African Cats

African Cats was founded by Gideon Goudsmit, to provide luxurious, yet fast catamarans for sailors that have outgrown beach cats. The target is families and couples who are looking for a well-built boat that will allow them to retain a thrilling sailing experience, but not at the cost of physical discomfort.

One thing African Cats feels passionate about is boat weight. Weight is, of course, an important issue in any multihull - lighter boats are faster, easier to handle and safer. In addition to using light-weight building materials, African Cats employs an infusion technique called VECTOR-K, which is very stiff, yet uses 50% of the (heavy) resin required for hand-lamination. The company also broke with the tradition of applying gel coat as an outer skin, and flow paint on the inner walls. Instead, a tougher polyurethane paint is used. This represents a weight loss of over 12% for the total weight of the boat.

African Cats prides itself on ease of maintenance (for instance, fuel filters are easily accessible), and generally a well-thought out layout that gives the best performance in terms of weight distribution, but makes the least compromise when it comes to the comfort on board.

The design philosophy can be summarised:

• Safe (over 200 % built-in reserve buoyancy)
• Comfortable
• Fast and fun to sail
• Luxurious interior
• Ergonomically sound
• Beautiful
• No out-gassing of construction solvents
• Reliable and easy to maintain
• Quiet
• Ready to sail across the ocean

Several sizes of boat are available. All models have the CE mark required for marketing in Europe.