28/04/2021
The Turkish translation of the second half of our article about the ocean cruising catamaran appeared in the February 2010 edition of Naviga magazine.
Part 2 – OCEAN CRUISING CATAMARANS
In the first part of this article, we looked at important aspects of the construction, design and rig of an ocean-going catamaran and some of the key factors that contribute to its safety at sea and at anchor. In this article, we will add our thoughts about how we used our catamaran as a boat and a home, as well as some of the equipment we carried on our circumnavigation.
Catamarans have so much more space than monohulls of similar length that they seem more like floating apartments than boats. Generally, the sleeping cabins, showers and heads are located in the hulls and the salon and galley are on the bridgedeck, just a step away from the outdoor entertaining area in the cockpit. There are many different possible configurations, so we would just like to offer some thoughts from our own personal experience.
Sleeping cabins should be comfortable at sea as well as at anchor, with good ventilation as well as good sound insulation. There is less bounce in the hulls than on the bridgedeck when on passage so cabins in the hulls make a lot of sense. Because catamarans don’t heel, there is no need for pilot berths or lee cloths, but it does help to have a berth or berths in various locations and different orientations, offering different possibilities depending on the conditions. The bunk in our cabin was oriented fore and aft which worked well and was easy for getting in and out without disturbing one another.
On long ocean passages, we followed a four hour on/four hour off watch system with one of us monitoring the boat while the other slept or rested. Out in the middle of the ocean in steady conditions, there isn’t much work to be done sailing the boat, so it is good to have a comfortable place for the on watch crew to be able to stretch out, both in the cockpit as well as on the bridgedeck. In our opinion, oval settees have no place on an ocean-going boat. They may look nicer and they may be good for entertaining, but at sea, you don’t always want to sit up straight. There are times when you would just like to lie down comfortably. After all, you don’t have oval sofas in your house. One thing we insisted on when our boat was being built was a square/cornered settee arrangement. We even had one bench built extra wide so that the two of us could lie down side by side to watch TV or listen to music or the radio. It was possible to brace ourselves in this corner when conditions got a bit rough and still be able to see all the navigation instruments, wind and depth indicators, radar, chart, etc.
Our full-size chart table was in the bridgedeck salon, just inside the door to the cockpit, and was the location of all of our key electronics, radios, as well as repeaters of the equipment at the helm position (wind, depth, speed, etc.). Radar and electronic chart plotter (laptop) were visible from the cockpit but safe from the weather and salt spray. The electric switch panel and battery monitor/regulator were at easy reach. Inmarsat-C, laptop, printer, TV, DVD player, stereo, even intruder alarms, were all clustered at this location which was like the interior command center of the boat. At anchor, even while watching TV or a DVD, we could keep one eye on the depth or wind speed/direction. At the helm were the autopilot controls, speed log, masthead wind indicator, deck level wind indicator, forward-looking echo sounder and a separate depth instrument with an aft mounted transducer (for those times when backing into a berth). We had a backup for all our key electronics, just in case one failed while at sea or in some remote corner of the world.
Although most of the steering is done by the autopilot when on long passages, there are times when the helm cannot be left unattended. When you have to spend hours at the wheel, you want that position to be as protected and comfortable as possible. Some catamarans, especially those designed for the charter market, have positioned the helm station or stations outside the cockpit, either one on each stern or in a working cockpit above the main entertaining cockpit. While these may work well on a charter boat with a paid skipper who is away from the social areas, they are not suitable for long-distance, short-handed, ocean-going cruising. On cold, wet, windy nights, we would not have liked steering from a position at the sterns, exposed to the conditions, far from the chart table, outside the easy reach of the galley, too close to the edge of the deck. Much safer was our helm position at the forward end of the cockpit, shielded by a bimini overhead and a window in front, close to all sheet and halyard controls.
Even if you head out to sea to get away from it all, communications are very important when you are in the middle of nowhere. VHF and SSB are essential for staying in touch with other cruisers and authorities ashore as well as other ships. There are SSB nets in most parts of the world where cruisers gather at specified times and frequencies to exchange weather and other important information as well as keep in touch with friends and gossip. Email has become another major way to share information with friends at sea as well as keeping in touch with those back home and more and more, it is becoming the only way to communicate with authorities on land. For example, Australia requires arriving boats to inform them via email 48 hours in advance of their arrival and keep in mind that if you are arriving from Vanuatu or Fiji, you would be at sea for about a week. Whereas in the past, most weather information was disseminated via voice broadcast on SSB radio or via weather fax over the radio, more and more cruisers are getting better and more timely weather information via email or direct from the internet. So, some way to communicate via email has become a part of the cruising lifestyle. There are many ways to do this and technology is constantly changing, so we won’t offer advice on this subject. Our needs were met by having VHF and SSB radios as well as Inmarsat-C (a text-only, always on, satellite-based communication system that has its own GPS and an excellent, international alarm system if you are in trouble anywhere around the world) and Iridium satellite telephone, plus a cell phone for coastal cruising.
The galley is a very important part of any boat, even more so on an ocean-cruising vessel visiting remote corners of the world, because most of your meals will be cooked aboard – there may not be any possibility to eat ashore in many of the secluded places you visit. A catamaran has plenty of space to stow food stocks – we always began each season with enough dry or packaged stores to last at least six months and a comprehensive list of where everything was located so that we could keep track of our provisions. Many catamarans have the galley situated on the bridgedeck, which is convenient to the salon dining area and cockpit. We were much happier having our galley down in the hull where the motion was steadier when on passage and still was open to the salon seating.
Refrigeration adds much to the joys of life at sea, making it possible to carry stores of perishable foods and have cold drinks and freeze all that fresh fish you’ll catch. We recommend 12-volt electric refrigeration instead of engine-driven, for its ease of use and because it seems to make more sense to stow engine-generated power in the batteries, where it can be used by other equipment, than in the holding plate of the freezer. In our experience, the most reliable, efficient boat refrigeration systems are from Frigoboat, based on a Danfoss compressor and easy to install, precharged components that can be replaced by the owner without the need of a mechanic. We can also recommend a keel-cooled system, which has the advantage of using seawater to cool the condenser but doesn’t need a separate water pump – the refrigerant pipe is simply led outside the hull and back in again. With a second, air-cooled condenser installed inside the boat, this system works well when the boat is in the water as well as dried out on a beach or hauled out in a boatyard.
Water is an important consideration when cruising to areas where there is either a shortage of water on shore or no way to easily access it. Many of the islands we visited were dependent on rainwater or brackish water from shallow wells and had only a limited supply. Although most of our cruising was done in the tropical latitudes, the best season for sailing was always the dry season, so occasional rain showers could not be relied upon to fill the water tanks. One of the best pieces of equipment we had installed on our boat was our reverse osmosis water-maker, something we consider essential for long-term, liveaboard ocean cruising. Because this piece of equipment is so important and used so frequently, the location of the installation is also important. We have seen systems located in the engine room, accessed from the deck or sterns of the boat and operated in a cramped, hot, noisy place. We made sure our water-maker was installed so that it was accessible from inside the boat (it is located in its own cabin forward of the engine, under our bed) and easy to operate, even on passage in rough conditions. We could divert the product water to either of the main water storage tanks, one in each keel, or to a separate 30-liter stainless steel tank for drinking water. All product water going into this tank also went through a carbon filter and was treated by UV light, resulting in pure, sweet-tasting water. We extended the life of the UV light and carbon filter by using them only to treat our drinking water, not the usage water stowed in our main tanks. To extend the life of the membranes, we always flushed the system with product water after use, so it is important to have the system installed in a way that this is possible.
It is also important to be able to access and clean the inside of your water storage tanks. Even if you have a water-maker, when you are in a marina with a convenient hose or in a place with a lot of rain, the tanks will be filled with water not of your own making and therefore of questionable quality. Filtering this water before filling and treating the tanks with chlorine is not enough, they still need occasional cleaning. On many boats this is just not possible and the owners have to trust the filters they may install on their galley water taps. Luckily, our tanks had three watertight access hatches each so that we could always control their condition and swab out each of the baffled areas when necessary. With their location in the keels and the watertight access hatches, our water tanks also served as crash chambers in case we were to hit something as well as providing some low down ballast. We were able to monitor the level in our water tanks as well as in our fuel tanks with a simple device called the Tank Tender.
Most catamarans have two engines, one in each hull. Not only does this ensure easy maneuverability in tight marinas it means that there is always one good engine in case something happens to the other or to one of the propellers. We saw no need to carry a third motor in the form of a generator to charge batteries or run electrical equipment. Solar panels, however, are an absolute must, providing maintenance-free, silent, daytime charging and catamarans have plenty of space to put them. At anchor, our solar panels met all of our electrical needs, even for weeks. We only used our wind generator on passage when the sails blocked the sun from shining on the panels.
To store electricity, we highly recommend gel cell batteries. Unlike lead acid batteries, they are very easy to maintain and hold their charge even when turned off for months. Our first house bank lasted 12 years and we were so pleased with them that we replaced them with the exact same batteries (3 x 220 amp hour Exide). We can also recommend the Link 2000R battery monitor and regulator (used with a Heart – now Xantrex - 220 volt inverter charger) to keep tabs on the battery state and charge process. We also had a Prosine 1800 watt inverter for 110 volt appliances.
A cruising catamaran spends much of its time at anchor and so the dinghy will be used extensively to reach shore or get to beautiful snorkeling spots by the reef. For durability, we would strongly recommend the Avon RIB – which has a hard bottom and a much better quality hypalon fabric. Nothing survives the tropical sun like hypalon as we have seen several cruiser friends suffer with seams parting in their PVC dinghies. Ideally, the dinghy should be lifted out of the water when not in use to prevent bottom fouling and to deter theft. Davits are the easiest way to do this and ideally suited to the high, wide stern platform of a catamaran. Arches on the sterns of catamarans are very common and there is much to recommend them, although some are very big and look ugly. They are useful for mounting all sorts of antenna and other equipment, even solar panels.
We hope that what we have written is useful for you. The world is very big and very beautiful, especially the Pacific. Even if you are not able to immediately go out cruising, just the dream of doing so is very nice. After all, you must first have the dream before you can realize it. Before we began cruising, we dreamed for 11.5 years, researching, planning, trying various types of catamarans while bareboat chartering, visiting 5 different catamaran builders. In the end, we had a dream of a 14 year circumnavigation – and we hope you will, too.
