The TRUTH about Buying a CATAMARAN. Don't be LIED TO..

first things first i want you to take everything that you know about catamarans and wrap it up in a ball take everything that you think that you know about catamarans wrap it up in a bowl and [ __ ] it off down the road get rid of it you don't need it take all of your preconceived notions all of the things that you think that you know so in this video i'm going to speak about the great safety paradox as i've called it i'm going to say something very sexist i'm going to talk about the misinformation that you probably heard from dealers and unfortunately some reputable sailing magazines we're going to look briefly at some equations and why they're super important and i'm going to do a bit of a case study and run through some weather programs this video is going to ruffle a few feathers it's going to piss off some big boat manufacturers but it's the truth at least and a good deal of what it is is just simply the physics of sailing i want to make something absolutely clear before i jump into it all and that is that if you got yourself a boat second hand for a steal and you're happy with it i think that's the best thing ever i'm stoked for you i'm really happy i hope that you get as much enjoyment out of sailing around the world as i have i hope to meet you in an anchorage one day i just really could not be happier for you this video really isn't aimed at you i'd also like to just point out where my motivations lie we are 99 crowdfunded so that means that you could reasonably assume that we're going to have your like our audience you viewers out there we're going to have your best interests at heart so ultramurra did help us out with a loan but we are financing that 100 ourselves i really think that this is where the crowdfunding model does shine through all of our motivations are just set up to just give you guys the best information that we can and that's fantastic so with all of that being said i think i should probably start the first time i had a boat pulled out of the water this was in thailand and i had just zero experience it was the largest monohull that i could afford and that was the entire thought process that went into that decision what i thought i knew was wrong which meant that i probably knew less than zero and what happened was the guy that was selling the boat was from norway and the guy that was doing the inspection was from norway so i was just like oh there's certainly a conflict of interest here i was pretty worried but the surveyor was really good he turned to me and he goes given that this is a crazy racing vessel you must have done you know how many sydney to hobarts you must be this crazy awesome australian racer and i was like mate i've never sailed a boat ever and he's like seriously oh yeah and he goes okay put that back in the water and then he turns to his norwegian friend he like yelled at him and goes you should not be selling that boat to him and was like naughty boy i guess the reason for me telling you guys that is that like i'm a form of the phone or a buffoon that's in the midst of reform so i'm really thinking about the information that i think people should know especially if they want to do a fair bit of blue water sailing if you want to motor your friends around a couple of islands part-time and work nine-to-five you know which would be awesome this video probably isn't for you it's more aimed at people that want to do a little bit more but i should warn you that once you do do a bit of blue water sailing you will probably become addicted most people do so what you think you're going to do you should plan early that that is just going to evolve and change and just grow much much larger it generally does so this is more aimed at people that want to do a few years of sailing and at least a couple of ocean passages probably a little bit more than that so i've read this book a couple of times i think it's just absolutely fantastic i'll definitely recommend getting it after you watch this video and before you buy a catamaran you just you have to go through it it's very well laid out it's fantastic i'll do a link to it below catamaran's the complete guide for cruising sailors and the opening lines are life is too short to sail slowly or uncomfortably he then goes on to make the case for multi-hulls over monohulls for like 50 pages which uh was pretty funny he's pretty objective but that's not the reason for this video here in this book he talks about the old sailing maxim space economy and performance and the fact that you can pick two out of those three things now let's take a look at what happens when we adjust this a little okay excellent yeah if we just drag this out a little bit more oh yeah that's a little bit better drag that out a little bit more now just a little bit plank of wood plank of wood best suppose the best push numbers in the world step right up step right up pow best performing uh vote in the world you guys are the pow guys right we are indeed i heard you're going to be in the knuckles i'm so glad to see you so my husband and i three kids looking to sell around the world we're looking really comfortable what can you recommend man you're standing on it this here is the 35 millimeter plank of wood this is what we recommend here at pow it means literally a plank of wood i thought that was like some technical sailing that's correct very cheap very lightweight very performance orientated you stick your sails on here off you go okay um i've got a lot to see here and not much time so yeah that's cool good luck with your wood make sure you get in because we've got a lot of interest around here thanks thanks so much okay bye so if you're watching this video you're probably interested in multi-hull sailing and the biggest safety factor that i think that we've got as multi-hulls apart from the fact that one that's engineered properly shouldn't sink is the fact that we have a very large potential for performance and this was never more obvious for me than when we crossed the north atlantic with greta and svante and nikki where we really were jumping from one safe piece of ocean to another whilst surrounded by fairly inclement conditions but that really doesn't mean that performance is only good when you're preparing for the worst sort of conditions with a better performing vessel you'll be able to pretty much pick a path across an ocean where you can stay in let's say less than two meter waves rather than waiting for weather conditions to catch up with you and getting stuck in four to five men as well so you can actually keep up with weather conditions you can jump on the back of lows you will learn to be a better sailor you'll just be more confident you can travel twice as far during the day i remember reading lynn and larry party's book when they upgraded vessel and it was much faster and that was one of their key points was being able to make the day trip that was much further it just felt like their horizons had broadened and for me what i think is the most important one is that for a given boat speed you can have far less sailor which means that when that nasty squall hits you're probably twice as safe so for example a 20-ton vessel will have twice as much sail up to go the same speed as a 10-ton vessel and after two atlantic crossings on this boat you know tens of thousands of miles a lot of it probably being virtually single-handed because elena's looking after lenny that would be the main safety thing that i've learned and that i would like to let you guys know so i really do just want you guys to be safe i want you to have fun i want you to do easy miles it's really good if your partner can be in bed and you know that you don't have every scrap of sail up just to be getting to the six knots that you want to be doing for a crossing and they can just rest easier if you've got a little bit of sail in the back and when you are faced with a difficult forecast and you eventually will be you are just provided with so many more options if you're on a vessel that can really move and the reason that i think that this is such pertinent information is the fact that there really are boats out there that can go twice the speed for the same amount of money as one of the standard charter catamarans so i'll do a link below to the owner of a leopard who made a video about various points of sale and speeds that they were reaching so you can get a good idea as to the performance of that vessel and if some of you out there are thinking like this is all well and good but these are three-quarters of a million dollar vessels and completely out of my zone out of my league if people start going into boat shows and asking better questions and it all filters back through then the second hand market will be full of much better performing vessels if i was a 16 year old it'd be amazing give you up young fella and put your fortnight controller away try and figure out how to take your job online all right i'm going to read from this book page 36. so he's previously spoken about how the charter industry was wonderful because it allowed the price of vessels to come down because they were being mass produced but then he goes on to say a lot of blame now that we have praised them goes to the charter industry which commissions thousands of new cruising caps each year in order to update their constantly abused fleets and with the goal to increase profitability charter companies prefer multi-hulls with the most space to length to price ratio this keeps acquisition costs at a minimum yet maximizes revenues when renting to large parties the only problem is that these types of charter cats often have mediocre performance and sometimes dangerous behaviour in challenging sea conditions often hulls and bridge decks pound against waves and older catamarans purchased from charter fleets for a bargain can end up being a nightmare to own this is not to say that there aren't good charter caps around that one can obtain at a good price and still enjoy however one should never forget the purpose of the boat and the forces the sea can throw at you so i thought that that was very very relevant information if you're thinking of buying a multi-hull you really have to read that book now the fun stuff i'm going to rip through some equations that i think you should all become familiar with and if you dare skip ahead i'm going to jump through this computer screen here and throttle you now it's annoying and boring but like it's just really important it's some of the most important stuff that you need to know and if you can concentrate on things like numbers you can remove the emotion away from your decision making which is also important i think bruce number where sail area equals upwind sail area and displacement equals the weight of the boat in pounds the higher the coefficient the faster the boat and the better its performance in light air power to weight ratio one of the most important efficiency factors on a boat shows all of the sail area relative to its displacement and the higher the number the faster the boat will sail sail area to wetted surface coefficient this formula divides the upwind sail area of the boat which is the mainsail and 100 jib by the wetted surface area and it gives an indication of light wind performance hull fineness ratio the maximum water line equals the length of the hull at water line in feet maximum beam water line equals the beam of the hull at the water line in feet i'm not super up to speed on that one it's difficult to explain it's very important and these are the questions that you should be asking right moving on stability coefficient okay this was devised by the famously menage a toiring james warren who has a good book as well this analyzes a multi-hull's ability to basically resist wind it's important but sea state is far more important but it's just a good stability factor polars no one talks about polars it's unbelievable demand that you get your poles it's like so important it's how your boat performs a polar is effectively a database it's relating to the boat's speed with regards to true wind conditions it's sort of how a vessel should theoretically perform in a frictionless perfect world of engineering design like cad and it's what you'll plug into a weather router so you put in your numbers and then given the weather conditions predict wind will just plot your course and say you'll be traveling at this speed here so it's it's really helpful and it's good fun comparing polars of different boats and it removes a lot of guesswork like someone's saying i cruise at seven knots but that means nothing because i haven't told you the conditions that they cruise in did not make a sense unless they're talking about hull speed because which is a monohull but we're not talking about that okay the great safety paradox this is where two inexperienced sailors go to a boat show and they're understandably drawn towards the boat that looks like a comfortable house they're then informed by the dealer who's on board that the exact configuration of the vessel that they're on is perfect insofar as to say that any more performance orientated would be a stripped out race boat very uncomfortable and perhaps likely to flip and any more comfortable and it just won't be able to perform well enough there'll be discussion about a safety fuse where the rigging will go before the boat would capsize these are the sorts of things that people are beginning to think about when they're at the boat show what i would like people to think about is the amount of load that is accrued when you try to get a 20-ton boat moving versus a 10-ton boat think of the amount of load on the sheets and on the standing and running rigging and this is the blaring hole in the reasoning of virtually all inexperienced sailors myself as well as i was talking about before you're drawn towards and inevitably end up buying the exact vessel that you don't want to be in when faced with a difficult forecast which you will eventually be dealt it's almost like people's completely understandable fear means that they're more likely to buy the one that looks homely but that's not the one that you should be in if you're worried it's like after you had more experience then you could graduate from the sailboat it should be like this is the default it does all the things that you want to in bad conditions the conditions that you're worried about and once you've graduated from there then you can go over here but it's completely upside down and that's one of the major things that i'm constantly thinking about and speaking to people about so there's a guy i think in california that created the great catamaran tacking challenge where he offered anyone two and a half thousand us dollars on a lagoon 380 or similar charter vessel to send in their attacking angles showing less than 90 degrees with a good vmg no one wrote in no like no one could do it and i liked it because his motivation behind doing it was he kept hearing people inexperienced sailors who were really dirty on themselves like getting really down they're like oh i can't i'm doing everything wrong i'm not doing this i'm not doing this and there's arguments on board and stuff like that and the truth is they just they simply can't do it so he created this challenge and it was quite controversial but it got a lot of people talking it was quite obvious to him and many other people what information they were going to find and that's eventually what happened now for the sexist part i keep hearing from literally every boat salesman who are all men to the point that it really is a tired cliche at this point that a guy comes strolling in onto the boat at a boat show on a more performance orientated vessel that the salesman is actually really proud to have on display and the lady says it's half the size where's the fridge the air conditioning's only 16 000 btu now i get it you need to be comfortable especially living on board but something that i think that i can tell those of you who haven't been sailing is that the things that you think are important now won't be by say the eight month mark of your journey or maybe a year or maybe a year and a half but it would definitely change so i would like to be wrong about that what i would love to see some of the ladies rolling in there kicking the side of the boat what's the old bruce number on this bad boy how many miles a day can this do to keep myself and my family out of harm's way if you are a lady out there and you do see this video and you do look at those equations and start thinking about that and i can point you in a more minimalist safer direction i will just be so stoked i'll be slinging high fives there will be massive hugs and the funny thing is they're the ones that the guys actually want to be selling honestly i've spoken to them they're all sailors and they would love to be building more sailing orientated vessels they'll come home they're probably french come home from their big day on their cad computers with a big smile on their face but it does have to start with you guys so you really don't want to get the dimensions of a king-sized bed and then build a boat around that but i can tell you that's what's being done if that's your design parameters if that's your starting point you're not going to end up with a sailing vessel everyone needs to be very aware of exactly the purpose behind the vessel that it is that they're purchasing and what happens is that if that's the comparison or there's the king size bed over there three air conditioners 10 fridges that filters back through because inexperienced people are going to walk on board one and go why can't i have that so then other manufacturers that would prefer to be concentrating on other areas are like oh well you know our hands are tight we need to sort of step in this direction this really isn't a good business maneuver by sailing la valuebond light the best thing that we could have done would be to buddy up with one of the big companies and try and jag some commission honestly our allegiance is with the people power to the people good on you thank you to our patrons this was quite a difficult one to make and i felt like you know i didn't know if i should put it out there or not i was a little bit worried still am if you like that give it a like have a comment share it with various groups and tell me what i've done wrong if i've offended you let me know there are a few more things i would like to say obviously performance can be taken too far which does become unsafe i don't think that anyone watching this would be able to handle you know a mod 70. there is something to be said for white so for example if you just gave me five meter waves then i would prefer to be in a heavier vessel for sure i guess in that this video is more about sort of correcting perceptions this really isn't the final say on everything and i will continue to learn and evolve as a sailor and i'll do a link down below to catamaran impe who's a dude who's been cruising around in a lagoon for years and years and years so i'd love to hear from him if he's got anything to say about this i'll also do an article that skip novak did for yachting world where he talks about how a super high performance cat can be dangerous he does talk about sailing consistently at 25 knots which is pretty much the polar opposite of what i'm recommending here with doing the easy miles but worth a look anyway so i'll link that down below and if you are concerned about being on a vessel that's too powerful this is one thing that i don't understand just put a reef in put two reefs in sail around with two reefs in the main until you become more confident and just practice roofing going downwind turning into big waves look at that as an opportunity to learn and run through it with your crew you're gonna have to do that no matter what so it's far better to have that performance sitting there i may have covered everything there i think it's probably because i'm australian or i don't know we don't really like to bang on about how much experience we've got or how good we are at anything but i've probably done about between 50 and 80 000 miles now i really need to go back and add all that up and then i did the sydney to hobart and did that north atlantic crossing with nikki who's a sailing rock star and it wasn't until i'd done those things that i really felt like i really could hold my own i've spoken to andre about this he wants to do a volvo i think i would love to do a volvo maybe in another life but anyway it's really not until now where because we're sailing with vagabond we do get a direct line to people like i can speak to virtually anyone in the marine industry that i want like i'd called up greg or tarzan and said i love your bookman and him and i had a big chat about a whole bunch of different things so with that as well it's really not until now that i've sort of felt comfortable handing out advice to you guys or behaving like an expert it's taken me a little time but i'm here to tell you how it is now okay i really apologize about the flex there i really do hope that that video provides a bit of a shortcut to what i've learned over the last seven years and what all of these experienced dudes up and down the dock what they all know and what we all talk about good luck in finding your vessel i hope this has been helpful like i said there's a stack of links below there is huge amounts to learn i hope i haven't disappointed or annoyed anyone i'm very aware of how much emotion goes into such a massive investment selling your home and then buying your big dream vessel i hope that you can be happy that maybe in the future you could get something better i don't know it's just what i believe to be the truth so i think it's important to get out there more information for everyone the better share that video subscribe and uh i'm gonna go for a swim [Music]

Channel: Sailing La Vagabonde

Views: 1,769,064

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Id: LGD5pmANdgA

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020