Interesting choice.

yep I'd take a 60 fter Rapido, thank you very much, or their previous cat.

Actually just one of their pod seats would be a pretty nice addition, as always standing up to helm is starting to get a little long in the tooth.

Im sure it might be a camera angle, but the tiller steering does not as comfortable as youd expect??

Fits with his previously expressed opinion that safety at sea emanates from speed due to the ability to avoid bad weather in this day & age of supposedly good and reliable weather reports. Personally I'm not convinced and prefer the hull Integrity of a mono Hull.

I have always regarded trimarans as mono hulls with training wheels giving the benefit of increased buoyancy and less displacement. A lot better idea than catarmarans IMHO.

Doing 25 knots down waves under bare poles will sort them out

and how many laps have they done in the last 6 years?

Their multi's are current designs fella's, we are not talking a Piver here.

Lagoon catamarans are current designs and they are currently falling apart all over the world as the bridge decks and bulkheads are cracking and aren't even keeping the hulls in alignment. Seems catamaran design hasn't come that far after all!

THUMBERG'S are GO

I like the boat. I've never got into the lifestyle sailing blogs though, I like watching something that I learn from, The Mariner fella being a good example. I watched about a min of this before I lost interest.
The boat though is different, I like that a lot. I've 'soloed' a 60' 10,000 kg cat before (everyone was down below passed out hung over as dogs all day) and there is a lot of power you have to respect, things can get ugly verry quickly. We blew a winch and a bit of the deck clean off the boat under a big gust one day at something like 28 knots boat speed, that took out a lot of miscellaneous gear on the way through from the loads. Which leads me to the only thing that is jarring to me with the Rapido, the kinda weird looking rudder post. I'd want a rock solid emergency steering system on a big tri, especially short handed. That rudder post does nothing to allay that belief, it looks fragile and hard to get at. Would be interesting to see more detail.
For that price you'd have your pick amongst the quality monos manufacturers, that's not a cheap boat.

Wouldn't be my choice. I'm a more a belts and britches guy. Give me a slower s&s 34 any day. There would be some interesting forces on those three hulls, they are stretched over such a large area.

A good cat or a good tri is a good boat. There is nothing too hard about engineering any style of boat well, mono, cat or tri. I owned two tris for about 13 years all up and loved them both. I lived aboard for about 3 years on one and don't know why they are going from a tri to a cat, especially with kids, unless it is to do with the money.
The Rapido will be a lot of boat and huge loads for not much extra speed. You usually can't use the extra speed potential in a light cruising boat - your crew will want to get off. We cruise faster in our 4000kg 38ft cat than we did in the 1500kg racer - the racer was just too hard on us. I have a lovely design (I drew the boat) of a tri I was going to build. It took me 2 years to design it. It was a nice amalgam of seaworthy and swift. Everybody, I mean everybody I talked about it with told me I was an idiot to build a tri. But I loved tris. Then one night my best friend (who I built a 38ft tri for), even he told me a cat was better. So instead of trying to fit a tiny table in the forecabin for our two boys in the tri design I spent a couple of hours playing with cat layouts. After an hour it was obvious, we would have divided accomodation, more storage, about 3 times more room, better dinghy storage, better resale and an easier build with a cat. So we built a 38ft cat and I have never ever regretted the decision. Tris are fab, but not great for a family, or maybe even a couple. I would go to the USA and sail a Searunner 37 slowly back home if I didn't have my cat. But to build a modern multi as a tri is such a small niche market it almost does not exist.

Great reply above but when you're 26 years old, sexy and fun is much more important than sensible and practical.

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keensailor said..
Wouldn't be my choice. I'm a more a belts and britches guy. Give me a slower s&s 34 any day. There would be some interesting forces on those three hulls, they are stretched over such a large area.

Yeah, I was thinking of John Goss' Team Phillips. Reading the Rapido marketing bumf on their website, they talk about how they bolted the centre hull to the ground, then pull up on the amas measuring the force. They reckon they got to 9 ton without it letting go.

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shaggybaxter said..

keensailor said..
Wouldn't be my choice. I'm a more a belts and britches guy. Give me a slower s&s 34 any day. There would be some interesting forces on those three hulls, they are stretched over such a large area.

Yeah, I was thinking of John Goss' Team Phillips. Reading the Rapido marketing bumf on their website, they talk about how they bolted the centre hull to the ground, then pull up on the amas measuring the force. They reckon they got to 9 ton without it letting go.

The engineer in me says that there is a difference between a steady dead-load (9 ton force) applied once and the working (cycling) of the lesser forces you'd get at sea, including the torsion from uneven front-rear loading of the amahs. Hopefully, the structural designers have worked it out.

(You could visualise torsion by imagining a catamaran balanced on two supports, one at the front-port and the other on the rear-starboard, with the rest of the boat dangling in mid-air. The twisting force in the middle is the torsion)

The early aeroplane-makers tested their planes by hanging them upside down and weighing down the wings. They had many failures until they figured out that it was the torsion that was pulling the wings off the planes, not a simple dead-load. After that, they had to deal with fatigue-cracks.

Maybe I'm a mono-snob.

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Maybe I'm a mono-snob.

Or maybe you have a point . I'm a bit of a Pete Goss fan, I think I cried when this happened. Pretty revolutionary design. Paul Larsen the Aussie who went onto Sailrocket fame was one of the crew. Seems like there all always a Kiwi or an Aussie to be found when one is pushing the boundaries.

The engineering is done and dusted. The forces involved in cats and tris are pretty easy to cater for if you don't skim the weight too much. Racers may sometimes be a problem but considering that tris and cats can race around the world in 50 or so days and do constant 30 knots for a week proves that a tri is a fine concept, even for a well engineered racer. For a cruiser it should be no problem. I can pin my cat fore and aft on one hull and then jack the stern or bow of the other. I get about 1-2m cm of deflection. I used to do this all the time when building her. Good multis don't break up, even half bad ones don't, just like a nice mono. Tris don't load beams heavily so the stresses stay low enough so that fatigue cycling increases logarithmically. You can always jack the floats and take the stands away from the main hull. It is done all the time to paint the bottom.

Consider the forces on a keel joint or a chainplate. There are huge cycling loads on these parts. Just build them well and there is no problem. Of course it is good that we like our boats, but it does help to sail a nice pedigree boat of a type to get a real feel for the type.

Team Phillips was a problem from the start. She had super long cantilever bows and very few boats have ever had such bows. A cat designer wrote about his misgivings before she sailed as he could make the bows deflect at the dock. She had thin hulls, and no forebeam, which allowed the bows to do their own thing. She was innovative but an evolutionary dead end.

I do have some concerns about the Rapido for family cruising. Cruising a tri can be a pain in a beam sea if the windward float bashes hard on the approaching swell. The way to get around this is to lift the float up high, dihedral, have very veed floats or just push the boat all the time. Racers adopt the latter approach and it is a pain for a cruiser. The Rapido has pretty flat floats and they are not too high. She could bang hard, in a beam sea, and at anchor. Another issue is drying out. A cat is great for drying out, we spent 10 days twice in Percy lagoon and a week in Hill inlet thrice, drying out each low. In the olden days in the tri, we would lean over a lot until I made a crutch, a cat just sits flat. Then there is the kids. A cat has the kids at your eye level when sailing, playing in the cabin. The tri has them with less space, much less floor area and down low. A cat is great for keeping an eye on kids. Our kids had the starboard hull to themselves if they weren't in the cabin. Once, my brother was with us and we were 1000 m off Byron in a westerly, we were doing 12-14 knots and smoking and the boys were making card houses. My brother came up and said "Card houses, at 14 knots?" Flat as a tack and a lovely reach. Cats are great for kids.

Have a sail on a good multi if you haven't had one. Get down the RPAYC and grab a sail if you can. A nice one is awfully fun to sail, as is a nice S and S or Ross or Farr or Alden or metre boat. They are no better or worse, just different, with differences that may suit you or not. Mine suits me to a tee and I love her still after 21 years. And no, no structural issues and she was built by a total amateur.

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Kankama said..
The engineering is done and dusted. The forces involved in cats and tris are pretty easy to cater for if you don't skim the weight too much. Racers may sometimes be a problem but considering that tris and cats can race around the world in 50 or so days and do constant 30 knots for a week proves that a tri is a fine concept, even for a well engineered racer. For a cruiser it should be no problem. I can pin my cat fore and aft on one hull and then jack the stern or bow of the other. I get about 1-2m cm of deflection. I used to do this all the time when building her. Good multis don't break up, even half bad ones don't, just like a nice mono. Tris don't load beams heavily so the stresses stay low enough so that fatigue cycling increases logarithmically. You can always jack the floats and take the stands away from the main hull. It is done all the time to paint the bottom.

Consider the forces on a keel joint or a chainplate. There are huge cycling loads on these parts. Just build them well and there is no problem. Of course it is good that we like our boats, but it does help to sail a nice pedigree boat of a type to get a real feel for the type.

Team Phillips was a problem from the start. She had super long cantilever bows and very few boats have ever had such bows. A cat designer wrote about his misgivings before she sailed as he could make the bows deflect at the dock. She had thin hulls, and no forebeam, which allowed the bows to do their own thing. She was innovative but an evolutionary dead end.

I do have some concerns about the Rapido for family cruising. Cruising a tri can be a pain in a beam sea if the windward float bashes hard on the approaching swell. The way to get around this is to lift the float up high, dihedral, have very veed floats or just push the boat all the time. Racers adopt the latter approach and it is a pain for a cruiser. The Rapido has pretty flat floats and they are not too high. She could bang hard, in a beam sea, and at anchor. Another issue is drying out. A cat is great for drying out, we spent 10 days twice in Percy lagoon and a week in Hill inlet thrice, drying out each low. In the olden days in the tri, we would lean over a lot until I made a crutch, a cat just sits flat. Then there is the kids. A cat has the kids at your eye level when sailing, playing in the cabin. The tri has them with less space, much less floor area and down low. A cat is great for keeping an eye on kids. Our kids had the starboard hull to themselves if they weren't in the cabin. Once, my brother was with us and we were 1000 m off Byron in a westerly, we were doing 12-14 knots and smoking and the boys were making card houses. My brother came up and said "Card houses, at 14 knots?" Flat as a tack and a lovely reach. Cats are great for kids.

Have a sail on a good multi if you haven't had one. Get down the RPAYC and grab a sail if you can. A nice one is awfully fun to sail, as is a nice S and S or Ross or Farr or Alden or metre boat. They are no better or worse, just different, with differences that may suit you or not. Mine suits me to a tee and I love her still after 21 years. And no, no structural issues and she was built by a total amateur.

G'day Kankama,
I agree Team Philips was a stretch too far, you only have to look at the forrard sections of the hulls to know that unless they had re-invented composites that was optimistic to put it nicely.
On a sidenote, can you explain the benefits behind the wishbone rig? I kinda get the concept but I've never fully understood it. Its obviously scale-able to maxi size (Team Phillips is a wishbone per mast) so I'm surprised you don't see more of it.
Cheers,
SB

The engineering is done and dusted in everything except the Lagoon 450's it would seem as there are now more and more stories coming out of boats with both cracked front and rear bulkheads and tabbing coming away.

The Kiwi dude on Parlay Revival was the first to mention it and everyone dismissed it because it was a hurricane damaged boat he had rebuilt. He didn't accept that explanation as in his opinion the damage had started before the hurricane. Since then other people with boats that had never been in a hurricane are now reporting the exact same damage to their boats. Lagoon have apparently admitted that all is not well with their boats but what exactly they are going to do about it remains to be seen.

The biggest market for Lagoon is North America, the place where everybody has their own pet lawyer.

I was amazed when I went onboard one of the French production cats that I could lose my keys down the back of the clothes locker. Good custom cat building has the integration of the interior and hull structure as vital to increase the strength and stiffness of hull panels. But making things cheaper means it is faster to simply attach a pre made interior to the hulls with a few fastenings. I have no data about the Lagoon 450. The problem is one of a particular design, rather than a general deficiency in cats. Tabbing a bulkhead, is not rocket science, but it can take time to do well and in a fast build boat, something may get passed over.

As for my wishbone. I am a mono sailor originally. I race/raced Lasers, 420s, Sharpies, windsurfers, Tornadoes too and any yacht I could jump on but I cruise multis. There is no type of boat that can sail as fast as a good multi with 50cm of rudders up draft with no seakeeping compromises. But multis have huge sheet loads. The loads can get up to half the displacement on the mainsheet.

Monos lean over and have less roachy mains. So they have lower loaded sheets and you can have fun adjusting them. You also vang the main to reduce sheet loads and so you can sail deep downwind easily. Most multis have hard to adjust sheets because the loads are so high. A wishbone takes all the vertical sheet loads and applies them back up the rig (a bit). The only load on the sheet is the sideways load. So my 38ft cat has a 4 to 1 mainsheet with no winch. Also the wishbone vangs the sail beautifully when sailing deep. So the main gets well looked after. I am looking for a new main. The current one is original and is 21 years old and made of laminate and is great up to 15 knots. One reason has to be the wishbone, it protects the sail from the rigging and always keeps it tight in all directions so it doesn't flog.
I have had vertical and horizontal tillers, now a wheel, three different engine pods, two different bridgedeck cabin structures but have never ever wanted to change the wishbone. With her cutter rig and wishbone, with the staysail up and genoa rolled up, In 20 knots I can do circles without needing a winch handle. It is nice to have one to flatten the staysail but I could sail around without one. The loads are low.

Cheers

Phil

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Kankama said..
As for my wishbone. I am a mono sailor originally. I race/raced Lasers, 420s, Sharpies, windsurfers, Tornadoes too and any yacht I could jump on but I cruise multis. There is no type of boat that can sail as fast as a good multi with 50cm of rudders up draft with no seakeeping compromises. But multis have huge sheet loads. The loads can get up to half the displacement on the mainsheet.

Monos lean over and have less roachy mains. So they have lower loaded sheets and you can have fun adjusting them. You also vang the main to reduce sheet loads and so you can sail deep downwind easily. Most multis have hard to adjust sheets because the loads are so high. A wishbone takes all the vertical sheet loads and applies them back up the rig (a bit). The only load on the sheet is the sideways load. So my 38ft cat has a 4 to 1 mainsheet with no winch. Also the wishbone vangs the sail beautifully when sailing deep. So the main gets well looked after. I am looking for a new main. The current one is original and is 21 years old and made of laminate and is great up to 15 knots. One reason has to be the wishbone, it protects the sail from the rigging and always keeps it tight in all directions so it doesn't flog.
I have had vertical and horizontal tillers, now a wheel, three different engine pods, two different bridgedeck cabin structures but have never ever wanted to change the wishbone. With her cutter rig and wishbone, with the staysail up and genoa rolled up, In 20 knots I can do circles without needing a winch handle. It is nice to have one to flatten the staysail but I could sail around without one. The loads are low.

Cheers

Phil

Thanks Phil, I'm kinda surprised they don't use it on more production boats, it sounds like a good idea all around.
Any negatives come to mind?

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shaggybaxter said..

Kankama said..
As for my wishbone. I am a mono sailor originally. I race/raced Lasers, 420s, Sharpies, windsurfers, Tornadoes too and any yacht I could jump on but I cruise multis. There is no type of boat that can sail as fast as a good multi with 50cm of rudders up draft with no seakeeping compromises. But multis have huge sheet loads. The loads can get up to half the displacement on the mainsheet.

Monos lean over and have less roachy mains. So they have lower loaded sheets and you can have fun adjusting them. You also vang the main to reduce sheet loads and so you can sail deep downwind easily. Most multis have hard to adjust sheets because the loads are so high. A wishbone takes all the vertical sheet loads and applies them back up the rig (a bit). The only load on the sheet is the sideways load. So my 38ft cat has a 4 to 1 mainsheet with no winch. Also the wishbone vangs the sail beautifully when sailing deep. So the main gets well looked after. I am looking for a new main. The current one is original and is 21 years old and made of laminate and is great up to 15 knots. One reason has to be the wishbone, it protects the sail from the rigging and always keeps it tight in all directions so it doesn't flog.
I have had vertical and horizontal tillers, now a wheel, three different engine pods, two different bridgedeck cabin structures but have never ever wanted to change the wishbone. With her cutter rig and wishbone, with the staysail up and genoa rolled up, In 20 knots I can do circles without needing a winch handle. It is nice to have one to flatten the staysail but I could sail around without one. The loads are low.

Cheers

Phil

Thanks Phil, I'm kinda surprised they don't use it on more production boats, it sounds like a good idea all around.
Any negatives come to mind?

Hi Phil
I believe I saw your cat anchored a few weeks ago in near the Croudace jetty,
Couple of questions about your main.
What is the process to put a reef in?
Is it in mast furling (which would explain reefing) or does it just drop to the top of cabin roof?

Cheers

PS Re the Tri, as mentioned above, what the hell were they thinking when deciding to go tri with young kids ???
Other than, wow look at us, how good are we to get a free boat, this will boost our image.

I'm speculating but I'd say that due to their commercial exposure they might well have received a good deal from the manufacturer. Might have had an influence in their purchase

Do we know if they had to purchase it at all? Maybe Outremer wanted their cat back and this one is on loan or on some similar arrangement. I didn't watch the video. I like my boat porn to be about the boats and not the women. Mads and Boat life and "I'm a builder and sailor" Leo are my faves. Watching Leo chisel is amazing.

(Yeah the boat is at Croudace. Wishbones have a few issues. They are hard to reef if you don't have the system I got from a guy who designed it. It uses a clutch at the end of the wishbone. They don't get quite the same leech tension in high winds (but I cruise so I reef then) and they don't like being on masts with spreaders (so you have to go spreaderless - but that suits the cutter rig and so all is good)

I couldn't watch much of it but he mentions a couple of times "its what we think the viewers want to see".

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some of the episodes mention how they got a french loan, and selling the Outremer cat.
They may not have paid full rrp, but it was made pretty clear that the tri was a purchase.


With a youtube coming out every week, i'm sure the kitty is topped up a little.

If Leo can fund paying some boatbuilders via patrons, why couldnt a good deal could be worked out with a factory wanting to boost its fanbase, via a couple of healthy looking aussies hire purchasing a tri off them for a few years?

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crustysailor said..

some of the episodes mention how they got a french loan, and selling the Outremer cat.
They may not have paid full rrp, but it was made pretty clear that the tri was a purchase.


With a youtube coming out every week, i'm sure the kitty is topped up a little.

If Leo can fund paying some boatbuilders via patrons, why couldnt a good deal could be worked out with a factory wanting to boost its fanbase, via a couple of healthy looking aussies hire purchasing a tri off them for a few years?

I watched the episode where they were given the cat and my understanding was that it was free and there were only two conditions. Firstly they had to keep it 2 years and secondly they had to produce a video at least twice a month. Now I'm wondering if perhaps there was another condition to the effect that they were not allowed to buy another brand of catamaran within a certain period. This would therefore be a work-around. Perhaps however things are just as he says and the swap was due to the desire to go electric engine and one engine is easier and cheaper than 2.

If you watch the video Riley insists it was never a free boat.

I can imagine why manufacturers would be falling over themselves to support the world's most popukar you tube sailers. So l am sure there is some kind of deal.

And thinking of the viewers is sound business strategy!

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Kankama said..
I like my boat porn to be about the boats and not the women.

Yep!!

After a while watching any of these sailing channels is like watching a shampoo commercial. Every week it's the same "Lather, Rinse and repeat", meaning somewhere is a person under the shower with an empty shampoo bottle, or in this case a bloke with a good looking girl and a boat.

^^ agreed.
Apart from Tally Ho, most of the others I have seen have just come in as 'suggestions' and its just click bait.

I did see one last week though and was going contemplating starting a new thread, something like Sailor Girl.?
(French chick that was new to sailing, had sailed some whitsundays, usual stuff).

The episode I saw though had her crossing Bass Strait, with only one other guy aboard, on a new secondhand boat, untested, new main,stuffed heady, it was fast becoming car crash tv. when the engine stops pumping, the seas get up..

it was a Steel boat going back to Sydney.

I have not seen all of the episodes, but I hope it was not a Seabreezer....