Under rated boats

I think that was toppers Idea

but turboing a 600 when you have a perfectly good 700 or MPS....

Best boat I ever sailed (and owned in fact) was a Jacksnipe, Jack Holt's answer to the Fireball.

Exciting, easy to sail and easily the best behaved boat I've known when capsized. It had a double-bottom with footwells for the helm, would sit indefinitely on its side without turtling yet self-drained just fine when up again. Poor build quality and poor marketing let it down though.

Closest thing today is the 3000, easy-peasy, but great fun. I gather the V3000 with its sealed mast is also reluctant to turtle.

But what's the difference between a tunnel hull and a catamaran? Does the Vortex actually only have one hull? What's the definition of a  "hull"?

I'm pretty sure all of the tunnel-hull powerboats are/were called cats, not monos; certainly most are, whether or not they have an air gap between the hulls if I remember right.

The difference can't just be having a solid bit between the "hulls", because that means old Shearwaters, Yvonnes etc and cruising cats are tunnel hulls.

There was a "tunnel hull" racing boat way back in the 1800s; Dominion. It was a big scow, with a tunnel through the centre. Even then, she was often called a catamaran.  She was certainly banned because she was too much like one and I'm pretty sure that cat sailors have claimed her as one of their ancestors. Tunnel  hull Moths were also banned as being catamarans.

Surely if we just try to work out how many "hulls" something has, there's plenty of potential for things to get really messy. If a Vortex is a mono, when what about a modified Vortex with a bigger tunnel and more defined "hulls"? At exactly what stage does it stop being part of a tunnel hull, and one of two separate hulls? How would you define that to keep boats that are effectively cats out of mono racing?

Seems to me a boat that has two separate pieces of buoyancy side-by-side and connected has two hulls by definition and is therefore either a cat or a proa.

On the other hand you don't really sail the Vortex as a Cat - at least when I tried doing the wild thing downwind in one it don't ome off (unlike me). I call it a one-and-a-half-maran.

Nice idea Curly, but not so. Buoyancy aint buoyancy if its not in the water and there's no continuous transverse buoyancy below the water on a Vortex. Also I don't think the 'tramp' is hollow, so there's no contiuous reserve buoyancy above the water.

Perhaps the difference can be described by the design philosophy.  A cat gets its performance due the high initial stability and slender hulls. A tunnel hull gets its performance from being lifted by air, which reduces drag. The Vortex fits this description of a cat, but not the tunnel hull description. Ergo, its a catamaran. The fact that Chew allow them just shows that Bristol Water don't know the difference.