Hay I found the perfect multihull sailboat. It's a 16' trimaran that weighs only 115 lbs. You can set it up in 5 or less minutes. It’s fast and sails well in light winds. Also if you have no wind you can use its human powered propulsion system. It’s also car-top-able and dismantles in an easy to manage package. It’s currently the #1 selling sailing product in the US and Canada, and will soon be introduced internationally. It was voted the #1 recreational product for 2007 by National Geographic. Once you see it at www.hobiecat.com and whether you like it or not this is what the general sailing public wants. The future of sailing is here it’s just not obvious to those stuck in the old world of carbon fiber cats (heck the kevlar/carbon cats are not even the future of sailing). I constantly hear sailors, young and old say they are tired of all the set up time, etc. with most cats, particularly racing cats (& monohull sport boats, etc.), they just want to go sailing and have fun, and they want to spend less than $10,000. Most want to spend around $3-5000 new. They want to race but not with hard core racers.

Also regarding why Hobie will not produce a HT boat or something else, well when it ain’t broke why fix it (the H16 class is strong ((next H16 world’s; masters registration is full; will be a large turnout again like all the H16 world’s of the past – 170 competitors signed up and that number will reach well over 200)), the Tiger is doing great, and the Wave and their other roto-molded boats are consistently strong sellers). Hobie co. is very happy and very successful company, they certainly do not need to build a new light weight cat for a very small portion of the market that really is not a profitable market, and producing a new HT boat would only fragment the strong H16 & Tiger classes.

Fair winds, <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />