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For sailors of a certain age, the entire concept of a mulithull is cutting edge. However, even a cursory glance at a harbor full of cats and tris will show that the “cutting edge” of today looks very different from the cutting edge of, say, the ‘90s, or even the early 2000s—to the point where today’s cats and tris are as different from their predecessors as their predecessors were from the monohulls that came before them.
Bows
Where better to start than at the very front of the boat? Two decades ago, in the run-up to The Race, a no-holds-barred, nonstop fully-crewed race around the world, British Vendée Globe hero Pete Goss launched a then radical twin-masted catamaran with “wave piercing” bows. The 120ft Team Phillips, as it was called, ended up falling to pieces during a storm in the mid-Atlantic. However, the boat’s bow concept lived on and can now be found aboard everything from grand prix foiling cats and tris, like those competing in the SailGP, TF35 and GC32 pro circuits, to the latest generations of cruisers. Among the latter, the amount of “piercing” can range from the dramatically fine bows found on the amas of the Neel trimaran line to the “tumblehome” bows found on more conventional cruising cats. Wave-piercing bows are also de rigueur aboard today’s higher-performance cruisers and smaller racing and cruising trimarans with folding amas, like those built by Corsair or in Denmark’s Dragonfly line.
In every case, the goal is to reduce hobby-horsing in chop or a seaway, both by removing weight out of the ends and allowing the bow to better slice its way through the waves (as opposed to lifting over them). Fortunately, since the anchor is deployed amidships aboard a cruising cat, you don’t have to worry about banging the stem when deploying or retrieving the hook. (Neel trimarans employ a combination anchor roller/sprint to help keep you out of trouble: same thing with the new Dragonfly 40.) For what it’s worth wave-piercing, or “tumblehome” bows are also damn sexy looking.
Rigs
With their split backstays and aggressively swept spreaders obviating the need for a single, fixed centerline backstay, multihulls are a natural fit for square-headed mains. The result has been their appearance aboard everything from America’s Cup racers and bleeding-edge A-class cats to performance-cruisers like those built by Balance, Gunboat and HH Catamarans and out-and-out cruisers. Complementing this trend has been the now essentially ubiquitous use of full-length battens—a feature that was already widely used before the advent of square-top mains to support the larger roaches found aboard multihull mainsails…
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