CATANA 59 SLIDESHOW

Some of you were lucky to visit the Catana 59 at the Cannes Boat Show, for the others here are a few pictures of this new luxury catamaran.

FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE LA PLAISANCE DE CANNES - CANNES INTERNATIONAL YACHTING FESTIVAL - LUXURY CATAMARANS EXHIBITORS

This is a list of the yards present at the Cannes show involved with luxury multihulls. 

• Alu Marine
• Catana
• CNB
• Curvelle
• Flash Catamarans
• Fountaine Pajot
• Lagoon
• Le Breton Yachts
• Mattia
• Outremer Yachting
• Privilege Marine
• Sunreef Yachts
• Windpearl Yachts

 If I am missing one, let me know.

TAINO 24 DESIGNED BY GILLES VATON FOR SALE

The Taino 24 was designed by Gilles Vaton and built by the CATANA group. It was created both for private and luxury charter use. It offers a huge deck salon of nearly 40 m². It is now for sale at a price of  2 200 000 Euros.

LAUNCHING OF A CATANA 65

CATANA'S NEW WEBSITE IS ONLINE

CATANA has recently launched a new website at www.catana.com

The catamaran builder catana has launched a new website. On the front page you have a direct access to the different models. You can also get connected to a special application where you can discover the 20 points that make Catana catamaran fast to sail including the new curved daggerboards available on the latest models.

NAUTIC 2010 THE LUXURY CATAMARAN BUILDERS AT THE PARIS BOAT SHOW

The Paris boat show will start this week on the 4 th and end on the 12 th of December. Who are the luxury catamaran builders at the show ?


No large catamaran will be exhibited at the show but the following yards will have a booth to welcome you in the Multihull section. - Alliaura Marine, the builder of the Privilege 745 and the Privilege 1000

• Catana, the builder of the Catana 92.

• Catlantech, the builder of the Catlante 600.

• Fountaine Pajot, builder of the Galathea 65.

• Lagoon Catamaran, builder of the lagoon 620 will exhibit its smallest Lagoon the 380 the world best seller and the new Lagoon 450.

• Sunreef Yachts and Sunreef Charter, the luxury catamaran specialist.

Special gift a slideshow of the Galathea by the famous yachting photographe Gilles Martin-Raget.

Charter GALATHEA catamaran with Windward Islands.

M'80 by Christophe BARREAU & Frédéric NEUMAN

This is a new project of a smart, fast and easy to sail 80 footer by Christophe Barrault, the historical designer of the CATANA range, and his partner Frédéric Neuman. Christophe Barreau has designed many catamarans including the CATANA range since the beggining. He is an experienced sailor having sailed extensively on his own designs and is the first one to cross the 80 th parallel on a cruising catamaran. All his designs are easy to sail with a small crew thanks to their self-taking jib and feature retractable daggerboards reducing the draft from 3,5 m to 1,7m.

Jean Yves Carteret from Linea Concept has designed 3 different interior layouts all for six guest in independant suites with a crew of 3.

CATANA NEW WEB SITE AND CATANA 92

The french catamaran builder CATANA has just launched its new website and introduces the largest CATANA yet the CATANA 92.

This is the new version of the CATANA website, which is kind of sad for me since I was responsible many years ago of the older version. This is good it needed to be renewed. It is very light colored and easy to browse. There is a new section called "cruising club" in which you can find a new access for the CATANA owners.In the yacht section you will find a new yacht the CATANA 92 which is the new name for the previous catana custom, always designed by Christophe Barreau, the historic designer.The first one ORION was launched earlier this year and left the shipyard in September. We can finally see some pictures of her and a video of the sea trials, it is very impressive. ORION was built for an experience CATANA owner for a round the world journey. The interior is huge (200 m²) and close wind the CATANA 92 can carry no less than 500 m² of sails. It is to be noticed that the moulds of the CATANA 92 are adjustable in size to built a smaller or a larger CATANA. CATANA is renewing its complete range with new and more modern designs.

ONE YEAR OLD - HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Happy Birthday Luxury Catamaran

I just realized your luxury catamaran blog is one year old.

Champagne..

I started posting on this blog on March 27 th 2007. At the beginning I started to experience with blogs for fun and because I am found of cruising cats. Now, writing a post is real hapiness for me. Plus, I learn a lot about the business.

The luxury catamaran business is really booming with many projects being built and on the drawing boards. I am olding a few info for you for the coming weeks until I am authorized to publish them. New projects to come are really innovative in terms of design and building processes, not just replicas of older cats and that is a sign of well being.

GEMINI the world largest sailing luxury catamaran - 145 '

2008 will be the year GEMINI, the largest sailing luxury cat ever built so far will be launched and I can't wait to see the first pictures.

Great projects such as the NAHEMA 120, the SUNREEF 102, the BLUBAY 95, the BLUBAY 92, , the GUNBOAT 90, the YAPLUKA DD 85, the CATANA 87, the two EXCLUSIVE 76, the third MATRIX 76 will be either launched and sailing or well advenced by the end of the year.

Thanks to those of you who take time to leave some comments.

Thanks to those who have suscribed to the blog through FeedBlitz (right end column) many of you are in the industry. I will send you my short history of catamarans by the end of the week before publishing it on the blog next month.

Luxury Catamaran gets on average (since 1 January 2008) and according to the beta version of statcounter 164 page loads, 82 unique visitors and 14 returning visitors a day from all around the world which is quite good for such a niche subject.

For 2008 I would like to move to a three column template. I have tried experiments with wordpress but it takes me to much time to switch. If any one of you knows a free 3 column blogger templates I can customize through blogger, please let me know.

More to come on luxury catamaran, stay tuned.

ORION - CATANA 87

ORION, CATANA 87'

ORION, CATANA's largest yacht produced so far, just passed through the shipyards doors (they had to enlarge for the occasion) on the 28 th of February in Canet en Roussillon (south of France). It is very hard to give you any precise information about this unit since very little came out of the shipyard during the building process and the only interior renderings available are in this PDF file . CATANA has done very little communication on its custom range, maybe ORION's owner ask so or they don't intend to insist on this range of production which is quite a different approach to boat building than standard or semi-custom, or maybe that is just their marketing strategy.

ORION was built for a South African owner, who already circled the world on a 58 ' CATANA, and features 200 sqm of living space. Built in composite to CATANA's high standards of quality and with a Christophe Barreau Design, she should be a great blue water catamaran with high performance. The official launching should take place in May. I hope we will get more information once she is launched.

CATANA shipyard has been founded in 1984 after a few ups and downs, it seems that it is now back on the right tracks. This shipyard has a great potential with really goods basics. You will find the information about the concept of CATANA in this section of their website which I developped and wrote while I was working there and part of the logbook I wrote while crossing a CATANA 471 during the Transat des Passionés 1998.

If you guys at CATANA have more information I can post on my blog just let me know.

DUSSELDORF BOOT REVIEW - A GREAT SHOW

Nahema's stand at the boote dusseldorf 2008

I just came back from the Dusseldorf Boote yesterday where I spent 11 days with NAHEMA's team and had a great time. This was the best boat show I attended in the last 12 years.

Special thanks to Nicolas Daher, NAHEMA's the executive director for trusting me, Malouréne Corbeille, sales assitant for her energy and patience, and Sonja-Dana Roelen, our clever hostess for laughting at my fith degree French jokes.

From left to right Nicolas Daher, Malouréne Corbeille, Sonja-Dana Roelen, and your blogmaster Sébastien Barthez

NAHEMA was the only one mega-catamaran builder and displayed two models the NAHEMA 120 and PHENOMEN by Nahema an amazing 150 footer. The largest catamarans exhibited at the boat show was the CATANA 50.

Boat shows are the occasions to meet very interesting people you exchanged only mails with. Amongst many others I was very happy to meet with :

- Ewa Stachurska, SUNREEF's PR manager. She is a very very energetic, efficient young lady. We talked for a few minutes about the show and how we worked. It is always interesting to exchange point of view with a profesionnal doing the same job. I hope next time we will have more time. Ewa was in Dusseldorf to see if it was worth it for SUNREEF to be there next year. Since she came at the beginning I had a hard time answering her questions but now I can. Yes Ewa it is worth it and for many reasons. First, you have more than 280 000 visitors coming for all around Europe and even farther. So in terms of brand image being there is a great thing, you get your brand noticed. Second, I noticed the visitors really loved watersports and are very curious. Third, when you come in Dusseldorf in January you don't come for the weather, you come for the show. Fourth, all the people in the superyacht hall 7 I talked to told me this was their best show as far as potential buyers, press and networking. Fifth, this is a long show and tiring, however people have more time. You get to talk with partners, press who are not in a rush and conversation have a lot more value. Sixth, average purchasing power is endeed pretty high. Finally, the public in this show litteraly love multihulls.

- Olivier Racoupeau, a successfull naval architect based in La Rochelle, who designed many monohulls for Beneteau, catamarans for Fountaine Pajot, Yacht Industries (Yapluka), and has actually three mega-catamarans in built, a record. I have the chance to go to Olivier Racoupeau offices in a couple of weeks so I will let you know more about his mega catamarans concepts. Check Olivier's amazing monohull project of the EVOE in collaboration with Isabelle Ramirez and Couedel Hugon Design.

- Merijn de Waard, Superyachtimes' (click on the link you will see pictures from the show) website founder and editor, who took the great picture of our team. Merijn has done things the right way, creating a website about the industry easy to surf and with interesting and well written content. Keep up the good work and you will get good results.

- Philippe Touet, Incidence Sail maker, the best sails maker in the world for multihulls. I have known Philippe for ten years now and he is always a great guy with such an amazing knowledge about sail making and multihulls. He has designed and made the sails for Francis Joyon's IDEC and so many other multihulls and mega-yachts. Philippe, who is an experienced sailor, a member of the Banque Populaire team since 2007, teamed up with Groupama from 1999 to 2007 and took part to the America's Cup in 87-92-95. Check his records,amazing. He is a also a fun guy to be around for partying with his collegue and friend Huges Destremau another experienced sailor. If you need sails for your catamaran call Incidence.

- Others, Frédéric Jaouen from JFA, Laurent Charlier from H2X builder of the Bradley and of the NAHEMA 120, Olivier Lafourcade from 20 years old CNB a reference in sailing yacht building, Nicolas Claris from the Claris agency, Shipman's team, builders of the most performant carbon cruising monohulls on the market...

Getting around Dusseldorf : a few advice if you plan to visit or exhibit at the show next year.

• Book a hotel close to the city center and Königs allee, this way you will not be far away from the altstadt where most of the fun goes on at night, from the harbour with its Frank Gehry architecture (one of my favorite architect) and trendy night life, from shopping, and most important from the subway line U78 which takes you in 20 minutes right inside the show.
• Book your restaurants ahead of times, most of the brewery are booked during the complete duration of the show. Some great tables : Café Madrid - real spanish Tapas, Okra - cheap and very good Ethipian food, Lido - quite expensive but an amazing restaurant made of glass and wood above the Rhine in the Franck Gehry district with a view on the water and modern buildings, Rosie modern german and international food with good music, Bandido-the best mexican restaurant I have ever been too, Sila - Thai a real treat book and ask to be in the backroom, seated on the ground if you don't mind taking you shoes of and order a Mai Tai and a degustation menu, Schlüssel a real brewery with traditional alt beer and good food.
  

CATANA 87 - ORION

I found this video of the building of the largest CATANA up to date the CATANA 87- "ORION". It show how the hulls are built using female moulds and state of the art technology. ORION belongs to the custom range of CATANA catamarans. This shipyard has been famous for building safe and seaworthy catamarans from 43 to 65 foot. One of their customer rounded the world with a 58 and asked for a larger easy to sail catamaran. Designed by Christophe Barreau the CATANA are fast and reliable blue water catamarans. One CATANA's website you will find a lot information on their philosophy as well as logbooks and links to catana owners websites.