Performance

Fast, light and comfortable: these are ocean crossing performance cruisers.

In this section you will find the speed merchants of the multihull world, with a collection of Gunboat Catamarans plus Kinetic, Outremer, Ocean Explorer, ORC, Dazcat and HH setting the pace.

Then there are those performance boats that strike a balance between speed, space and load carrying. We are thinking of the Catana Catamarans range here (the pioneers in this category thanks to Lock Crowther’s early designs), plus Balance and Max Cruise Marine who strike a great balance between performance and comfort.

What is a “Performance” Catamaran?

Dazcat 1495 “Apollo”

The term does get thrown around for marketing purposes, but for us, the performance segment includes boats that are lighter than average with an SA/D ratio of 25 and over. They will typically have daggerboards to improve the performance upwind (although not exclusively) and higher length to beam ratios of each individual hull.

They will be able to sail at 5 knots and over in lighter winds. So we would classify a Dazcat as performance and a Nautitech as a faster cruising cat.

This is a competitive market with other yards launching boats such as ITA Catamarans, Windelo, C-Catamarans and Independent Catamarans. The list keeps growing.