Catamarans have recently been used for both leisure and sport sailing, although they have been used for millennia in Oceans. Seafaring Polynesians used catamarans to settle the world's most far-flung islands.
The English adventurer and pirate William Dampier, traveling around the world in the 1690s in search of business opportunities, once found himself on the southeastern coast of India, in Tamil Nadu on the Bay of Bengal. He was the first to write in English about a kind of vessel he observed there. It was little more than a raft made of logs. These are but one log, or two, sometimes of a sort of light wood, so small, that they carry but one man, whose legs and breech are always in the water.
The name came from the Tamil language of India. However, the name as we know it came from a different part of the world, the South Pacific. English visitors applied the Tamil name catamaran to the swift, stable sail and paddle boats made out of two widely separated logs and used by Polynesian natives to get from one island to another.
The Idea was too good an idea to leave to the Polynesians. In the 1870s an American, Nathanael Herreshoff, began to build catamarans to his own design. The speed and stability of these new vessels soon made them popular pleasure craft in America.
In the twentieth century, the catamaran inspired an even more popular sailboat. A Southern California maker of surfboards, Hobie Alter, came up with the idea for "a small catamaran that you could easily take out into the water and sail and take back in." In 1967 he produced the first 250-pound Hobie Cat 14, and two years later the larger and even more successful Hobie 16. That boat remains in production, with more than 100,000 made in the past three decades.
Presently, the catamaran market is the fastest growing segment of the entire boating industry.
Powered catamarans
A recent development in design has been the introduction of the power catamaran. The 'power' version incorporates the best features of a motor yacht and combines it with the traditional sailing characteristics of a multihull. Usually, the power catamaran is devoid of any sailing apparatus as demonstrated by one of the top-selling models in the United States, the Lagoon Power 43. This boat has now been introduced to a number of charter fleets in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean and is becoming an increasingly common sight.
Mega catamarans
One of the biggest developments over the last decade in the yachting arena has been the rise of the super catamaran - a multihull over 60 feet in length which come in semi-custom and custom designs.
Various international boat manufacturers are leading the way in this area including Yapluka, Sunreef, Lagoon and Privilege. A catamaran over 145 feet in length is reportedly under construction on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
The emergence of the "super or mega" is a relatively new event which is akin to the rise of the mega or super yacht which was used to describe the huge growth in luxury, large motor yachts in the French Riviera and Floridian Coast.
One of the reasons for increased "super or mega" construction was The Race, a circumnavigation challenge which departed from Barcelona, Spain, on New Year's Eve, 2000. As a result of the prize money and prestige associated with this event, four new catamarans (and two highly modified ones) over 100' in length were built to compete. The largest, PlayStation, owned by Steve Fossett, was 125' long and had a mast which was 147' above the water. Virtually, all of the new mega catamarans were built of pre-preg carbon fiber for strength and the lowest possible weight.
It takes up to one year or more to complete construction of one of these "super or mega catamarans" which represents state-of-the-art design breakthroughs in this sector.