Is this the future of big boat sailing? Why the hell not? It is the Wylie-designed Wildcat, a 43' cat boat. Simple, light (really light, not "well, we wish it was a bit lighter") and the numbers look great: LWL: 40, LOA: 43.5, Beam: 10.0, draft 10.0(!) Disp: 7500 lbs., 4000 lbs. of ballast (500 blade, 3500 bulb), and lifting keel. Sure, most of you look at the cat boat as some sort of a freak, and perhaps rightly so. Really, they are different; certainly in how they look and often that can be enough to scare most of us away.

I had the chance to sail a Wlyiecat 30 a while back and truthfully we were chuckling under our breath as we were walking down the dock and what an odd duck the thing looked. But as we sailed it, it didn't seem quite so odd. Sure, we in no way had it figured out, and it did seem to sail different particularly upwind, but clearly there was something to it.

So now you take a thoroughly modern hull and foils, the latest in carbon rig technology, a philosophy dripping in light and fast as the mantra, and you might just have something not only very cool and very fast, but very breakthrough.

We get the feeling that the sport is looking for and waiting for something new, something different and most importantly, something better. It is unlikely that these things will be accomplished with existing thinking. You're going to have to go outside of the box. Might this be it?

November 16, 2001