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Phaedo3: The Man Behind the MOD 70

• By Bill Springer
• Updated: January 6, 2016

The smiling, stubble-faced 35-year-old owner and co-skipper of the lime-green and chrome MOD70 trimaran Phaedo3 is still trembling with adrenaline hours after he and a small crew of crazies blitzed across the English Channel in 4 hours and 29 minutes. While crossing the 138-mile space between Cowes, England, and Dinard, France, they maintained a 28.7-knot average, pegging the speedo at 40.9 knots. It’s another passage record for Lloyd Thornburg, and the third his squad bags in one week.

“This is the scariest thing I’ve done,” says Thornburg, the jovial American skipper. “I fly, skydive and drive fast cars, but all those other things are scary for a minute or a few minutes at a time. This boat shows you what you’re capable of after being miserable, and tired, and soaked in fear for 30 hours.”

The possibility of waking up upside down in the dark, freezing-cold water plays on his mind. The constant noise and exposure wear him down. “But that’s the beauty of it,” he says. “It’s like a mental detox that breaks life down to its simplest and most beautiful elements. Pushing these boats to their limits offshore might be as close as anyone can get to what it feels like to be in space. You can’t get farther away from civilization. It’s a harsh environment, and the speed is like nothing else on Earth.”

Call of the Wild

Thornburg grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the son of a successful mutual fund manager. It wasn’t until he was sent to Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and started reading about Joshua Slocum and Robin Lee Graham, that his mind started to open to the excitement and freedom of offshore sailing.

“Reading these adventure stories was my escape,” he says. “Nobody in my family was particularly into boating, but I identified with those offshore sailors because they were outsiders.”

While he grew up on a dirt road in New Mexico with sweeping views of the Southwest, he says he found the landscape and insular nature of boarding school to be claustrophobic. “I’d never even heard of J. Crew and felt like an outsider,” he says, “but as soon as I found those stories, I thought sailing around the world was one of the coolest things anyone could possibly do.”

In time he learned to sail on a Soling in California, and lived aboard a Bristol Channel Cutter in Annapolis, Maryland, while attending graduate school. The cutter was small, and he kept his outings to the confines of Chesapeake Bay. Later, with a small inheritance from his grandparents, he eventually purchased a stout steel 37-footer and joined the Caribbean 1500 cruising rally. Once in the Caribbean, Thornburg spent a season island-hopping, alone. “I wasn’t planning on singlehanding,” he says, “but I had a falling-out with the friend I was going to sail with.”

He sailed alone to Grenada: “It was fun, for a while, and I absolutely inhaled books. I read War and Peace in, like, four days.” His isolation, however, eventually got to him, as did the realization that he wanted to sail around the world with other people, and to go faster than he could with his overweight, undercanvased cutter. He found what he was looking for during a demo sail on the first-generation Gunboat 48 catamaran Cream .

Thornburg is a beneficiary of his family’s international investment firm, which manages a stated $56 billion in assets, giving him the means to commission his first Phaedo , a bright orange Gunboat 66, when he was still in his 20s. With it he intended to sail around the world, but after entering a few races, he discovered racing with a team of top sailors was far more fun than cruising. Soon, with the help of Cam Lewis and other multihull experts, Thornburg developed a core team and started winning. His orange Phaedo opened up the New York YC Transatlantic Race to multihulls in 2011, and it was winning the 2013 Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu until it dismasted. During the long motor back to Los Angeles, Thornburg says, much of the talk was about going after sailing’s marquee records.

He spent the next two years working with a team of builders to rebuild Phaedo and turn it into one of the world’s fastest cruising catamarans. But two years is a long time to go without an adrenaline fix, so when emails from Phaedo crewmember Brian Thompson, a world-record-holding professional multihull sailor, introduced Thornburg to a wickedly fast turnkey multihull on the market, his attention shifted.

“Buying the MOD all happened very, very fast,” he says. “We started looking at the racing calendar during Christmas 2014. We knew we had unfinished business to attend to at the 2015 Transpac, but then we started thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to race in the Transpac and the Transatlantic Race in the same year?’”

In January 2015, team manager Rachel Jaspersen, Thompson and a surveyor traveled to Lorient, France, shoveled snow off the MOD70’s deck, and wrapped the boat in its distinctive chrome livery before the sale was even final. The timeline was tight: Thornburg wanted to compete in the Caribbean 600 in Antigua a month later.

“My third time on the helm was during the Caribbean 600,” he says, “and my first time seeing the boat in person was just before the start. That’s why I’m grateful for the team. I trust them. I’m learning from the best.”

Granted, Phaedo3 was flush with pro-sailing talent, but bagging the Caribbean 600 course record was just the start of more to come.

Racing to the Edge

Thornburg is extremely proud of the Caribbean 600, the Antigua-to-Newport and other records Phaedo3 set in 2015, but what the whole team really, really wanted was the Transatlantic Race record. Two days of calms after the start squashed any hopes this year, but the team did record the fastest elapsed time (7 days, 2 hours) in the race, and perhaps more important, Thornburg got his first real experience peering over the edge. Once the wind filled, the team had four consecutive days averaging more than 600 miles a day, hit speeds in the 40s, and covered 652 miles in one 24-hour run.

“I wasn’t really conscious of being afraid,” Thornburg says, “but I did notice that when we were driving really hard, I had moments of being cold yet looking down at where my hand had been on the tiller, and noticing it’s just covered in sweat. Even my palm is just sweating in spite of being cold and wet. My subconscious must have been afraid, yet there I was, strangely calm.

“Another thing I learned is we’re all a lot crazier than I thought,” he adds with a smile. “I knew the boat was very physical, but the cumulative strain of going so fast for so long took a lot more effort than I imagined.” He also understands that he didn’t just buy a boat; he’s punched his ticket to the rarefied world at the highest echelon of offshore racing. He understands that being able to afford the right boat and the right team — which any owner will tell you is a decision based on passion rather than practical financial principles — is a critical ingredient for success, but he’s all in. The Transatlantic Race is simply fuel to his fire.

On the heels of the Transatlantic, despite working so hard to rebuild Phaedo , Thornburg discovered that the Gunboat 66 didn’t deliver the same intensity in the 2015 Transpac. Still, the team finished and won on corrected time.

“It’s a funny thing, taking a nonracing boat racing,” he says. “There’s something about being on a raceboat that just puts everybody in a racing mentality, whereas racing your awesome bachelor pad [makes it] a little harder to have that same level of focus. It’s hard to push as hard [on the Gunboat 66] because the trimmers can’t see the mainsail, and you can’t feel the wind or really see what’s going on at the helm. On the other hand, I didn’t have to put on any foul-weather gear or sunscreen all the way across.”

Royal Result

Soon after the mai tais wear off, Thornburg is on a plane to Cowes for the start of the Rolex Fastnet Race, a 600-mile ocean-racing classic. Phaedo3 leads the 300-boat-strong fleet out of Cowes with much larger trimarans in its wake, including the 131-foot Sprindrift 2 , the 80-foot Prince de Bretagne , and the more experienced team aboard the MOD70 Musandam-Oman Sail. Phaedo3 finishes second overall, narrowly missing line honors to Spindrift 2 . It’s not the result Thornburg wanted, but it’s a credible addition to an amazing first season.

The crew remains on standby in Cowes because they feel that, in the right conditions, they can break the 595-mile-long Fastnet Race course record held by Banque Populaire V . They get those conditions in the middle of a night in early September, and reduce the record time to 27 hours, 42 minutes, 26 seconds.

They finish under darkness. It’s blowing hard, but they don’t get off the boat. Instead they have a five-minute planning session, cant the mast to one side, and set a course for La Rochelle, intent on breaking the record from Plymouth held by Steve Fossett’s PlayStation. In a sprint described by Thornburg as “pure magic,” they shave two hours from Fossett’s record and add it to their tally.

For Thornburg, having the means to underwrite such boats and crews capable of breaking world records isn’t important compared to the mystical experience of pushing himself beyond his comfort zone. It’s impossible to put a price on going to the edge, sailing — driving — these amazing machines through survival conditions with a team of like-minded individuals. Yet like the adventurers whose stories inspired him to take to the sea in the first place, his mind is wide-open, and what stretches before him is freedom.

Their latest exploits? Finishing the year with a bang and one final record for 2015 in St. Barth.

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Phaedo 3, Les Voiles de Saint Barth 2015

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Wild Group completes wrap of 70ft Racing Trimaran Phaedo3

• Inspiration

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Written by Zuzana Bednarova

Wild Group International have already hit the headline hat-trick this year, with the largest yacht ever wrapped, motor yacht Aviva , announcing the exclusive distribution rights for the ground-breaking Färben films, and now they can announce that they have successfully completed the wrap of the striking 70-foot speed demon trimaran Phaedo3 .

Lloyd Thornburg’s MOD 70 yacht Phaedo^3 smashed the race record ©RORC/Tim Wright/Photoaction.com

Sailing yacht Phaedo 3 set the RORC Caribbean 600 course record by over six hours last week. Wild Group International’s team were commissioned prior to her launch earlier this year to wrap the ‘racing weapon’ in chrome and electric lime green in Brittany.

Greg Hoar, the founder of Wild Group International, states: “Really pleased to be involved with Brian and his team on this fantastic project.  It’s a great demonstration of the different effects that can be used with vinyl films and foils and just how striking a result they can achieve.  Well done to the Phaedo3 team!”

Please contact CharterWorld - the luxury yacht charter specialist - for more on superyacht news item "Wild Group completes wrap of 70ft Racing Trimaran Phaedo3".

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Team Phaedo Adds Three New Hulls

The need for sailing at extreme speed under sail has apparently taken a powerful hold on Lloyd Thornburg, Latitude’s friend from Newport Beach, St. Barth and Santa Fe. Yesterday Team Phaedo introduced a new addition to their stable, the MOD70 Phaedo3, for Monday’s start of the RORC Caribbean 600 . Thornburg told the press he’d secretly been trying to put together a MOD70 project for the last two years.

Phaedo3 will be joined at the Antigua starting line of the Caribbean 600 by San Franciscan Peter Aschenbrenner’s Nigel Irens 63-ft trimaran,  Paradox . Both trimarans have a chance to break the course record of 40 hours, 11 minutes set by the ORMA 60 Region Guadeloupe in the inaugural race. As Paradox is a half racer, half cruiser, and Phaedo3 is an all-out racer, the latter has the much better shot at the record.

Both trimarans were built as tamed-down versions of the wildly fast and fragile ORMA 60 trimarans. But it certainly hasn’t seemed to limit their performance much. We sailed aboard Thomas Siebel’s Orion, the only MOD70 on the West Coast, one afternoon on Banderas Bay. In winds of about 20 knots, the trimaran was screaming along at up to 34 knots. We couldn’t believe it.

That’s nothing compared to what Orion crewmembers tell us the MOD70 has done on San Francisco Bay, namely hitting 44 knots! If we’re not mistaken, that’s just a tad faster than was achieved by any of the 72-ft America’s Cup 34 catamarans. And unlike the America’s Cup cats, MOD70 tris aren’t foilers. Then, too, one of the MOD70s flipped in a moderate breeze during a race off Ireland. The video for that is all over the Internet.

Phaedo3 is MOD70 #3, previously known as Fonica when it was campaigned by the great Michel Desjoyeaux. He will be along for the Caribbean 600. The rest of the all-star crew will consist of Brian Thompson, Sam Goodchild, Pete Cumming, Sam Wooga Bason, Warren Fitzgerald and Romain Attanasio.

In just six short years the Caribbean 600, which starts and finishes in Antigua and weaves among a number of islands, has arguably become the world’s best middle distance ocean race.

Latitude readers may remember that Thornburg and crew did an incredible 427 miles in 24 hours during the 2013 Transpac with his orange Gunboat 66 Phaedo, a legitimate cruising catamaran complete with a pizza oven.

Unfortunately, the mast came down the following day in rather mild conditions. Over the next 18 months, she got a fabulous new rig and an extensive makeover in Newport Beach, an area that Lloyd has found to his liking. Lloyd is not new to California, having attended the Art Design College in Pasadena. During that time he sailed a Soling, if we remember correctly, out of Marina del Rey. He’s into a different world now.

The addition of Phaedo3 to Team Phaedo instantly makes Thornburg, who is only in his mid-30s, one of the bigger international players in high speed ocean racing. Good luck, guys!

Not to be overlooked is the introduction of George David’s daring new Rambler 88, which replaces his Rambler 92 and Rambler 100. It will be a warm-up for her Voiles de St. Barth match-up with Jim Clark’s reportedly $100 million 100-footer, Comanche, which made her debut in the Sydney to Hobart Race.

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Howdy Partner! A bird’s eye view of ‘ti Profligate, anchored in the aqua waters of the Caribbean.

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Sailmon products onboard, d35 phaedo^2.

Hull Length : 10.81m Length Overall LOA : 14.95m Width of Hull : 6.89m Overall Width : 8.74m Dry weight : 1200kg Main Sail Area : 81.6m2 Jib Area : 21m2 Solent Area : 40.7m2 Genoa : 70.8m2 Reacher : 131.1m2 Crew : 5 (minimum) Crew weight : 456kg (maximum)

In 2017, American sailor and Team Phaedo racing team founder Lloyd Thornburg, took the helm of Team Tilt’s previous Decision 35 (LOA: 14.95m) . The D35’s were developed by a group of owners with designer Sebastien Schmidt, with the goal of creating a fast, high-tech, but affordable one-design catamaran to combat the ever-increasing costs and extremism of multihull sailing on lake geneva. The result was the Decision 35, built purely for competition, the demanding boat is a multihull boasting an exceptional power to weight ratio, designed specifically for light wind conditions, prevailing on Lake Geneva. With Lloyd at the Helm Phaedo^2 was born. Now in there first full season in the D35 Trophy, Lloyd has brought with him a stellar crew comprised of some of the sailing worlds best (including Chris Draper, Ed Smyth, Haylee Outteridge, Stuart Bithell and Julian Cressant).

Onboard configuration D35 Phaedo^2

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MOD70 trimaran Phaedo^3 smashes record for the Pearns Point Round Antigua Race

• Harriett Ferris
• April 27, 2015

Jean-Paul Riviere's Dolphin 100, Nomad IV was the first monohull to complete the course and was declared the winner of the Yachting World Trophy.

Race Report: Saturday 25 April 2015

With clear blue skies and tropical heat, the Pearns Point Round Antigua Race was a gentle introduction for close to 40 international teams, racing 52 nautical miles around Antigua. The relatively light wind of 12-15 knots conspired to create a slow race, but the glorious mild weather did not stop Lloyd Thornburg’s MOD70, Phaedo^3 setting a new record for the Pearns Point Round Antigua Race of 3hr, 26mins, 09 secs, beating the previous record of Mari-Cha IV by 51 minutes. The green trimaran continues on its record-breaking season, having set new times at the RORC Caribbean 600, Les Voiles de St Barth’s, Guadeloupe to Antigua Race and Round Redonda.

Jean-Paul Riviere’s Dolphin 100, Nomad IV with a Russian/French crew was the first monohull to complete the course and was declared the winner of the Yachting World Trophy (Editor Elaine hopped onboard ‘the world’s fastest cruiser’ last year- read her full report here )

Phaedo^3’s tactician, Brian Thompson puts into basic terms the reason for Phaedo^3’s phenomenal speed, even in light winds: “The simple fact is that Phaedo^3 has a very high power to weight ratio. The boat only weighs seven tonnes and the hulls have very low drag, plus only two of them are in the water at any time. Sojana, which held the previous record, probably weighs more than 60 tonnes and the hull shape has a lot more drag. Phaedo^3 can harness whatever wind there is and turn it into boat speed which is nearly twice as fast as the wind.”

CSA Racing 1 On corrected time, Daniel Figueirido’s Argentinian team racing Soto 53 Humilidad Zero won the class for the best corrected time under CSA. Jonathan Bamberger’s Canadian J/145, Spitfire was second. Antigua’s Bernie Evan-Wong, racing RP37, TAZ was third.

“We raced here last year on another boat and decided to return, but with Humilidad Zero,” commented  Daniel Figueirido. “We have come all the way from Buenos Aires and this is a great start, but we have a regatta to win!”

CSA Racing 2 Andy Middleton’s First 47.7, Global Yacht Racing,/EH01 chartered by Bill Blain on behalf of the Royal Southern Yacht Club, took line honours and the win after time correction. Plymouth, UK skipper, Nigel Passmore’s J/133, Apollo 7 was second. Texan Jim Hightower’s racing King 40, Hot Ticket was third.

“None of us sailed perfectly today but we had a great battle,” beamed Bill Blain at the prizegiving.  “We had a spinnaker wrap which cost us, but we got ourselves back with some good positioning. We know all about Apollo 7 and know how well that team sails and it was great to mix it with the Texan team on Hot Ticket. We had a good laugh with them afterwards and they know exactly what they are doing on the water.”

CSA Racing 3 First 40.7 Profile Logic, from the Sailing Logic race training school in Hamble UK scored a memorable victory, beating Carlo Falcone’s Caccia alla Volpe to the line and also took the win on corrected time. It was a family affair on Caccia alla Volpe as Carlo was racing with his wife Paolo and their 14 year old son, Rocco. Peter Hopps Sigma 38, Sam of Hamble was third. In the Bareboat Class, Mario Bacchelli’s Argentinian team racing Sapphire Dancer was the winner, whilst in the Multihull Fun Class, the winner was Canter de Jager’s Trimaran, Contour 34, Rebel.

Antigua Sailing Week runs from Sunday 26th April to May 1st. For more information visit www.sailingweek.com.

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GUNBOAT 66 PHAEDO: Shifting Into Cruising Mode

When I first stepped aboard the bright orange Gunboat 66 Phaedo while chatting up ARC sailors here in Rodney Bay, I had no idea at first who I was talking to. A soft-spoken not-quite-clean-shaven young man in a t-shirt invited me aboard after I hailed the boat from the dock, and I naturally assumed he must be crew. He eagerly pointed out the skipper (Paul Hand, on the left up top) and some of the other folks aboard, and it was only after I inquired directly as to his own identity that he admitted, a bit bashfully, that he was in fact owner of the boat.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Lloyd Thornburg (on the right up there) certainly doesn’t look or act like someone who has just dropped what must be something north of $4 million to build the boat of his dreams. But he sure does know what to do with it. Since departing Cape Town, South Africa, where the boat was born, in November of last year, Lloyd has raced Phaedo successfully in the Caribbean circuit early this year, in the Transatlantic Race this past summer, and in the Fastnet Race, in which his photo chase boat rescued the crew of Rambler 100 after she lost her keel and capsized just past Fastnet Rock.

Learning this, you might assume Lloyd is balls-to-the-wall racing royalty, but in fact his roots in the sport are modest and decidely cruising oriented. The first boat he ever owned was a Soling (which he did not race), then he sailed a Pacific Seacraft Dana 24, followed by a Bristol Channel Cutter 28, and then a 37-foot steel Amazon, which he cruised singlehanded around the West Indies for a while.

Then came a quantum leap to a Gunboat . Lloyd doesn’t have an entirely coherent explanation of how that happened, beyond saying that he saw one and fell in love with it. If Gunboats didn’t exist and he bought a boat “off the shelf,” as he puts it, he admits it would most likely be a Hallberg Rassy, a brand he has long admired.

When he ordered Phaedo he clearly conceived of her as a cruising boat, but somewhere in there it seems he was thoroughly seduced by the aesthetic of carbon fiber and the cutting edge of modern boat construction. By the time she was finished, Phaedo was the most aggressively built Gunboat to date in terms of weight reduction, complete with a state-of-the-art distributed-power system fed by lithium batteries.

These days I’d say Lloyd is a true cruiser/racer. A veritable Carleton Mitchell for the 21st century. His eyes do light up when discussing the performance of his boat. She’ll average 300 miles a day when she’s in race mode (her best day so far has been 385), with more than 4 tons of gear and fluids left ashore, and 240 a day when she’s in cruising mode. When I asked, half in jest, whether he’d ever flown a hull on Phaedo , Lloyd immediately answered, eyes brighter than ever: “Yes, all the time. Sometimes, I swear, it feels like we get both of them out of the water.”

And, as you can see in this video here, he really isn’t kidding about that.

It seems he particularly enjoyed the Fastnet Race. He tells an amazing story about how they almost didn’t make the start. A boat struck Phaedo the day before and damaged one hull, and through a miraculous series of coincidences it was barely possible to get it repaired in time. Phaedo was third around the rock, right after Rambler , and Lloyd’s photo boat was right on the scene, waiting to snap pix, but got sidelined into rescuing people instead.

“We were just 15 minutes from retiring from the race to join the search,” explains Lloyd. “But then we got word they recovered everyone. Just think–if we hadn’t repaired our hull in time, the photo boat wouldn’t have been there, and the next boat was two hours behind us.”

Clearly, the drama of all this captivated the young man, but still there’s a big part of Lloyd that just wants to go cruising. He entered Phaedo in the cruising division of the ARC, because he wanted to use his engines when the wind got light, and because he wanted to eat some real turkey on passage for a change instead of freeze-dried food. Phaedo was third boat over the line, and might easily have been first if she’d been in race mode, but right now that doesn’t seem so important to Lloyd and his crew.

“It was a lot nicer not having to chase some Volvo 70 around a course,” he admits.

Lloyd says he’s not entirely sure whether he’ll be racing or cruising around the Caribbean this season. But talking to him yesterday, I’d say he’s leaning very strongly toward spending a lot more time in the slow lane.

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Ok…this is my dream boat!!! Thanks for sharing such amazing info!

We were looking forward to seeing your CAT passing by our window on the way into Honolulu. We hope you decide to try again in the in 2015. We sail small CATS and at the present time we have have a Hobie Getaway that we trailer to Kaneohe Bay on the opposite side of Oahu.

Aloha, Bob and Ginger Thornburg

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The first Gunboat, a 62 named Tribe, started out as a fairly spartan family cruiser (well, for Gunboat, anyway). Then came the 48. And then came the 66.

For many, the best Gunboat As the orders came in, new owners wanted more space  and the ability to carry more load for luxury kit, and so Peter Johnstone with Morrelli & Melvin added feet to meet the demand while keeping performance levels up and the Gunboat 66 was born. This length has since become the “sweet spot” for Gunboats with the new Gunboat 68 coming in at a similar length.

The extra feet gave room for four en-suite staterooms plus crew quarters with a huge living platform.

Photo credit from Instagram: @safeharbornewportshipyard, @gareth.m.reeves, @eastcoastsailor, @bruceslayden, @seabreezeart

• Blistering sailing performance on all points of sail. The aim? Regular 300 nm days.
• The organisation of the boat, highlighted by that forward working cockpit
• The visibility and ventilation in the saloon
• The price. At least you won’t be spending as much as you would on a brand new Gunboat 68!
• Not as pretty as some of the other Gunboats. Thats subjective, I know, but she does look like they stretched the 62, but hey, I’m splitting hairs here. I’ve got to put something in the “Cons” section.

Sailing Performance

This is a Gunboat, and the Gunboat 66 doesn’t disappoint in this department of course. Even with all of your kit on, you will be sailing faster than the wind in single digit wind speeds and when the breeze fill in, the Gunboat 66 takes off onto a mid teen to 20 knot gallop. This is a boat that has inspired a number of newer designs such as the O-Yachts Class 6 catamaran and the HH66.

Signature Gunboat The forward cockpit feels like the nerve centre of the Gunboat 66. It’s the trademark for this luxury brand, a configuration inspired by Chris White’s Atlantic cats, and the perfected for this 66 footer.

You can control all of the sail systems from here and it’s organised to Space-X levels. Many Gunboats have a secondary wheel in the cockpit (another Chris White innovation) so that you can helm and manage your lines at the same time. 2 powered winches help with the considerable loads, with a manual winch for the mainsheet and traveller. The anchor windlass is also controlled from this space with foot controls. Although this is a 66′ performance cat, the systems have been designed for a short handed crew.

The aim is for 300+ mile days.  The self-tacking jib track allows you to head upwind easily with dagger-boards in each hull maximising your VMG. Because the 66 sails at such a clip, she generates her own wind, so you’ll be packing plenty of flat-cut sails to move you upwind in lighter winds.

It’s Carbon Baby Pretty much everything on these boats is built of carbon fiber. The designers went over the 66 with a fine toothcomb to keep the weight down and the result is a ultra-weight cruiser with the sail power, beam and length to carve up the field in a regatta.

Living Accomodation

The fully protected roomy aft deck flows seamlessly into the open plan saloon with it’s galley and sofas with the traditional Gunboat forward helm that spills out into the forward cockpit and working area.

Views. And Then Some. The most astonishing feature inside the saloon is the 360-degree views. Do you like a sea view? Prepare to spend much of your time with your mouth hanging open and with that forward cockpit door open, there is no need for air con: the breeze flows through the length of the boat. Most owners have fitted A/C anyway for marina days.

Down below are 4 queen sized en-suite cabins.

Under Power

The original power package was twin Volvo 55s, but many owner’s have upgraded to 75s.  They’ll push those fine cut bows along at 8.5 knots on one engine in a kind sea and 9.5 knots with both engines going.

Gunboat 66s

66-01 Coco De Mer (ex-Kanaloa)

66-02 Outnumbered (ex Flash, (ex-Panthera, ex-Mayhem, ex-Sugar Daddy first to circumnavigate)

66-03 Moondoggie (ex Tiger Lily, ex-Gazelle)

66-04 Phaedo (2010)

66-05 Laguz

66-06 Slim (8/2012 – finished at Jaz Marine)

66-07 Extreme H2O (finished on West Coast at Westerly)

Gunboat 66 Polars

Another design classic  from Gunboat. The 66 slips fast upwind, tacks tightly and roars away down wind while giving you all of the comfort and space of a luxury cruising cat. With its dagger-boards and retractable rudders, the 66 can take you places in the Bahama Banks and other shallow water destinations that luxury monohulls can only dream of.

Technical Specification

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Luxury Catamaran

World leading source of information on luxury cruising multihulls

July 28, 2013

Augustus - gunboat news.

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