This was published in December 1996 in the Fremantle Sailing Club Blue Water Bulletin.
For me "speeding" means doing over 10 knots. 10 knots is a smart pace for my 24 foot catamaran, especially when loaded for cruising. During the winter of 1995 I sailed about a thousand miles from Perth to Dampier and on several occasions I was speeding.
When I bought Nulla Nulla, over two years before, it was not with any intention of taking it cruising. I bought it to learn to sail a catamaran. I had always sailed monohulls and I knew cats were different. I chose the 24 foot Seawind because it is big enough to have useful accommodation and to provide a protected steering position, yet small enough and sprightly enough to be fun. The Seawind 24 also has a good reputation; they were sold in Australia and the United States and there are hundreds of them.
When the Fremantle Doctor was up I would take Nulla Nulla out and reach across the flat waters of Cockburn Sound with the sheets hard in. Spray would drench the leeward hull and on two occasions I flew the windward hull. At a guess, the speed would have been 15 knots or more.
Even though the boat felt under control with one hull in the air, I had no intention of flying a hull while it was my high seas cruising home. The consequences of a slip-up would be too severe: a capsize when out for an afternoon on the sound would be an expensive inconvenience; a capsize miles from land would be a catastrophe.
Nevertheless, I have had some fast sessions during the trip. The first was a hundred miles north of Perth off Wedge island. An easterly on starboard tack was giving long rides at 12 knots down lazy SW swells. No drama. The wind was steady, the water smooth. Had I needed to, I could have released sheets anytime. With the moderate beam wind I could also have gently rounded up to depower sails or else turned downwind and the boat would have slowed as it came off the reach.
A few days later I found myself doing 10-11 knots off Geraldton in the gusty aftermath of a squall. Again, no worries, for the main sheet was not tight and thus absorbed gusts, the squall had only slightly disturbed the sea and though rounding up might not have been a good idea (since the wind was on the quarter), I could have turned downwind and further freed sheets if things had got more exciting.
These are not exactly death-defying numbers for a catamaran. When it comes to numbers we hear and read a lot of claims. I think, and I am not alone, that knotmeters are to be taken with a pinch of salt. I have only a GPS. A GPS deduces speed by determining successive positions, computing the distances between them and comparing them with the time taken. It has to average, or "smooth" the information from lots of fixes. If mine (a Garmin 45) is set to "battery saver" mode its speed is erratic. The first time I used it I wondered what was going on. Presumably to save power it doesn't take many fixes. In "normal" mode the speed is steady and its ETA predictions (which are based on speed) are correct so it seems the indicated speed must be correct. What I am trying to say is: my 10 knots might be a knotmeter's 12.
In Shark Bay my wife, Fran, and I holed up for several days on the east side of Dirk Hartog Island, sheltering from NW winds. The bread and water ran low so we decided to sail to Denham.
"Put in a reef?" Fran asked.
"Nah - going downwind we won't feel it", I said. Much. We did not know how sheltered we were. The further out we got, the faster we went. After a spurt showing 13.6 knots, we eased up into irons, dropped the jib and reefed the main. The reef in the main is so massive that without a headsail I thought we were being very conservative. Rounding the tip of Bellefin Point our course became a run with the main right out and the speed around 8 knots. The waves were small - half a metre only - but steep, and I was glad to be going with them. Then it started to gust up. Speed increased to bursts above 12 knots, overtaking the waves. 12 knots with a reefed main: it seemed to me that meant there was a lot of wind. What would be the appropriate action if it got even stronger?
We couldn't drop off, since we were already on a dead run. Rounding up was to be avoided for the speed would increase as we came onto the reach and the centrifugal turning force would depress the lee hull. As far as I can make out, it is tripping over the lee bow when moving at speed that starts a capsize. At least that is the way it goes with trimarans; perhaps cats are safer in this respect. At any rate, rounding up didn't seem advisable. I explained this to Fran. As she began to appreciate that our steady, smooth ride had a latent sting in its tail, she narrowed her eyes at the potentially treacherous leeward bow (which was hissing through the water showing no sign of burying) and edged herself further back with me on the windward stern.
Dropping the main altogether would be problematical since the sail was pressed against the shroud and to free it would require rounding up. Just what was I to do if the wind increased? Slash the main with a knife? I thought if things became any wilder I might get Fran to pull the main in towards the centre while I gripped the tiller hard. That would slow us because of the reduction in sail area but it would be really riding the tiger - a steering deviation could cause involuntary rounding up with the main sheeted in. An alternative would be to stream some rope as a drogue.
I wouldn't say I was worried; I was just uncomfortable because of the limited options. We sat there, the numbers varying from 9 to over 12 for perhaps an hour. Nothing untoward happened. The question remains: how much speed could we carry? Was I concerned over nothing? The advertising literature claims the Seawind 24 can do over 20 knots. Would the boat have skimmed, smooth and steady, over the water at 20 knots? I just don't know.
An elementary monohull versus multihull argument compares major disasters. If a multi turns over it remains upside down which a mono doesn't (or shouldn't), however if a mono gets a hole in it, it sinks, which a multi doesn't (or shouldn't). Score one point each, we might say. Your multihull proselytiser will now ask (triumphantly) whether you'd rather be upside down on the surface of the ocean or right way up at the bottom.
Those aren't genuine alternatives. There is a fundamental difference in the causes of these mishaps. A mono might sink if it hits a whale or debris in the night. The crew aren't responsible for the disaster and there is nothing they can do to prevent it. On the other hand, the multihuller's disaster is caused by the crew. A multi capsizes if it is sailed too hard.
If you sail a mono too hard you'll break something but you won't sink (One Australia was an exception). That is to say, a mono is more forgiving of misjudgement than a multi. The worst you can do to a mono is lose the rig. That is vastly preferable to being upside down. The multihull sailor may claim to be more in control - it's up to the skipper to make his own disaster, not some random whale - but the multihuller also has greater need to be in control.
The question is - and perhaps this is the nitty gritty of why I originally bought my boat - How do you know when your multi is being over-pressed? On a mono there are any number of indications: the motion is uncomfortable, the rail is under, the vessel is lurching and broaching - and you also know your hull speed and if you shorten sail you won't go any slower but may even go faster.
For a multi all this is turned around. For a multi other than the heavy displacement type, hull speed doesn't apply. This is because of the narrowness of the hulls - in effect two or three canoes mounted side by side. I don't know what the ratio of waterline length to waterline beam is on my boat but it must be fairly high - ten to one perhaps - for there is no sensation of passing through the nominal hull speed of about 6 knots. Except when beating, a multi does not get uncomfortable with speed; indeed, depending on the sea, often the faster you go the smoother it is. And the more sail you stack on, the faster you will go - till you go too far. Racing multis will set spinnakers in a storm. Occasionally they come to grief.
It must have been the 1981 Brisbane-Gladstone and Gladstone-Cairns races when three of them flipped. I remember reading various accounts at the time. There was also a defensive letter Lock Crowther wrote to Cruising Helmsman. Mr Crowther, who until his death a year or so ago was regarded as the world's top multihull designer, pointed out that multis crash when racing whereas cruising multis seldom capsize.
Quite right. Monos, too, come to grief more often when they are racing than when they are cruising - we see, when the wind gets up, half the Sydney-Hobart fleet forced out. But by and large the mono crews can slink off to a cosy post mortem in the pub in Eden or Batemans Bay. They don't find themselves sitting glumly on their upturned hulls, firing off flares. Multihull racers seem to have a problem realising when they are pressing too hard.
I recently chanced across the Autumn 1992 number of Multihull World in which Harvey Raven discusses one of the 1981 capsizes. He says, "We capsized a 37 foot racing cat. The boat did not capsize itself."
Harvey is a veteran of a couple of dozen major offshore multi races. He also says, "The boat had given us plenty of warning that we were pushing too hard. We could easily have reduced sail. We chose to risk it. We knew it was dangerous. We paid the price." Harvey has forgotten more about multihulls than I'll ever learn and yet I can't quite accept this. It seems to me that only in hindsight can he say they pushed too hard. If they'd got away with it - and they obviously thought they had a good chance at the time - not only would they, ipso facto, not have been pushing too hard, but if they'd then come second they'd have wound up remembering for the rest of their lives the moments when they could have gone faster. It is all hypothetical but it does look as if even experts don't really know if they've pushed it too far till they actually get wet.
What was the "plenty of warning" the boat gave? He doesn't say and apart from a ridiculous speedo reading, I can't imagine. He insists on taking the blame for the capsize; he is admitting that the crew misjudged. Since it was an expert crew we can only conclude that it's very difficult to judge how close to the edge you are - and if you get it wrong it's curtains. Formerly of Raven Multihulls, Harvey Raven nowadays operates his 60 foot cat, Shotover, taking tourists out of Monkey Mia. I met him in Carnarvon in June. We spoke of other things.
Chris Smith, erstwhile WA Crowther representative, cruises with wife and two daughters on their 40 foot Crowther Buccaneer trimaran, Wings of Fantasy. I met him in Dampier in August and mentioned that a Farrier F31 trimaran flipped off Fremantle last winter during the Saturday afternoon race. Pilot error, was his reaction, observing bluntly that a Ferrari is a very safe motor car if the driver is skilled. Indeed, the Farrier is something of a Ferrari among multihulls. Unforgiving is the word that seems most appropriate. Farrier tris have crossed oceans and this could give a false impression. They take skill to sail.
Conventional wisdom has it that for boats, cars, bikes, etc, racing pushes the limits and develops the innovations the rest of us subsequently adopt. In the years since 1981 I don't think we've had any comparable sequence of capsizes. Have the designers or the sailors found some secret? I'd like to know what it is.
The fastest Nulla Nulla moved during my trip was on the flat water north of Point Maud. With a strong breeze on the port quarter, we were holding over 13 knots and hit a maximum of 14.3. To slow down we merely had to slacken the genoa sheet. It felt perfectly safe - though when the crew suggested engaging self steering, I declined.
All these ruminations on speed and capsize don't apply to the clunkers and possibly don't apply to cruising catamarans in general - only to racier cats and to trimarans. Even where there is no question of capsize, if something goes wrong, it happens quicker and harder when you are going fast. For the racing sailor risk is necessary but cruisers have to be conservative. The appropriate cruising attitude would be to regard the multihull's shallow draft and level platform as its major advantages and to consider the speed advantage as a bonus, to be enjoyed with circumspection.
Is speeding dangerous? As far as my little boat is concerned, most of the time speeding isn't dangerous and the rest of the time it probably isn't.
But I'm not sure.