Once upon a time in the late-1990s or early 2000s, a catamaran manufacturer brought a 39-foot catamaran to the Powerboat Magazine Performance Trials. The boat had all of four seats what could very charitably could be described as a “cozy” cockpit. Simply sliding into one of those form-fitting was a bit of a yoga-move, but once you were seated you felt as if you had a lot of boat around you, which in fact you did.
That was the upside.
But from this passenger’s perspective, it seemed to be a lot of wasted space. An almost 40-foot-long, 12-something-foot-wide boat with four seats stuffed into tiny hole in the deck simply didn’t compute. Big catamaran owners, I reckoned, must not have big families or many friends.
I was wrong, of course, as they often have plenty of both, which made the relationship between catamaran size and passenger capacity even more off, especially if you added sale-price cost ownership into the equation. That made the whole proposition even nuttier.
Of course, six-seat catamarans were far more common back then, regardless of vessel size. That made a lot more sense.
And yet even six seats has turned out to be less than enough.
That point was driven home yesterday when I interviewed new Skater Powerboats 388 catamaran owner Kevin Birrell, who previously had a six-seat 46-footer from the Douglas, Mich., company. Birrell had Skater build him a new 38-footer primarily because he wanted an eight-seater.
For the record, the first eight-seat Skater 388 “Wide-Body” cat was built for Ron Szolack in 2018.
Birrell’s desire for eight seats in his cat is not anomaly. Far from it, in fact.
According to Tony Cutsuries of Skater, MTI’s Randy Scism, Tony Cutsuries of Skater, Tony Chiaramonte of DCB Performance Marine and Justin Wagner of Doug Wright Powerboat/DWR, eight-seat cockpits have become the configuration of choice for new-model for buyers who choose catamarans that 39-feet or longer.
As in all things, there is a trade-off in additional seating capacity. The casualty is reduced “walk-around” space in the cockpit. But to off-set the drawback, builders have expanded interior cockpit widths when possible and have created some clever seating layouts that mitigate what is a relatively minor issue.
Because let’s be honest, how much time do you spend strolling in the cockpit of catamaran?
At least as far large-catamaran cockpits go, eight is the new six when it comes to seats. And that’s not a bad thing.