About Slider
Slider is a 16 foot minimalist cruising catamaran with comfortable adjustable seating inside the hulls.
I designed Slider to be the most luxurious 16 foot open boat beach cruiser possible. Much of the luxury derives from the fact that Slider is a catamaran, and consequently has a very stable and level ride. Even more luxurious is the adjustable seating within the hulls, where much of the crews’ bodies are protected from the elements. The helmsman steers facing forward in a comfortable molded seat, using a steering line that runs around the perimeter of the center deck and hulls. Once at anchor, luxury takes the form of a fairly spacious tent, which allows two people to bed down on the center deck, with one cockpit and its seats enclosed by the tent, and the other cockpit open for access to the outside world.
Because Slider is a cruising boat, her sail area is a conservative 140 sq. ft. This is undercanvassed, by the standards of beach cats such as the Hobie 16, which carries 218 sq. ft. of sail. Slider has slightly more stability than a typical 16 ft. beach cat, because of her greater weight… but if Slider capsizes, she probably can’t be righted by her crew, due to her very buoyant hulls. Sailing with sheets in hand, on the edge of capsize, is not my idea of relaxing cruising. In addition, Slider is intended to be sailed by two crew, one remaining in each cockpit in most circumstances, and without any necessity for the leeward crew to scramble across to the windward hull on every tack.
Despite her modest sail plan, Slider is not a slow boat, particularly when compared to monohull open cruisers of similar size and power (and substantially less luxury. This is due to her fine, 10 to 1, low-resistance hulls. She has a deep offset daggerboard in the port hull, and moderately high-aspect kickup rudders. She goes quite well to windward, especially considering her sprit-sloop rig, with its home-made mainsail. I chose this ancient configuration out of a personal curiosity about its suitability for a tiny cruising multihull, but I’ve also drawn a conventional Bermudan rig, and such a modern rig would have its mast stepped in exactly the same spot.
Slider’s greatest virtue, in my opinion, is her handiness. She tacks effortlessly, unlike many cats, which as a breed are notorious for being slow in stays. She has a modest amount of weather helm, so that if the steering line is released, she comes up into the wind and waits there, sails luffing, for as long as necessary. While she makes her best speed to windward with the sheets cracked slightly, she has a remarkable ability to pinch up and keep sailing more slowly, when necessary to clear a buoy or other obstruction.
Her shallow draft and flat bottoms make her easy to beach and to trail on a simple home-built trailer. Her mast can be raised or lowered in moments, because her forestay is tensioned with a zero-stretch Dyneema lanyard led back to the forebeam.
Slider seems to be a completely new kind of beach cruiser. So far as I know, Slider is one-of-a-kind. There are other 16 ft. cruising cats, but none of them are open boats with in-hull seating.
Copyright 2008 Ray Aldridge
