Look, I’m a dog person. I’ve had one most of my life. I’m a charter member of @wiborgdogclub, a regular at the Springs Park, and founder of the GODAWFUL Film Society where having a dog is a membership prerequisite. I’ve never had a cat. I don’t understand them and I don’t trust them. Except when it comes to boats. With boats, I worry I might be a cat person.
For reasons no one knows (until they tie up to this “Guestwords” column), boating is awash in “cat” terminology. You haul an anchor up to the “cathead.” Sailors of old were disciplined with a nine-lashed whip called a “cat o’ nine tails.” Incidentally, the phrases “the cat’s out of the bag” and “not enough room to swing a cat” both refer to this whip. But we’re barely out of port and already getting off course; so, back to boats.
The reason I say I might be a cat person when it comes to boats is because of two boat designs that I favor — the catboat and the catamaran. Let’s say a few words about the boat designs before we get into the whole cat thing.
A catamaran is a boat with two narrow hulls spanned above the waterline by a structure. It is the design used since ancient times by the seafarers of Austronesia, a term nobody uses meaning from the islands of the South Pacific to the islands of the Indian Ocean. But in the rest of the world, sailboat design took a different tack.
To keep the wind from knocking your sailboat down, you basically have two design choices. One is the multihull, or outrigger, design that prevents excessive heeling by extending floats abeam. The floats’ buoyancy resists the force of the wind on the sails. The other is a monohull that uses ballast and keel as counterweights to the wind force, tending to right the ship. Which design is superior depends on your purpose, but the catamaran has many advantages, and the design has proliferated in the West over the last half-century. But most of the world went the ballast and keel route for thousands of years for reasons that are the subject of roiling debate among naval architects.
Getting knocked over in a heavy blow is one kind of boating fail. As an aside, I’ll confess to you that I sometimes watch boating fail video compilations on YouTube. Because there but for the grace of God, right? I figure you’ve got a better chance of getting some of that grace if you watch these things.
The fails generally fall into five or six categories: (1) your boat is too small for what you’re trying to do — the “Jaws” problem, (2) you’ve disembarked but an engine is still running and your boat is now doing doughnuts without you, (3) you’ve underappreciated the importance of seaworthiness when it comes to your boat, (4) either you, your passengers, or both lack a proper understanding of what waves are, (5) you’re an idiot.
One more piece of boating advice that comes out of these boating fail videos: If you’re docking or at the launch ramp and two or more separate strangers have drawn near, taken out their phones, and begun videoing you, immediately stop what you are doing.
Catamarans are familiar to most folks, but catboats may not be. The two designs are nothing alike, but they’re both “cats,” causing a sea of confusion that we’ll sort out below. Catboat design is characterized by a single hull with an extra-wide beam that’s half its length and a mast that’s stepped way up in the bow. The sail is typically gaff-rigged to a single boom that runs the length of the boat and then some. Keeling and ballast are provided by a retractable centerboard.
The catboat originated right here in New York about 180 years ago as an inshore working and transport craft. Because it could be easily single-handed, had a lot of cargo room, and could operate in shallow waters, it became popular from the Chesapeake to New England. Catboats feature prominently on the old postcards of Three Mile Harbor that you can find in the East Hampton Library’s collection, as well as in paintings, including, most famously, Winslow Homer’s 1876 “Breezin’ Up (A Fair Wind)” and Edward Hopper’s 1939 “Ground Swell.”
The advent of powerboating brought to an end the era of the catboat, or, more accurately, the first era of the catboat. In the early 1960s, the design enjoyed a revival as a pleasure boat and racing class. The catboat renaissance was propelled not by utility like its ancestor, but by nostalgia, a reverence for tradition, and the out-and-out beauty of its lines. Cape Cod became the revival’s epicenter, with the Beetle Cat and Breck Marshall’s Sanderling designs becoming popular and enduring to this day.
Here on Long Island, the catboat’s rebirth revolved around Bill Menger, who designed and built catboats in Babylon from the early 1980s until the early 2000s. Three Goddesses, my 1993 Menger 19, is one of them. Learning to sail it by trial and error was anything but a breeze.
Boating, and especially sailing, is not like driving. The paved road generally doesn’t move and, where the rubber meets it, the grip is true. So the only force acting on a car is its drivetrain. Not the case with boats. Out on the water, there are any number of forces acting on your boat and conspiring to cause you embarrassment or worse. In addition to the engine, or the filled sail, there’s the tide, the wind, the current, the waves and swells, the alignment of the planets, whether the Mets are winning, and the chicken on a roll with coleslaw from One Stop. There’s also your boss (if she sensed you were on the boat when you took that work call).
Eventually, you learn to manage these forces to keep your boat on course. Now if I could only do the same with this “Guestwords” piece, which is supposed to be about the “cat” part of these boat words.
The names are a bit misfortunate because a cat prefix generally diminishes its object. A catfight is not a fair fight. Catcalls are not good calls. Cathouses are of ill repute. And we don’t like people to be catty. But can cat-positive folks take solace in the naming of these great boat designs? Not to take the wind out of their sails, but neither name originates from cats.
“Catamaran” comes from the Tamil word “kattumaram,” with “kattu” meaning to tie or bind and “maram” meaning wood or tree. The word refers to a log raft, which can be of monohull or multihull design.
“Catboat” is trickier. There are various theories, but it most likely comes from Irish boat nomenclature. A “cot boat” is the term for a shallow-draft wooden vessel used inshore on lakes and rivers in Ireland. The term is still in use today. The fact that the first catboats appeared here in the middle of the Irish potato famine migration of the mid-19th century strongly suggests this origin. “Cot,” as far as I know, has nothing to do with cats.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it seems I’m not a cat person after all. I’m a cot person or maybe a kattu person. Either way, it’s a relief.
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Pete Jakab lives near Three Mile Harbor. He says he spends his time trying to improve at fishing, farming, and writing after a misspent career in the city. If you’re into catboats or want to know more about the GODAWFUL Film Society, he can be reached at [email protected].