Beachcat
A beachcat is an off-the-beach class of catamaran ("cat") sailboat.
Although the term "beachcat" was popularized by surf board designer Hobie Alter, who designed the paradigm-changing Hobie 14 in 1965 and Hobie 16 in 1967, the underlying concept is thousands of years old. The Polynesians are credited with the first catamaran designs, although the initial design was probably more of a double-canoe design, with the hulls much closer together than in a modern catamaran.
Beachcats first came into style in the 1960s, with several popular designs. The Aqua cat is a good example of one of the early 1960s catamarans that is still in production.
The "original" beachcat, the Pacific cat, appeared in 1960 in California. The Pacific cat was designed by Carter Pyle and was first built in 1960. It was slightly smaller than 19 ft × 8 ft, and was a solid fiberglass catamaran with a solid core deck and traditional catamaran sail plan. The design's chief limitation was its weight of over 500 lb with approximately 300 square feet (28 m2) of sail area. The design was a traditional design with dagger boards and a hard deck. By comparison, the AQUA CAT 12 weighed 160 pounds and could easily be carried by two people, and the mast raised by one person.
Photos of the Pacific cat demonstrate that it was adept at handling the daunting Pacific coast surf, probably due to the momentum it carried even with the limited [for the time] sail plan. Pacific cats were made by Newport Boats / Mobjack Manufacturing. (Reference)
In the United States, Art Javes designed and marketed an early fiberglass catamaran sailboat, the Aqua, in 1961. The Aqua was a 12-foot-long fiberglass hulled cat, which featured two flat-bottomed, foam filled, symmetric fiberglass hulls. These hulls were connected with aluminum tubing that supported a trampoline-style deck that was large enough for several people. It also featured an unusual "lateen rigged" sail that was supported by a rigid aluminum A-frame. The mast itself was topped with a styrofoam float that helped insure that a capsizing, (especially in shallow water that could damage the mast), would be easily righted and result only in the boat going part way over. If capsized it was designed to rest on one hull, with the ball at the top of the mast preventing it from going fully inverted. The flat bottomed hulls made it a beach-friendly catamaran, but its reliance on dagger boards meant it had a draft of 2 ft with the dagger boards in position.
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