No disrespect, but I think you are, unless you are designing for a very narrow wind range. It's a fact of life that if you want to be powered up in light air, you'll be struggling in high wind, and vice versa...
Obviously, I am not explaining this well.
There have been past threads on this forum, sometimes hotly debated, about how fast a beach cat can go. Some have said that the top potential speed is slightly under 25 mph (or maybe it was knots, I can't remember). There have been anecdotal reports about going as fast as 30 mph. People have been trying for a long time to get gps readings that confirm speeds into the mid and high 20's, but most are just brief spurts, like when surfing on a wave.
Some have said that the limiting factor is that most catamarans have displacement (rather than planing) hulls.
So the question is, what is the upper limit of the potential hull speed?
In almost all cases of beach cats going very fast, the thing that ultimately stops them is the bows digging in and causing a pitchpole.
Therefore, based on speeds with outboard engines, it seems obvious to me that, even under sail alone, if you can get enough weight at the back of the boat, keeping the bows up out of the water, you would be able to achieve much higher speeds than have so far been recorded.
Like, when it is blowing about 25-30 knots, strap some 100-pound bags of sand on the back of the boat, rake the mast back, put up a spinnaker (to lift the bows) and see how much faster you can go.
Also, I wonder how much faster it could go if you leave the mast off and use a kitesail. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />
