The symposium held at the Mount Batten Watersports Centre, Plymouth, over the weekend of the 13^th and 14^th of April was a great success, with topics ranging from the fairly technical to the highly entertaining.

Mike Woods gave a very interesting talk about his “Ro-Ro Cat” project, a 35’ boat designed and built especially for sailors in wheelchairs, and Mike Butterfield had the audience chuckling as he described his career in sailing multihulls, including his Round Britain  success in “Dazzler”. The more technical subjects included a very informative talk by Dave Irving on foam sandwich construction, Wiz Deas of Matrix Mouldings talking about composite materials and an explanation by Jim Wilkinson of the theory behind “Revelation II”, his HT 36’ catamaran that is powered by a wind turbine driving a large underwater propeller. (Yes, it really does go dead upwind!)

Darren Newton gave a potted history of Dazcats and spoke about some of his recent design and build projects, (including “Impossible Dream”, the Nic Bailey paraplegic sailing cat under construction at Multimarine), and Dick Ogilvie, with his exciting “Rainbow Racing” video, described his plan to bring catamaran racing to the masses via the TV screen.

Saturday evening saw more than two dozen guests sit down to a very convivial dinner, followed by an evening of multihull chat and tall tales until the bar closed, and even then the stalwarts continued partying on board the boats till almost dawn.

On Sunday a completely different perspective on multihull cruising was revealed by David Waller of Aquacat when he outlined his 10m catamaran motor cruiser build project. Tim Forrester gave everyone food for thought when he raised the topic of man overboard during his talk on RYA sail-training from a multihull perspective. (This is a subject we will look at again during the July Sailing Meeting). Wiz Deas came back to talk about the 28’ Nic Bailey trimaran he is building and Pete Silcock won the admiration of the audience as he described his and Helen’s amazing DIY effort that had resulted in “Pas de Deux” the superbly finished cruising cat that graced the symposium posters and was moored at the pontoon outside.

 Also on the pontoon were Chris Dunn’s Pahi 63 “Big Cat”, Tim Cox and Julia Brock’s newly launched 36’ cruising cat “Revolution”, 10metre Dazcat “Bedazzled”, turbine equipped “Revelation II” and racing trimaran “Paradox”. Many thanks to the owners of these boats for showing everyone over them.

Adrian Honeybill and Annie Edwards manned the door and welcomed guests, Scott Brown ran the all important computer presentation equipment and Steve Turner introduced the speakers.

themultihull.com

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