hi all,
I am doing a school project on catamarans and part of the project is to find out what the cat sailors sail and reason or reasons why you purchased that paticular cat, so if you could spare some of your time to tell me what cat you currently sail and why you like that paticular cat then I would be very greatful
Tom

Started out on a Prindle 16 later got Prindle 18, as an sailing intructor sailed a variatie of boats and did all of the Hobie line except the wave and the Hobie 18. That includes the modern EU hobies like the Fox, FX-one and Tiger/Pacifics.

After sailing for several years with a good friend of with also to much time on his hands I found myself without a crew. His girlfriend said , move to the east of the country and in with me or stay in the west. He made his decision and I was without a dedicated crew. Did the "take somebody along" for a few years and then got really tired of teaching some-one to race every few months. This prevented my from ever buying a new F18 although this is defiantely the class to be in for several years now.

After a while I decided I wanted to have it both ways. A boat very suited to singlehanding and still easily convertable to an all out doublehander able to hang with the big boats.

No builder was making such a boat at the time and luckily I found several kindred spirits and we started a new class. Formula 16.

Right now, we are in our 4th year and we are still growing and it looks like this year is going to be big year for us.

Apartly the singlehanded/doublehander setup using only one platform and rig is seen as a very attractive concept.

Sure we could have boosted doublehander performance past the F18's in the doublehanded mode but that would have impacted negatively on the singlehander setup.

Sure we could have boosted singlehander efficiency in a few places so only the A-cat could have a change at beating us upwind but this would impact negatively on the doublehander performance

We decide en group to have good performance both ways and not make one extremely good. We ended up with an equal to F18 doublehander performance and 90's generation A-cat performance in the singlehander setup. Although it must be said that our spinnaker will take back what we lost and more when racing A-cats on the downwind legs.

This was a very acceptable compromise to us and apparently to several others as well.

The other reason I choose F16 was WEIGHT.

I really like F18's and the F18 class but I was really tired of logging some 180 kg (397) pounds around. F16 all up including everything weight of 107 kg = 236 lbs sounded alot better. Especially when you are sailing it singlehanded a significant amount of the time.

Besides nothing is more fun then playing Goliath on a smaller baots amidst the larger F18, F20's and other big shots.

Wouter