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From: Candy Chapman and Gary Bell (no email)
Date: Wed Oct 03 2007 - 09:09:07 EDT
Mervyn Carr again asked:
Compared to the cat (imo)the mainship is a distant second in terms of
comfort and stability. Now maybe the question should be, "is the Mainship
(34' 1979) just not particularly stable/seaworthy?" or "is the cat way nmore
stable?"
Yes, the Mainship (and any similarly sized monohull as well) is
considerably less roll stable than any wide stance catamaran. Pretty
simple geometry there.
As I suggested in my earlier rant, your Mainship is MORE stable in pitch
than any slender hulled boat, particularly a catamaran like mine. As I
also pointed out, roll stability is a more often encountered gremlin
than pitch, and a pitch stability challenge can be converted to take
advantage of a catamaran's roll stability with course and/or speed
changes, stern anchors, anchor bridles, etc..
I sense that your two questions are really only one. Yes your Mainship,
and any similar monohull is overall less stable than a catamaran (or
trimaran, or proa too of course) because of the shape of the 'footprint'
on the water, but that is of course a subjective evaluation from someone
with a dog in this fight. A monohull can be turned into the waves to
regain the advantage of it's inherent pitch stability, while a catamaran
can be turned to convert a challenge from pitch to roll. However, the
catamaran motion will only have the higher speed motion of a rolling
monohull when it is in the harmonic hobby horse pitching mode, and that
in my experience is very seldom found and quite easy to mediate or even
eliminate. Your own experience seems to coincide with mine, that the
pitching motion of a monohull, even when properly aligned and pitching
in the waves is less comfortable than the motion of a catamaran,
oriented to take the waves broad on the bow. Others may not agree, but
I might challenge them to come cruising and anchoring with us, and spend
some significant time aboard both sorts of boats. I expect that in the
boat motion catagory at least, the cat has the advantage. Hence my
comments about how suitable it is for general boating. Fuel economy vs.
speeds available and the internal space and amenities are of course
important issues for us as trawler trash.
Marin's comments on his preference for traditional boat appearance
agrees very well with the general consensus of the marketplace. There
are a lot more traditional looking trawlers out there than power
catamarans, and it's nice that somebody loves them! Power catamaran
sales, while growing faster than the manufacturers' ability to produce
them, for the PDQ and a few other makes at least, still lags far behind
monohull sales, due in large part to the fact that we all make major
acquisition choices, be they boats, cars, houses or spouses based in
large part on how they look (I consciously elected to NOT use the term
'curb appeal' there!), and particularly how they resemble our
preconceived notion of how the ideal boat, car, etc. would look. When
The Admiral and I bought our boat, PDQ sales manager Rob P. suggested
that over ninety percent of the early PDQ sales were to folks who had
NOT had a large power boat in the past -- and therefore had fewer
preconceived notions of how they should look. Might you be suffering
from a disconnect between how you think a boat should look and how those
boats compare to catamarans in several performance issues? I came to
power boating from an experience base of small boat sailing, crewing
racing sailboats and driving 4000 ton Navy destroyers around the
Pacific, so I had a good deal less 'prejudice' about appearance to deal
with. Add to that, we are dealing with that old gearhead Mr. Science
here, so 'newfangled', 'improved', and 'works better' are music to my
ears.
I find that most of us are pretty pleased with our current boats --
emotionally invested you might say -- to the point of being a trifle
defensive sometimes. Describes me for sure. I also feel that sometimes
our attitudes shift and a new car, boat, house, or even spouse becomes
attractive. One way or another we've all been there too. We admire
loyalty (in others mostly), and at the same time we hold innovation and
improvement up for approval. Complicated critters, people.
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