Multihull heavy weather tactics when sailing a catamaran offshore

From the following excellent article by Peter Johnstone on Sail Magazine:

http://www.sailmagazine.com/cruising/heavy-weather-strategies-when-sailing-catamaran

By their nature, larger catamarans are exceptionally safe offshore. It is not unusual to sail through mildly uncomfortable conditions, such as a gale, only to arrive in port and hear sailors on keelboats talk of “surviving” horrendous weather. A large modern catamaran has plenty of buoyancy and exceptional roll inertia. Together these make a capsize, or inversion, highly unlikely. A 30-foot breaking wave hitting a cat abeam will simply make the boat surf sideways.

On most offshore passages, advanced communications and weather information should preclude you from ever experiencing true gale or survival conditions. The highest risks are run on passages sailed on a north-south axis between seasons. Early spring or late autumn passages between New England and the Caribbean, in eastern Atlantic waters off Europe, or on routes between the South Pacific and New Zealand are where you typically have a chance of experiencing a good wallop offshore. Follow the wisdom outlined in Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes, and these risks should be minimized. Regardless, anyone venturing offshore in a multihull should be prepared to handle the worst.

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SAIL magazine examines the current range of soft wingsails

From the following article on the excellent SAIL magazine website:

http://www.sailmagazine.com/boats/have-wingsails-gone-mainstream

Has the wingsail finally come of age? After last year’s breathtaking America’s Cup series, and the news from boatbuilding giant Beneteau that it is experimenting with wings as an alternative to the traditional Bermudian sailplan on its production boats, it certainly looks that way. Where one leads, others follow, and if Beneteau’s trials go the way the factory expects, then cruising boats sporting one or two elliptical wings will be a common sight in years to come.

It took the Cup to put the spotlight back on the wingsail, but it has been around for decades in various iterations. Dennis Conner sailed the catamaran Stars & Stripes, sporting a hard wingsail, to victory in the 1988 mismatch against Sir Michael Fay’s Kiwi challenger. Back in the early 1990s Walker Wingsail Systems also designed and built a handful of cruising trimarans equipped with computer-controlled hard wingsails, before technical and legal problems—not mention a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the sailing community—eventually ended  the company’s attempts to make an impact on the market. The execution may have been flawed, but for many designers, engineers and sailors, the Walker Wingsail was at least a brave attempt to answer one question: why do sailboats have rigs and sails that are inherently inefficient?

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Excellent article on Sail Magazine examining Multihull designer Nigel Irens design history and current projects

From the following article on Sail Magazine by Paul Gelder:

http://www.sailmagazine.com/racing/nigel-irens-designs-some-fastest-racing-multihulls

Tucked away down a narrow alley in the picturesque town of Ashburton, on the edge of Dartmoor National Park in England, is a tiny building called the Tenter loft, a relic from the ancient wool industry when cloth was stretched on tenterhooks. It’s now the quirky office of British multihull designer Nigel Irens, the man behind some of the fastest sailing boats on the planet.

“The only things stretched in here are catamarans and trimarans,” says one of his team in a play on Irens’s maxim on multihull design that can be paraphrased as “design the longest boat you can possibly accept and then add a few feet.”

For 40 years, Irens has been at the cutting edge of multihull ocean racing. His name is on a string of record-setting catamarans and trimarans that are bywords among multihull aficionados everywhere, including ENZA, the 92-foot cat on which Peter Blake and Robin Knox-Johnston set the first Jules Verne sailing record in 1994; iDEC, on which Francis Joyon became the fastest man to circumnavigate solo; B&Q Castorama, on which Ellen Macarthur became not just the fastest woman around the world but, for a while, the fastest person, period. These and many other designs have long been celebrated as a kind of fusion of art and science. Irens’s designs, built for speed and endurance, have been called poems of flowing function, and for decades have been sought after by the hottest sailors on the race circuits.

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Chris White Atlantic 47 catmaran with Mastfoil Sail Magazines best multihull in the 41-50' range

From the following article on the Sail Magazine website:

http://www.sailmagazine.com/best-boats/sails-best-boats-2014-atlantic-47

Although huge, full-roached mainsails have been the rule on most catamarans for years now, in real life we all know that many cruising-cat sailors don’t ever use them because they can be so hard to handle. A number of designers have responded to this fact in incremental ways—for example, by reducing mainsail size or specifying in-mast furling. But now veteran multihull designer Chris White has solved the problem completely by taking the bold step of eliminating the mainsail altogether.

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