Inside SOTW Mag: Sport Catamaran Roundup—Killer Six Pack

ByMatt Trulio

For the past year or so, TNT Custom Marine co-owner and speedonthewater.com columnist John Tomlinson had been urging us to put together a roundup of outboard engine-powered sport catamarans. He even offered the TNT facility in Miami as a possible venue. Naturally, as close observers of the go-fast powerboat market who’ve watched the sport cat segment explode, we were all in.

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For the six-man Speedonthewater.com crew, evaluating a half-dozen of today’s hottest sport catamarans was nothing but a privilege and a pleasure. Photo courtesy/copyright Pete Boden/Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.

But organizing powerboat roundups takes time, and by the time we finally settled on making this one happen during the late-August Super Cat Fest event at the Camden On The Lake Resort in Lake Ozark, Mo., Tomlinson had to bow out with a family commitment. To everyone’s relief and good fortune, well-known tunnel-boat racer Shaun Torrente was eager to join fellow high-performance marine industry veterans Grant Bruggemann and Bob Teague as professional test drivers for the roundup.

To evaluate the six sport cats from DCB Performance Boats, Fountain Powerboats, Mystic Powerboats, MTI, Pilini Marine and Wright Performance at the Camden On The Lake docks, we split into three test driver/ writer teams. A new contributor to speedonthewater.com, Jared Powell of Wave To Wave digital performance-boating magazine paired up with Teague, the test driver with the most experience.

While Torrente and Bruggemann are far from rookies, they were new to the testing protocols that became second nature for those of us who were part of the Powerboat magazine test team—Teague and the two speedonthewater.com co- publishers, Trulio and Johnson.

The drill was simple: Each team put each boat through the same set of drills, from time to plane and top speed to rough- water handling and low-speed tracking, and recorded the results. While all of the teams’ numbers were close, for the purposes of this article we used the best number achieved. across the three-team test group.

To read the full story, click the download link for the PDF of the September/October 2018 Speed On The Water magazine, and please share any feedback with us below, via email or on social media.