I've heard the rumors about the Hobie A-cat but have found the concept puzzling--Hobie creating and marketing an A-cat doesn't seem to fit with their overall market presence and approach, which relies heavily on branding, selling a lifestyle, and maintaining a consistent, nearly unchanging product (sort of like how a McDonald's Big Mac being the same here as in Hong Kong). Unlike any other cat manufacturers, Hobie still has a large base of recreational sailors. They don't buy A-cats and most have never even heard of the class.

Interestingly, A-cats are more of a yacht club based phenomenon in the US, while the Hobie scene is Hobie-only-fleet based.

In a way, I'm sure Hobie would rather focus on the Tiger class rather than the F18 class; they're only being forced to do so.

The only way I can understand why Hobie would bother with delveloping an A-cat is that perhaps it's like Ford spending a bundle on developing a hand-built supercar. They don't expect to sell many; the product won't be the best value (hand-built cottage projects are not efficient); but it's a sort of "flag ship" for the company.

Dunno, you are talking about the company that built the TriFoiler, aren't you?
A-Cat makes a lot more sense.

Well were is the Tri-foiler now ? Were is the tri-foiler class ?

The tri-foiler was designed by somebody else and hobie bought the building rights only to discontinue the production (if you can call it that) a few years later.

I think Eric is refering to that. Sure Hobie can plan to come out with a new and totally different class/design but will such a design survive the rigorous HCA One-design mentality. Up to now no boat really has. Even the Tiger F18 has been doing a strenious balancing act between Tiger OD and Tiger F18 where both version really don't compare well anymore.

How will the hobie A-cat fare ? I really don't see a Hobie OD A-cat class coming of the ground. The boats are just too expensive for that while the spinnaker boats aren't as easily beaten by the A-cats as the were in the past. If you slot out 18.000 or more bucks you want to get some good racing in return otherwise there are far cheaper alternatives with about the same speed potential. (just an example Blade F16 for 12.800 US$)

I'm giving Hobie the benefit of the doubt but I really would like to see how Hobie designs and builds there A-cat. This A-cat class is not for an average design team. Their boat will get totally killed by the other A's. This is an all-out no second chances cat class. Take a look at what happened to the Bim javelins and AHPC mark 5 A-cats. Both yards quickly understood what was going on and Bim introduced the Bim XJ and AHPC started building the Flyer; replacing both the javelin and mark 5's. I really don't forsee the Hobie Corp put that much continuity into their A-cat. They will get a design team to design their A-cat and put that design in to production and that is it. No further fine-tuning or modification in the years after that.

A-cats are also rather expensive boats to build. Their traget group are the well of sailors and not the fun-group sailors that is linked to most of the Hobie classes.

In general the A-cat is a totally different ball game then what Hobie is used too. I'm not to sure that they will be able to make the transition.

Looking at the Tri-foiler experiment I see no reason to start believing otherwise.

But this is just my personal opinion.

Wouter