Roger Hatfield to speak at NEMA Annual Dinner Meeting, February 10 

Meet Roger Hatfield, co-founder of Gold Coast Yachts, at the NEMA Annual Dinner Meeting on Saturday, February 10. The festivities begin at 6 p.m. in the Boston Room at Anthony’s Pier 4. The Annual Dinner also features the 2000 NEMA Season Racing awards, a delicious buffet dinner and the year’s best opportunity to schmooze with over 100 NEMA members. (Reservation form and directions are on page 11. Registration deadline, February 5th.) 

Roger Hatfield first became interested in multihulls many years ago when he and his wife built, sailed and lived aboard their first boat, a Searunner 31' tri. Roger and his wife raced in several Trade Winds races and were largely responsible for starting the Caribbean Multihull Race. Roger began designing and building experimental multihulls, including a 34' foiler catamaran, which he later converted to trimaran. At about this time Roger and Richard Difede founded Gold Coast Yachts in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Since its founding in 1980, Gold Coast Yachts has earned a reputation for building high-quality trimarans and catamarans that not only carry passengers, but also win races. 

Gold Coast Yacht’s main business is designing and building catamarans for the day charter industry. Roger’s original passenger friendly layout of the late 1980s has been copied by many other designers and builders. Today the GCY cats carry about a million passengers a year. GCY’s latest project is a seventy-eight foot, wing-masted, schooner-rigged catamaran set up for 125 passengers. Early requests for power cats were met with the development of a unique wave-piercer style cat. This design evolved from Roger’s propensity to become “motion impaired,” his keen interest in the SWATH (Small Waterplane Area Twin-Hull) concept, and a sincere interest in fuel efficiency. An intuitive understanding of the weaknesses of the first two Australian wave-piercers and the second vessel’s generally accepted third bow solution led ultimately to a US patent for the Gold Coast Yachts’ style of wave-piercer. 

To date, Roger has designed and built 10 very successful wave-piercers ranging in length from 39' to 104'. Five of the 57 GCY vessels built to date are private cruisers; four are cats and one is very high performance 56' trimaran (Joe Colpitt’s Virgin Fire). These vessels introduced outside co-operative design work to GCY, a trend that has continued due to the increasing complexity and sophistication found in some of these vessels. 

Recently demand in the maturing day charter industry has shifted to larger vessels with more power. Of the 47 sailing vessels designed and built, sixteen have inboard power, with nine fitting Skene's definition of a motor sailer: the ability to power to windward faster than you can sail. Though most of the GCY boats have claimed sailing speeds in excess of twenty knots with large passenger loads onboard, Roger’s favorite is still the 54' Spirit of Kauai which he has claimed to be the “Worlds’ fastest motor sailer”. She ultimately hit 27 knots powering and sailed at speeds of 25 knots on her delivery to Hawaii. On a daily basis for the last seven years Spirit of Kauai has run her trip around the island of Kauai fully loaded cruising at 22 knots. She has opened many eyes to the potential for phenomenal motor sailing using the multihull platform.