Stroll around any big marina. There tucked in a corner you will inevitably find an old Stiletto cat with its jet fighter canopies and knifelike hulls. These old boats are still being raced and enjoyed. The Stiletto represents Peter Wormwood s introduction into cruising cats. Thirty years later these hulls are still near state of the art.
Weight is the enemy in any boat design, but even more so with cats.
If cats get heavy they gain wetted surface and can become light-air dogs. Put this displacement into two hulls and you get 220 square feet of wetted surface. This is an 18-percent increase. In light air it s almost entirely a wetted-surface battle. You can balance this a bit with the knowledge that in Peter s design the boards are fully retractable, whereas in our hypothetical monohull, the keel would almost certainly be fixed.