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“This just came in the mail,” says Gino Morrelli excitedly as he runs into the kitchen of his California home. In his hand is a booklet that may or may not grant him the International Proficiency Certificate (IPC) that is required to charter a bareboat in Croatia. “Now we can go on vacation in September!”
Morrelli, one half of the design power team Morrelli & Melvin, is one of the minds responsible for boats like the Rapido trimarans (read the Rapido 40 review here), multiple Leopards including the 47 PC and award-winning 38 and 44, HH catamarans, Invincible powerboats, the NACRA 17, and even the Windcat workboats that service offshore wind farms. If that weren’t enough, he also had a hand in designing for elite racers like America’s Cup campaigns and the maxi cat PlayStation during his career of four decades.
And still, he’s been sweating getting approval to run a European power cat for a week. Bureaucracy can be batty.
From Humble Beginnings
Gino Morrelli may be a top multihull designer today, but it wasn’t always bleeding edge technology and yacht design accolades. When he was young, his family moved from Texas to Southern California. They bought plans for and built a 33-foot Lock Crowther-designed plywood and epoxy trimaran, which was the boat that began Morrelli’s racing career. Self-taught in multihull design, he couldn’t have guessed the legacy he was starting.
Over the next 10 years, Morrelli launched and closed his first company building 18 square meter cats, and hung out in Hawaii after sailing there on a friend’s home-built 45-foot boat, just because there wasn’t much to do back home. The Hawaiian contacts he made during those years would stay with him for life…
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