenging skills.
|
Articles & Reviews
|
