Customer Reviews

Catamarans, Every Sailor's Guide

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is beautifully laid out and would look good on anybody's coffe table. Multihull champion and dealer Gregor Tarjan outlines modern catamaran advantages over monohulls and describes what attributes make them perform well - as seen in several other multihull texts, but with nicer pictures here.

On and off throughout the book he explains how to get the best performance out of a catamaran: his discussion on how best to use Apparent Wind, VMG and daggerboards to one's advantage is the best I have seen, with easy to understand charts and drawings. There is a chapter on construction with interesting information (e.g. cycles to failure for different types of materials) but I found it difficult to relate it to any particular production boat. Anchoring and heavy weather sailing get light treatment and are much better covered in other texts.

The author concludes the 200 pages of main text with 50 pages dedicated to Noteworthy Multihulls. Each of 25 multihulls gets a two-page spread with beautiful pictures, just the most basic of specifications, and a very short blurb that could have been written by the builders themselves. After the good discussion of parameters, construction, and evaluation coefficients throughout the book (e.g. Hull Finess Ratio, Sail Area to Wetted Surface, bridge deck clearance, payload ability etc.) I was disappointed that data was not available to compare the different Noteworthy Designs based on what I had learned in the previous pages. Other than the fact that Outremer is the most present builder in the pictures, this book will not help you decide whether you should buy a Catana 47 or a Switch 51.

Overall, even though the information was often scattered throughout several chapters, I liked Catamarans-Every Sailor's Guide mainly for the beautiful pictures and the excellent seamanship discussion.

For a long while I have been dreaming of owning a cruising catamaran and went online to get information. I ordered "Catamarans, Every Sailor's Guide" and believe it to be my best investment of time and money so far. The information comes from an author with considerable experience who appears to be unbiased. It is full of photos and layouts for current (2007) production models. I hope future editions of this text are available for future models as I believe this is an excellent source of information for those wanting to learn more about modern catamarans.

I would tend to agree with some of these reviews-except the copy of the book I received (New-$53.94 w/shipping) was very rough. Lots of pages stuck together, pages that had been separated were torn and frayed. In general it looked like a book that should have been rejected from the printer, not sold. My email complaint has not been responded to, and I now have asked Amazon to take action against the Aeroyacht. If you purchase this book and then go to the buyers comments about Aeroyacht you will see that they only have a 20% satisfaction rating and a 40% dissatisfaction rating. Not really reflected in these reviews.

All that aside, the book offers about the same amount of quality information about catamarans that any worthwhile cat salesman would tell you in an hour. Pictures are very nice. The slant is that he sales the only worthwhile catamarans in the world.

Would I own the book-sure. But, buy it where you can look at the quality first, and hopefully on the discounted rack.

So far everything I have read in this book has been very informative and written with an un-biased opinion. LOVE THIS BOOK.....don't buy a catamaran until you have read this book

After meeting the author in different places over the last couple of years I was interested in the book. Mr. Tarjan has experience that comes hard and takes time. He has been involved in other published multihull accounts and this book is a culmination of a long history selling, building and sailing catamarans. Well done and looks great.