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Miami Herald March 11, 1984
ARONOW BUILDS NEW CATAMARAN WITH MORE SPEED--AND STABILITY
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The man who made the deep-vee offshore boat the ne plus ultra of rough-water racing says his new catamaran has made the deep-vee obsolete. "Look at this! Can you do this with any deep-vee you can think of?" Don Aronow asked as he put the 39-foot cat into a locked- wheel, hands-off turn at 60 miles per hour while slicing across three- to four- foot seas on the Atlantic off Baker's Haulover. "And feel it in your feet. No pounding. This is the best rough-water ride you'll ever come across." The high-pressure, high-energy dean of blue-water speed demons virtually began the deep-vee revolution 20 years ago when he designed the Donzi 27 and drove it to numerous offshore championships. A lot of people think the Bertrams of that day were just as good, but they didn't have a Don Aronow behind the wheel, jamming his boat to victory through seas that left other boats broken and their crews battered. The next big step also came from Aronow. It was the 35-foot Cigarette, which dominated the sport for years and was copied shamelessly. "When the deep-vee came along, that was a breakthrough over flat-bottomed boats," said Aronow. "This catamaran is the next step." While Aronow's earlier evolutions brought the drivers ever closer to the edge of disaster because of their increased speed, the new cat should appeal to those who like the rough-water ride of a deep-vee but also are concerned with safety. Aronow's boat is not a racing catamaran like those built by Cougar Corp. a half mile from his new USA Racing Team on NE 188th Street (a road, incidentally, that holds in its short stretch no less than five boat-building companies started by Aronow). Cougar cats have dominated offshore racing in recent years. The 38- to 40-footers run well in excess of 100 m.p.h. with 1,500 horsepower, and the new 50-foot supercats top out at about 135 with 2,800 horsepower. But the raceboats are designed to carry two or three people, they tend to be wet, and they must slow considerably in seas over three feet because the tunnel between the hulls is relatively low and starts pounding on the waves. Aronow's version, being marketed as the Bluewater Catamaran, has a narrowed tunnel between the hulls but also is deeper, giving more clearance above the waves. Aronow said the unusual shape of this tunnel compresses the air as the boat drops onto a wave, cushioning the impact. Also, while cats often have a hard time getting up on plane, this one pops up like a small runabout, and the twin chines on each hull keep it flat as it reaches planing speed. The boat rides so flat that it does not have trim tabs, just in/ out trim controls for the outdrives. The version Aronow uses for demonstrations has twin 440- horsepower Mercury engines and tops out at 61 m.p.h. It is equipped with twin Mercruiser outdrives, standard versions rather than the Speedmaster racing models. "We could put full race engines in this boat and get close to 100, but why would we?" Aronow said. "It's the same reason we wouldn't race this boat on the offshore circuit. We can't beat the racing cats in smooth water, and when it really gets rough now, they postpone the race. This boat is for the guy who wants to go fast in rough water offshore, but he wants to do it with a safer, more comfortable ride than he'd get in a vee." The Bluewater Cat is 39 feet two inches long, 11 1/2 feet in beam and weighs about 9,500 pounds. It has considerably more freeboard than most cats -- 38 inches -- and the tunnel is four feet wide. ("Don't print that," Aronow said, grinning. "Make them measure it themselves before they rip it off."). It goes for $130,000, and Aronow said he has sold seven. Aronow's plant is building a twin-diesel, 75- to 80-m.p.h. version that Willie Meyers will race in the inaugural, 1,400- mile Round Britain Offshore Powerboat Race next July, a wild and demanding event that will see the competitors circumnavigate England, Wales and Scotland in 10 daily stages ranging from 60 to 185 miles each. "Top speed isn't going to be as important in this race as endurance," said Meyers. "You race in the Atlantic Ocean, Irish Sea, North Sea and the English Channel, and it can get very, very rough. I think this boat is going to be ideal for those conditions." Blasting down the Intracoastal Waterway, Aronow slowed to about 40 for a few seconds to make sure no one was in our way as we went under the Haulover Bridge. Then he slammed the throttles all the way forward, where they stayed for the next 10 minutes until we slowed to yell to a deep-vee Cigarette 35 to see if it wanted to race. The handling on the new cat is spectacular, literally one- finger control even while making turns at full throttle with the wheel locked hard over. The boat does turn inside a vee-hull, and it does so with virtually no fuss or heel, even in a four-foot sea. The 35-foot Cigarette, equipped with twin 540-horsepower engines, had a speed advantage of about 12 m.p.h. and pulled away from us as we ran away from the beach. But once we hit the four-foot rollers offshore, the deep-vee started to fly off the wave tops and we soon were closing on the other boat. "I wish it was even rougher," Aronow said. "The rougher it gets, the better it is for us. When you get down to it, what we have here is two deep-vee hulls, split apart, going into the water. This boat is fun to ride. A vee-hull isn't in a sea like this; it's work." While the driver of the deep-vee worked hard at the wheel to keep the boat tracking and upright and the throttleman continuously worked the engines, we scooted along with the throttles shoved wide open, the steering wheel centered and our arms crossed on our chests. Aboard the cat, the ride was so soft the passengers could brace themselves in the bolsters without holding onto the grab rails. On the deep-vee, we could see the three- man crews' heads snap forward every time the boat touched down on a big wave. Steering on Aronow's boat is wonderfully precise. Aronow's idea of driving is to turn no more than necessary to avoid objects in his path, and at first it was unnerving to watch steel daymark posts and buoys and concrete bridge supports rip past only a couple of feet away at 60 m.p.h. And I apologize to the guys in the 40-foot ketch whose stern we shaved by five feet on our way offshore (they were where Aronow wanted to go). Running back to the plant on 188th Street, Aronow whipped up behind the Cigarette and put the Cat's left sponson on the wake and the right sponson on the flat water on the outside. He took his hands off the wheel and the cat continued to run straight and true, heeled at 20 degrees. "Isn't this the way you'd like a boat to run?" he asked. And for a guy who thinks stability comes way ahead of speed, there wasn't any answer but, "Yep." |