Catboats are Fun and Easy to Sail

Cat Boat: a fun Dutch boat.

Catboats are a sailboat with just one mast in the bow of the boat. They are usually very wide, have  centerboards and are gaff rigged. I was horrified when my dad bought one.

The first sailboat my dad bought was a big clunky, heavy boat that needed a Gale force wind to sail well. We were on a inland lake in the Midwest (Indiana) and sailing was not popular or very common. The old sloop looked like what I thought a sailboat should look like, looked like what others in the area had, but did not sail well. I was thrilled when Dad said he traded the boat in for an Inland Catboat. All I heard was traded for a new boat.

When it arrived I was horrified. It was one boat long but two boats wide and had the mast stepped way in the bow and the bow looked like it had a chin that jutted forward, not slanted back like a boat should. Then there was the short mast and a horrible 4 sided sail. The rudder seamed oversized and ugly and it had a centerboard with a big ugly crank that was the main thing in the boat. The only thing I liked was the color of the boat. My first thought was there was no way I could take my girlfriend out on this ugly boat. I did not want to go out on this ugly boat.

That was my introduction to the Catboat. A catboat can be described as having a fore and aft sail set on a mast that is stepped in the extreme bow. The mast is usually unstayed and often short. The hulls are shallow draft hulls, with a great beam width for good stability. The boat usually has a centerboard for additional stability. The width of the boat is often close to ½ the length of the boat.

Traditionally the catboat has a Gaff sail with a very long boom.  A topping lift is often needed to support the boom because of its length. A fore stay is often used to help compensate for the long boom weight. It was a cheap sail set for the sailors of the boat. One sail, two booms, and 4 lines was all that is needed for the setup.

Holland may be the original home of the cat rig. The wide shallow draft light displacement boats were the workboats for the Dutch on their inland waterways.

Once we started sailing the catboat, I was more than impressed. It was like a race car compared to the boat that Dad had traded in. The boat sailed beautifully to windward and would sail much closer to the wind than the sloop had. You had to balance the centerboard depth and your weight distribution in the boat for the wind you had, but the boat would fly across the water. The extra wide boat helped make it easy to get the weight distribution right to sail right and it made the boat very forgiving at the same time. 

Going down wind was strange at first. Because of the big wide sail, and the long boom it wanted to catch too much wind. What you had to do was to use the topping lift to hold up the boom and drop the peak boom of the gaff sail way down. This dumps some of the air and makes it more balanced. Your weight distribution was also important to counterbalance the long boom out the side of the boat.  Then there was the jibe danger… that long boom could sweep everybody off the boat. (I thought that was exciting till it clobbered me) 8-)

The boat also sailed well in light wind because of the large sail. By the end of the summer I liked sailing the little blue ugly boat. And, I did take my girlfriend out on the boat. 8-) I was more than surprised that the next summer we were not the only Cat boat on lake. We had started something with this little Dutch boat.

The Inland Catboat (built in Northern Indiana) my Dad had bought was a beautifully designed boat and it sailed well. I have sailed on other cats that were not easy boats to sail. If you are interested in a catboat, be sure to try it out first. They do not sail like a sloop, and a good design of hull and sail make a big difference on how the boat will sail.