Forward Cockpits Are All Wet

We can’t count the number of owners and skippers of catamarans with forward cockpits who have told us they never get wet in those cockpits, even when sailing to weather. It might have something to do with the fact that our catamaran Profligate doesn’t have a forward cockpit, but we’ve always been a little skeptical.

Our skepticism ratcheted up after seeing the Seahorse magazine video made of our friend Lloyd Thornberg’s St. Barth-based Gunboat 66 Phaedo, which has just undergone an 18-month refit in Newport Beach following her dismasting in the 2013 Transpac. You’ll remember that Phaedo covered an astonishing 425 miles in 24 hours in the early stages of that race to Hawaii, almost certainly giving her the record for the fastest legitimate cruising catamaran, and certainly the record for fastest cruising catamaran with a built-in pizza oven. Yet at 24 seconds into the Seahorse video, it almost looks as though Lloyd and captain/project manager Paul Hand, another friend and great guy, are catching a little spray. And even more spray a few seconds later. And conditions don’t look that rough.

If Lloyd and Paul look a little familiar, it’s because they, along with Paul’s wife Sandra, are featured in a photo spread on pages 70-71 of the November Latitude 38. We’d visited them aboard Phaedo in October and gotten a tour of the significantly modified cat. We didn’t write about the refit because Lloyd asked us to respect the fact he’d given first rights to Seahorse and Multihull World. But we’ll let a little factoid slip out — the load on the new headstay at rest is 12,000 pounds!

Phaedo is rocket fast and a nautical work of art, but we wonder at Lloyd’s desire for even more speed. We have a rule aboard Profligate — keep it under 15 knots at night, and nothing over 20 knots during the day. Naturally we broke that rule in the Baja Ha-Ha by hitting 20 knots after dark, but a short time later dropped our chute, as did Jim Milski aboard the Schionning 49 Sea Level, who had hit 21.7 knots. Jim said he was relieved that he could drop his chute without seeming to chicken out. Lloyd and Paul probably would have continued on in the mid- to high 20s. But then Lloyd is at least half Jim’s and our age.

What would be really fun is if Lloyd kept Phaedo on the West Coast until the start of the 2015 Transpac, because the new owner of what had been the Gunboat 62 Cucu Cucu Belle has undertaken a six-month refit at Driscoll’s Boat Yard in San Diego with an eye to Transpac honors. Hull #2, she’s the lightest of the big Gunboats. Hand knows her well, for he was her skipper in the Caribbean back in 2004 when she was Safari — and when she did a little high-speed sailing side-by-side with Profligate on a reach to St. Barth. Yeah, it’s a small sailing world. And a good one, too.