The Catamaran With Two Masts That Nobody Could Name

The Catamaran Nobody Could Name in Jacksonville

A sailor spotted something genuinely strange in Jacksonville recently: a catamaran unlike anything in the usual anchorage lineup. The internet ID'd it as an Atlantic 47 MastFoil — a Chris White design built in Valdivia, Chile, that most cruisers have never seen in the flesh.

The sail plan is the whole point. The A47 can be rigged with either the patented MastFoil rig or a traditional sloop rig. On the MastFoil version, twin jibs plus the foils — with an optional screecher — mean the crew can reef or go to full sail downwind in any situation without the chaos of wrestling a single large main. The forward cockpit, an idea Gunboat took from Chris White's designs, keeps the helm accessible when conditions deteriorate. There's also an interior helm for when the weather turns genuinely ugly or the latitude drops.

At 47 feet with a 24' 2" beam and only 3' 6" of draft, the A47 has cruised the Caribbean, US East Coast, Bahamas, and the Pacific extensively. For sailors used to seeing the same parade of production cats in every anchorage, this thing is a reminder that the design space is wider than the charter fleet suggests.

Gobble's Take: Next time you're squinting at something unfamiliar across the anchorage, it might just be the most interesting boat in the harbor.

Sources: Reddit r/sailing · Chris White Designs

Stop Asking What Your Cruising Boat Should Weigh

Someone asked the liveaboard community for a minimum displacement figure for a 10-meter sailboat, expecting a tidy number. What they got instead was a collective correction: displacement alone tells you almost nothing useful about a boat's ocean-going character.

Experienced sailors pushed back quickly. A light 38-footer built for racing and a heavy 27-footer designed for ocean crossings don't belong in the same conversation — length and displacement are downstream of hull shape, intended destinations, crew size, and budget. One commenter pointed to the Contest 31 as a practical example: a sturdy, heavy boat that reportedly shrugged off four-to-six-foot waves at four-second intervals on Lake Michigan without complaint, despite its modest size.

The real trap for aspiring Caribbean cruisers is fixating on a single spec sheet number while ignoring the harder questions about how a hull actually behaves in a seaway. A boat built for the ICW is a different animal from one built for a Windward Islands passage, regardless of what the displacement figure says.

Gobble's Take: The ocean doesn't care what your boat weighs — it cares whether your hull was designed to handle what you're asking it to do.

Source: Reddit r/liveaboard

12 Knots, 30-Knot Winds, and 2,050 Miles Left: Inside a Pacific Crossing on a 35-Footer

The crew of SV Trouble are six days into their crossing from Cabo to the Marquesas, dead downwind, wing-on-wing, on a 35-foot boat — and the ocean is not being gentle. True winds hit 30 knots; apparent wind sits around 22. The waves are forecast at seven feet on seven-and-a-half-second intervals, though the crew suspects that's understated. SV Trouble surfed down a wave at just over 12 knots through the water — fast enough that the crew added another reef in the main to dial things back to manageable.

At the time of posting, they were 623 nautical miles in with roughly 2,050 to go. One commenter who made a similar crossing on a heavy 47-footer noted they went wing-on-wing for about 45 minutes before deciding a deep reach and an extra day at sea was worth more than the stress of holding that angle. Another recalled the 2009-to-2014 era of Pacific cruising, when getting a 48-hour surface chart via Pactor modem in under an hour felt like a miracle — a useful reminder of how much has changed, and how little the ocean itself has.

The most honest sentence in the whole thread came from someone who'd just returned from four months in the Sea of Cortez: "I feel like I'd discovered the only way to live."

Gobble's Take: Twelve knots on a 35-footer sounds thrilling until you remember you have to sustain that decision-making for three more weeks.

Source: Reddit r/sailing

Quick Hits

• Endeavor, Morgan, or Gulfstar — which vintage cruiser holds up? Liveaboard sailors are debating the real-world trade-offs between three classic American cruising boats: the Morgan Out Island 41's comfortable but slow reputation, the Gulfstar's inconsistent build quality and known underpowering in big seas, and the Endeavor's bilge-mounted tanks that often need replacing — a job that means pulling the entire sole. Reddit r/liveaboard

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