Catamarans: The Complete Guide for Cruising Sailors

A few years old but great coffee table book and informative. Provided for gift to future catamaran goal seekers and they were thrilled with it.

I ordered this book on a long delivery time, then I discovered a newer edition is available on Kindle. So I read it on Kindle and set-up a return on the book.Great information, no one knows more about multihulls than Gregor Tarjan. I don't know what if any difference there is between the book and the Kindle editions. Contains almost everything every sailor should know before buying a boat.The quality of photographs and format of this book make it well worth buying both. When the book I intended to return arrived, no question it's a keeper.

This is the “Gold Standard” of books on catamarans. It has an incredible amount of well researched information on the construction and the details of sailing these boats. I borrowed it from a friend during my search for buying a cat and decided it was something I would want to refer to in the future, so I purchased my own copy. It has been updated recently with a listing and description of most of the popular production carts. I have been a monohull sailor for decades and have charted large cats in the Caribbean on several occasions, but I didn’t realize how little I really knew about them before reading this.

Great book, but...WARNING 1: The first couple of chapters of this book are TERRIBLE, grossly exaggerating the advantages of catamarans.WARNING 2: The best parts of this book are aimed at experienced monohull sailors. A beginner would be lost.WARNING 3: This book has a lot of mistakes. For example, it says that long bridgedecks slam less than short bridgedecks. He surely meant the other way around! The author needs to proof-read his book.Despite that this book as a LOT of shortcomings, I still love it. I have a lot of experience racing and coastal cruising monohulls, and have decided to buy a catamaran. Practically every book on sailing and most magazine articles are monohull-specific. This book is fantastic for people like me. The author assumes that you already know how to sail pretty well, and he focuses on how catamarans are different, e.g., differences in design, construction, performance, rigs, sail plan, sail trim, reefing, sailing upwind, sailing downwind, tacking, gybing, keels and daggerboards, anchoring, and heavy weather.

Very knowledgeable discussion of the positive and negative aspects of Catamarans.The author is a naval architect who specialises in catamaran design. He has been sailing them for over 40 years and is much more knowledgeable than a normal author of a nautical book.One minor comment is that he appears overly negative about his comparison with monohulls. But the points he makes are all valid.In fairness I am a monohull sailor who wants to move to a catamaran and as such I possibly have an inferiority complex.It is a well written, very informative & beautiful book with gorgeous photographs on every page. It has a lot of great information from a different perspective than usual with enough information for even the best sailor.

Outstanding book with detailed information about Catamarans including construction, rigging, sailing, heavy weather, designs and more. Several well done illustrations and tons of super photographs showing amazing yachts. I wish more information was provided for average sized, priced boats but Tarjon is a broker for expensive boats so that is where his focus lies.I would buy the book again and I highly recommend it as both a reference tool and coffee table type book.

Great gift for my boat loving husband!

The photography in the book is excellent, and there is plenty of information on the characteristics of cruising catamaran design, construction, and handling, but there is plenty of wasted space too. For example, the "Noteworthy Multihulls" chapter is basically a series of two page ads for various multihulls. It even includes a few boats in the 60 to 100 foot range, of which the vast majority of cruising sailors will never set foot on, much less own. One of the catamarans listed, the Jaguar 36, has a displacement of 24,460 pounds, higher than some 40 foot or longer catamarans listed, but the author doesn't see fit to hightlight or explain this outlying figure. Some of the appendices, again, are a waste of paper. Survival equipment checklist, Cruising equipment checklist, Maintenance tasks, Metric Equivalents, Beaufort Scale, Glossary of nautical terms, strike me as a last minute addition to fill up more pages. For what reason? I don't know. The rest of the information was worth what I paid for it.