We want to thank everyone who participated in AeroCat's November Demo Days.  This was a huge success, below is a recap of the trip.  Let us know where you would like to see demo's available, just call (814)-602-9286.

AeroCat's break through design and building process offers you the highest performing, most fuel efficient power cat in the world, a test ride will prove it.

Hulls are built using Airex foam core, biaxial fiberglass cloth & epoxy resin.

The versatility and stability of the AeroCat design makes it adaptable to any configuration.  Whether you want a center console, sport fisherman, dive boat, yacht tender, work boat or a trailerable trawler, AeroCat Marine will deliver your custom boat at a price you can afford!

Every AeroCat boat is custom hand made to your specifications by American craftsmen.
Due to the fact each boat is unique, catalogs are not available, detailed information is on the website,
which is updated  on a regular basis.  Call Terry Olsen at 814-602-9286 for more information.

November Demo Days;
In Search Of The Perfect (affordable) Boat
By Ken Handman, designer of Aero Cat Catamarans

This is a four page recap of  our most recent “Demo Days” event and some of the thoughtful questions and answers generated by the presence of tropical storm Ida. In an attempt to describe why Aero Cat boats are superior in the challenging sea conditions observed during ten days of sea trials we have included some in depth technical descriptions of Aero Cat engineering features. It is not necessary to read this if you have limited time or little interest in technical details of catamarans, because this web site contains all the basic information about our boats, plus we will be happy to answer any further questions by phone.

The inspiration for writing this piece comes from a long 3800 mile road trip that I completed recently. The journey was in my trusty F-150 pick up towing one of our twenty one foot center console cats. Aero Cat Marine is only two years old and we are located near Erie, PA, not the easiest place to get to for a test ride. My partner in the business, Terry Olsen kept telling me that we had a lot of folks that were very interested in our trawlers and fishing boats, but didn’t have the time to travel to Lake Erie. So we decided to go on a road trip to demonstrate the performance of our boats by taking as many people as possible out on the water for a test ride.
During the course of this trip some intense weather conditions prevailed and a number of interesting questions arose, so we will answer them as we tell this story.

Terry and I drove nearly straight through to the New Orleans area and met some extremely knowledgeable boat guys and one gal. These folks fish Lake Pontchartrain, the Gulf of Mexico and out to the offshore oil platforms. They used to own competent fishing boats in the 20’-28’ range, but Katrina took their boats away. Now that they have their homes and lives rebuilt they are ready to go fishing again. Only this time they want a boat that can better handle the extreme weather and seas that the Gulf serves up. This is why they expressed an interest in  Aero Cat boats.

After a few days of fun in the New Orleans area Terry had to fly home to run the business and I went on alone. Next stop was Panama City, FL, then the plan was to head to South Carolina and on up the Eastern Seaboard where we had fishermen and Loopers (as in cruising the Great Loop) scheduled to take test rides in every state bordering the Atlantic ocean up to NY. This was all carefully planned to coincide with the end of hurricane season. As most of us weather watchers know we never get hurricanes after the end of October, but….not this year, because hurricane Ida decided that she would surprise us and pay a visit in November.

What followed was a twelve hundred mile slog up the coast, through intermittent tropical storm, rain squalls, plain old heavy rain and then light rain, also lots of wind. The only stop that had to be canceled was in NC. The rest of the guys were so determined to get to know the boat that we went ahead and ran her in some pretty dicey conditions. After all, the primary feature of  Aero Cat boats is their rough water capability, and these guys wanted to see if she could handle the conditions. The weather finally cleared on the last demo day on the Hudson River, a perfect day for boating.

Okay, that’s the background, now let’s talk about the trip and get into some of the comments heard along the way. The comments are of particular interest due to the extreme weather conditions. The least enthusiastic comments, voiced by a fair number of  the most experienced guys, professional captains and guides, was “this is this the best small boat I have ever run.” The reaction from the non-professionals, mostly men in their late 50s to early 70s, was more like watching kids open gifts on Christmas morning. After returning to the launch ramp, I heard comments such as, “Oh my god, this is the boat that I have been looking for, for …(fill in the blank)...years. “Unbelievable how fast (16-25 mph depending on conditions) we were going under these conditions, my friend’s Bertram 32 (also Boston Whaler, Glacier Bay, World Cat), etc. could never run at those speeds, under these conditions. On and on the comments went. The worse the sea conditions, the more intense and positive the comments. In some of the small craft harbors the park ranger or dock master would come down to the sea wall to watch “these idiots” go out in storm warning conditions. We ran in some crazy stuff and when we got the boat back in the harbor, it finally dawned on everyone and they said “we were running in five to six foot seas and never took a drop of water over the bow, I never dreamt that was possible.”

To put the above comments in context, we have to recognize that in most cases we were running close to the shore line, just in case the wind speed picked up further and we had to duck back to the marina quickly.  This close-to-the-shore line situation actually made the test ride more difficult because the water was shallow in-shore. The wind driven waves that had been running across thirty to forty foot depths suddenly were fetching up on fifteen foot shoal bottoms. This caused the face of the wave to take on a near vertical shape and reduced the wave frequency to the point where the distance between crests was little more than double the boat’s length. Really scary stuff in the average 21’ center console boat.

Why is a nearly vertical, five foot wave, running in a forty foot pattern so scary? Because most small boats do not have enough “reserve buoyancy” in the bow section to cause the boat to lift quickly enough to avoid “stuffing” (burying) the bow into tall waves and taking on a dangerous load of water. Let’s talk about reserve buoyancy for a minute. Before the wide, heavy deep V boats came on the scene in the mid 1960s, vessels with long thin hulls and sharp bows were the standard. They were easily driven by 125 HP flat head engines and could cruise comfortably in the 18-25 MPH range and deliver excellent (by today’s standards) fuel mileage. They could run comfortably in a chop because the sharp narrow bows cut through the waves, but operating in steep seas was a sea sick inducing challenge. Of particular concern was running down wind in a steep following sea, because the bow sections tended to become overwhelmed easily due to lack of buoyancy forward. The opposite type of hull is a modern deep V design  with adequate reserve buoyancy. Naturally, this boat has full bow sections and can support heavier loads than the vessel with the skinny vertical bow. Most modern boats and yachts have these fuller bows because the designer can plan for more load carrying capacity, larger heavier engines and larger fuel tanks.

 So that’s it? Modern vessels all need full bow sections?  Answer: yes, in today’s “me too” school of boat design where speed, (to hell with the fuel mileage) swoopy graphics and colors, complex molded interiors, ever more cup holders and beautiful upholstery are the primary design features.

Okay, so if all the modern boats have full bows, that must be the way to go, right?.…Not necessarily, let’s take a look at both styles:

Sharp, narrow bows combined with narrow hulls cut through small to medium chop much better than broad bows, giving the passengers a smoother ride under these conditions. Also, with proper design, the narrow bow permits the boat to achieve its top speed with smaller engines and less fuel consumption.

Full bows and wide hulls cause a boat to pound a little or a lot depending on the height of the waves encountered. However, when confronted with the steep waves we encountered on the demonstration rides, the full bow is considerably better suited for these conditions because it has more wetted surface available to lift the boat instead of driving into steep waves.

Now that we’ve had a primer on bow design, what the heck are we going to do with this information? Answer: what if we had both features on one catamaran?  What if the designer of the cat (me) adapted the narrow bow sections from one of the most famous sailboats ever built? A bow that famously cuts through choppy seas like nothing else, delivering an incredibly smooth ride. Then when the cat is confronted with steep waves, an airfoil style tunnel takes up where the bow sections leaves off. When confronted with very steep waves, the thin bows of the Aero Cat gradually loose the ability to support the front of the boat and permit the hull to settle into the water, until the very broad tunnel contacts the water. Or to put it into the words of one of the guys on my trip who experienced this, “the tunnel acted like a toboggan when we hit the steep waves. It lifted the boat at the bottom of the trough just like a toboggan at the bottom of a gully.” ….. That’s the story, bow sections similar to the Herreshoff designed Alerion sloop, now residing in the Mystic Seaport Museum at Mystic,CT, combined with a NACA-like airfoil tunnel, accomplish the best of both bow features. I know of no other boat in the world with this design.  

New design topic: weight.  Assuming you understand the unique dual qualities of the forward sections of the Aero Cat we can now talk about another subject that you rarely read about in magazines or the boating blogs, weight. Or more importantly, the power to weight (P/W) ratio of boats. Example: a boat that weighs 7500 pounds and uses a 250 HP engine, has a P/W ratio of 30. Over a lot of years in the world of motor sports I have had the privilege to drive, fly, ride and race some potent boats, cars, aircraft and motorcycles. Also build, rebuild and modify some of the these machines, all of which have one thing in common: the power to weight ratio of a performance machine is the single most important factor in determining the vehicle’s ability to compete.  Expressed in simple terms I learned that, all other things being equal, the machine with the best P/W ratio will go faster, corner quicker, burn less fuel and generally last longer than a heavier machine. Further, there is very little difference in  the P/W numbers between machines as diverse as motorcycles, cars, single engine aircraft and power boats. All of these machines can perform adequately in the 30 to 40 pounds per horsepower range. When you get close to the 20 P/W ratio, the machine takes on a different personality with sparkling performance. A P/W of 15 or less starts to put you into the high speed category and below ten is for professional drivers only.  

Now let’s look at how weight effects boats outside of the speed issues described above. In decades past most boaters subscribed to the theory that heavy boats rode smoother than light ones and generally the theory held up. But a lot has changed in the form of light weight composite construction techniques. Some boat builders have made the switch, but many have not. Instead, the primary thinking of the old days still prevail; heavy handlayed deep V fiberglass hulls, big engines and big fuel tanks. A very inefficient combination. Even modern catamarans still weigh as much as the conventional boats.  

So what if we reversed this process for building Aero Cat boats? We’ll start with two narrow, light weight hulls integrated into a platform that’s as wide as the V bottoms but a third the weight. Because the narrow hulls require a fraction of the power to plane-off and run on top of the water, instead of having to part the water, we can install light weight four cylinder outboard engines. The small engines burn a lot less fuel so we only need about a third of the fuel capacity. Now that there is less fuel and far lighter engines to deal with, we can build a lighter hull. We do that with a modern composite core construction resulting in unwinding the escalating weight scenario of the deep Vs. Result: Aero Cat boats deliver a P/W ratio in the 15-20 range with standard power and great fuel economy. In fact aside from the term “boat,” there is very little similarity between a heavy V bottom and an Aero Cat. Notice I didn’t say catamaran, as in all boats with twin hulls. Reason is that Aero Cat is almost as different from other cats as catamarans are to V bottoms.  

Summary: When you combine the unique forward section of the Aero Cats with the light weight, the result is a vessel that is clearly superior to any other in its size range. This concept applies all the way the across our line of boats, even the trawlers where the owner is not concerned with a low P/W ratio. The combination of light weight and the unique bow deliver fuel mileage and rough water performance that is not available in any other small trawler or fishing boat.

That’s my report on the trip and the primary questions on why Aero Cats are the most unique, affordable boats on the water. Call Terry to plan your custom built Aero Cat.