The world of multihulls has long been an esoteric one and the fact that it is now a multi million pound industry doesn’t mean that certain oddities and prejudices do not remain. One of the most troubling for many manufacturers has been the sharp divide between those catamarans with daggerboards – which are generally labelled performance cruisers and those without – which are generally sneered at by those who have daggerboards. This is because many years ago, certain manufacturers thought nothing of building comfortable cruising catamarans that went sideways as fast as they went forward. The reason manufacturers eschewed daggerboards is because they were expensive to fit and took up a bit of interior volume. The result was a certain snobbery that persists to this day.
One manufacturer which has endeavoured more than most to break down this perception is Nautitech who took it upon itself to build catamarans without daggerboards but with a pleasing level of performance and weatherliness thanks
