A knackered old cruising catamaran - just launched after languishing for five years in a boat yard near Plymouth.
Pod is a 9 metre long catamaran, made of foam sandwiched with reinforced glass fibre. It was designed by Richard Woods, as a fast cruiser/racer.
When I bought it to convert it into a commercial fishing boat, it had been deteriorating in a boatyard for five years. It was structurally sound, but the leaking windows allowed water into the hulls so the whole boat was damp and smelly, with some rotten fabrics etc. The cockpit and lockers were made of plywood which had become sodden and soft in many places. The daggerboards and rudders had also allowed water through their fibreglass skins into the timber interior. There's more, but you get the picture. It was perfect for my purposes!
This was a boat that would be expensive and time-consuming to rebuild as a cruiser, which is all it was intended for. So it was relatively cheap.
The smelly fabric that lined the boat could be simply removed and not replaced. A fishing boat doesn't need lah-de-dah interiors.
The cockpit needed replacing. That was good. Whatever catamaran I bought, I'd have to replace the cockpit so that I could build in a hold for the fish and ice. So with this boat, I wasn't paying for a good cockpit which I'd then have to trash.
But why a catamaran? Why not a traditional wooden boat? Wouldn't that be more suitable, and more ecologically sound? Prettier?
Well, if I was going to build a new boat, timber would be the more ecological way to go. But what could be more ecological than intercepting a boat that is headed for land-fill? My cat is 95% recycled plastic and glass!
My previous boat was a traditional boat:
But like all monohulls it rolled at sea. Rolling from side to side is tiring, it makes cooking and doing any kind of work difficult, in light winds it tends to swing the rigging about and in strong winds, it can be downright dangerous. Also, notice the size of the cockpit - about 1.5 metres square, between the stern rail and the wooden coachroof. This boat was the same length as the catamaran.
A catamaran, having no ballast and having hulls wide apart, doesn't roll. It provides a stable working platform. And the cockpit is 2.3 metres long and 3.5 metres wide. The catamaran also sails much faster, much closer to the wind, provides much more shelter for the crew and has far more accommodation. And having no ballast, being built from foam and having four full watertight bulkheads, is unsinkable.
One often quoted disadvantage of a catamaran is that it is less capable at carrying loads. But my cat is a stripped down cruiser - a cruiser designed to carry enough provisions for a couple of people (or more) across an ocean. Another catamaran of the same design that I know of has sailed from South Africa to New Zealand via the Caribbean. I discussed loading with the designer, as we examined the boat before I bought it. He approved my plan for carrying up to a ton (1000 kgs) of fish/ice. If I ever catch that many fish in one trip, I'll be very happy to return to port!
If you'd like to find out more about the catamaran, details are here.
To read about the legal situation on fishing under sail, details are here.