Wharram Cat Breaks Up

Odd story here. “A crew of three men, a woman and a dog were rescued by the US Coast Guard on Christmas Eve when their 53ft Wharram catamaran Nootka Dancer reportedly broke in half off Jacksonville, Florida. As reported by Yachting World”
http://www.noonsite.com/Countries/USA/usa-three-crew-and-dog-rescued-by-us-coast-guard-after-53ft-catamaran-2018broke-in-half2019-off-the-coast-of-florida

It says it had an Aerorig.  That must mean on in the middle.  I don’t see how a Wharram would have enough bury to support an Aero.  And an all carbon mast on a Wharram?  Why?

I can never believe anyone would buy Wharram plans, but he has sold more plans than all of us combined.

Odd.

5 thoughts on “Wharram Cat Breaks Up”

  1. Like you have said before, more stuff done wrong, continue to give multi’s a bad name.
    Why so called intelligent people think they can do their own engineering is beyond me. It is obvious that without major beam structure redesign the Wharram beams could not support an Aerorig, good money spent in the wrong places.
    The backyard/home builder go to Wharram because the so called professional designers are no longer approachable unless you pay them huge design fees, not like the old days.
    The “professional designers” forget that multihull development is where it is today because of the reasonable/approachable designers of days past and backyard builders, which many of them were at one time.
    Thank goodness we still have designer/sailors like Kurt Hughes who is not only reasonable, but very approachable and helpfull.

  2. To be fair to James Wharram from what I’ve heard the boat as it stood was nothing like what was drawn by him to start with.

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