March 9, 2014.

While I'm on the subject of catamarans. The longstanding dig about cats is their lack of upwind sailing performance. Give them a broad reach or a run and they'll east up the miles like nobodies business. They get most of their power from a huge mainsail and their rig is usually complimented by a fractional headsail. The cat below is what you might expect to see when looking at a cruising cat. Comfortable at anchor and fast with a favorable breeze.

Traditional cruising cat

Broadblue has come up with an “innovation” on their 39 footer. On most cats the mast is located at the front of the salon (see above). The longer boom allows for a huge mainsail to help drive the thing upwind. If you look at the picture you'll see that this Broadblues mast is all the way aft of the salon. This makes the mainsail tiny while allowing for a full sized headsail rather than a fractional rig.

The boom is kicked off to port so it looks worse than it is although it is really small.

This kinda condemns the boat to being a downwind boat. So it seems that the design team took a weakness and made it worse. It doesn't go to wind that well so lets just remove any chance that it had.....I don't get it.