h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is a boat that we built in the latter years of the 20th Century and sailed down to the Canaries just in time for our honeymoon. The name is 'Pilgrim' and it is a 30 ft by 16 ft catamaran. Hence my login name.

There is an emotional attachment, of course. But the deep underlying qualities of this design are why we chose it and with 12 years experience of sailing it (including a bad Biscay and the successful trip South, eventually) we can confirm that its promise was fulfilled, and more.

With any boat, safety is always a consideration.

The Wharram catamaran designs can and do boast of their legendary seaworthiness with good reason. These boats are almost impossible to sink. Being made of wood and lacking ballast they do tend to float well even when severely damaged. I like that in a boat.

The heaviest thing on Pilgrim is the outboard motor which I can still lift in one hand despite encroaching arthritis. So even full of holes, Pilgrim would still sorta float. There's enough wood there even without the 600 Litres plus of recycled plastic bottles that we buried inside the structure during construction.

There's evidence of this in the tale of an earlier Wharram venturer to the Canaries. In a 28-foot Wharram of earlier genesis he was sailing single-handed from the Canaries to (I think) the Cape Verde Islands. A down-wind trip that should have been utterly relaxing.

Far from it, since a short time out from the Canaries a whale took an interest in his boat, for no obvious reason. It may have been hostile, or scratching its back, or perhaps it was feeling amorous?

Either way, it was banging and crunching up against the twin hulls of the Wharram, and doing it hard enough to split the hulls, which started to leak.

So our intrepid skipper went around the boat popping anything that had to be kept dry, like food, clothing and navigational tools into plastic bin liners for safety. Meanwhile the boat gradually filled up and settled into the water, ending up with the decks slightly clear of the sea.

Very annoying indeed, and most uncomfortable. But he just turned the boat around and sailed slowly back (upwind) to the Canaries to sort out these unexpected problems.

We wanted a boat like that so we chose the Tiki 30, and added the empty bottles for good measure.

On a 'double-canoe' style of cruising cat, you have two boats and a space in between. This space between is where you work the boat, and where one can sit in the sun/shade and sip drinks as one sails along.

This space is ideal for sailors and non-sailors alike. It hardly tilts at all, is larger than the cockpit of a 60-ft mono, and comes for free.

There's room there for a portable barbecue, which works fine, since catamarans won't spill a glass of beer in most weather conditions. I've tried it.

Which brings us to an unexpected bonus of this arrangement and the trouble also taken to ensure that the boat is 'weatherly', and will sail well against the wind in all conditions. The same abilities that provide that weatherliness can also provide considerable performance - and this is the case with the Tiki 30.

All cruising sailors I know have a streak of racer in them somewhere, and I'm worse than most. I've been described as a 'sail performance Nazi' and that's probably fair .

So it's not surprising that we would seek out the larger monohulls, especially the ones where their owners/skippers had made disparaging remarks about home-made boats or catamarans inability to sail...

...and sail right through them to windward with the tiller-pilot engaged, barbecue sizzling away, and huge glasses of beer in evidence. I had a special torn t-shirt to wear for these occasions.

Some were rotten sports and would scream invective at us, which for me was the icing on the cake. On e fine chap in a 60+ foot cruiser-racer came galloping along the pontoon after being trounced and accused me of running our engine in order to pass him. I opened the hatch and showed him the 5-hp Johnson lurking there....

He was a good sport, and re-focused on our sails, suddenly. Examining them closely he announced "Those are HydraNet, like mine! You're deadly serious aren't you?"

The ability to catch and pass a boat twice as long and costing 50x as much is endearing to me. The little cat that could...

To also have 6 berths available is remarkable, although you'll find that on a long voyage you'll need one of them for storage - we keep sails and stuff in one berth. Only occasionally did we pop one of our 'tired and emotional' guests down there on top of the spinnaker for a few hours rest before dawn.

If in port/aground on a beach or safe anchorage we have had the boat littered with snoring bodies after a party- on the bow and stern netting, on the bow trampoline, the two side tramps and the cockpit floor (designed to take a full size inflatable double bed) as well as the six berths below.

A very social boat, the Tiki 30!