Nautitech 542

Why two hulls & why the Nautitech 542?

Outside of our off the beach cat racing escapades, we have only owned monohulls to date. We enjoyed the fun of racing on a monohull but I found the handicap system a frustrating way to race because the results were dictated by an ever changing handicap which rewarded your next race for poor performance in the race prior.

With this in mind and the fact that our son Kye had outgrown his Opti dinghy, we purchased an F18 off the beach catamaran where the racing was a lot more physical, fun & fair - we race each Saturday together and really love being able to do this as a Father & Son team.

With my racing bug being satisfied by the F18, it gave space for us to allow our then current boat, a 2014 Bavaria 56 Cruiser, to be just that - a cruising boat!

While sailing up the east coast from Sydney to the Gold Coast in Jan 2018 with Kye & Hannah onboard - I looked longingly through my binoculars at a catamaran one evening about a mile out to sea from us whose occupants appeared to be very warm and comfortable inside their saloon while I was huddled up in the night air, dodging the icy cold spray behind my fabric dodger. To make matters worse, according to my AIS, they were travelling a full 2 knots quicker than us…. I think this was the beginning of the end for us and monohulls.

Later that year, as the idea of switching to a cat began to gather traction in my mind we had a fortuitous rendezvous with a Seawind 1600 while we were holidaying in Sardinia. The owners generously showed us around their beautiful boat and she was definitely a lovely looking boat and her polars indicated great performance - which was a high priority. By this stage we had made a pretty extensive “must haves list” for our next boat but were not considering purchasing anytime soon - just happy to look. On the list though was the desire to have our family of 5 stay on board with another family and not feel too cramped. Combining a boat with that much space and sleeping accommodation combined with a good turn of speed really narrows down the options!

I began to research what was out there and study Polars to compare performance. My short list included:

• a demo model TAG60 that was heavily discounted but needed lots of work and was a bit too much on the performance end of the spectrum (this boat is 60ft and still flys a hull!),

• Outremer 5X - probably still my favourite cat due to high performance but close to $AUD3M new and a 2 year wait list put this out of contention.

• Outremer 51 - nice boat and quick but too small inside for our needs.

• Seawind 1600 - some great innovations and lovely lines but not enough space for two families.

I created a list of all my “must haves” for a new cat and found the Nautitech 542 ticked all of my boxes with the exception of wanting dagger boards for upwind performance but it seemed I needed to choose between daggerboards and accommodation for friends and family.

The Nautitech team go to great lengths to save weight with extensive use of foam in construction and this translates to a dry ship weight of 15 tonnes which for a 54ft cat is light. According to the Polars the boat will exceed 20 knots downwind and we have now confirmed this on multiple occasions. We have also been amazed at the upwind performance of the boat. The sweet spot upwind in winds above 8 knots is 38 degrees apparent which is not much different than a cruising mono.

There were no Nautitech 542s available to inspect in Australia but an opportunity presented itself to see one in the flesh on the east coast of Italy while we were over there in June 2018. Not really in the market to purchase just yet but also not wanting to miss out on seeing an N542 that was only a few hours drive away - we jumped in the car and drove from Civitivecchia on the west coast of Italy to Pescara on the east coast.

The Australian agent liased with the Italian owner who kindly allowed us to inspect his boat which was in the middle of having air conditioning installed and hence the interior had been completely pulled apart… so not ideal for viewing!

Regardless of the mess inside, as soon as I boarded her - I just knew this was the boat for us. She had plenty of space, really nice lines and the quality of build was excellent.

A few days later we boarded a plane Australia bound where we would then spend the next month sailing our current Bavaria 56 from the Gold Coast up to Hamilton Island.

Over this passage north the conversations began to gather momentum around the space, stability and speed benefits of doing this journey on a cat and outside of the considerable expense involved there seemed far more pros than cons to make the switch.

As the name “Baruch” may indicate, our faith in God plays a large role in our lives and so we sought wisdom and discernment from Him and in this process felt very sure that this was a great investment into our lives and the lives of the people we loved and so a month after we had returned we were met at Hamilton Island airport by Jason Chipp, the Nautitech sales agent who under the guise of bringing us a new washing machine to replace the recently deceased unit, showed up with a contract in hand for us to sign.

That was July 2018 and our new Baruch launched in France July 2019.