I’m going to call it. The era of the multihull superyacht is dawning, with the Global Order Book showing a 65 per cent jump in orders. Owners at last seem to accept that two or even three hulls arc no mere passing fad. Concepts and designs for these boats have blossomed, as designers perceive the changing tide. A new breed of super-luxury catamarans and trimarans is on the way.
It has taken its time, mind you. Designers and naval architects have been talking about the benefits of multihulls for years, even decades: volume and efficiency; stability and speed; even the cost is favourable compared to a monohull of the same volume, according to some. There have been some isolated examples of the genre – the 44.2-metre sailing cat Hemisphere built by Pendennis: Racoupeau’s33-metre sailing cat built by Jinlong Mega Yacht: and the 42.5-metre McConaghy trimaran Adastra.
But after that initial flurry, things went pretty quiet on the build front, with the gloriously conspicuous exception of the 84-metre trimaran White Rabbit from Australia’s Echo Yachts. And in some senses, the multihull has gone back to the drawing board. Although there are plenty of big, wacky concepts out there, right up to the jet-black, 101-metre foiling beast that is Nemesis One, the multihull superyachts in build today are smaller and simpler, more like extensions of existing powercat lines, or adaptations of working boats, like Michael Hill’s 39-metre The Beast, with its military camo livery.
Not for nothing have many of the superyacht concepts been adapted from offshore service vessels for the wind and oil/gas sectors. But Chris Blackwell of Echo Yachts sounds a note of caution here. “One of the good things about the catamaran is that it does very well at speed, but the negative is that at slow speed or at rest, a wave can come under the boat and lift one hull and then moments later lift the second hull. You get a totally different whippy motion.’’
Of course, you can get round this by using dynamic positioning to keep the boat facing into the waves. But Blackwell champions the trimaran
