Eight New Cats Splash at Cannes Next Week. Here's the One Number I'll Read First.

Eight new sailing catamarans go in the water at Port Canto on Tuesday. Two of them weigh 18 tonnes and cost about €800,000. One weighs 10.5 tonnes and costs €1.4 million. Every brochure at Cannes will lead with the forward cockpit, the flybridge lounge, the number of cabins. I'll be reading a different line first, and it's the one most builders print smallest: light displacement.

I won't be in Cannes. We have four kids under six and I'm a wealth advisor in Bend, Oregon, which means the second week of September is back-to-school and quarter-end, not the Côte d'Azur. But I've been working through spec sheets for our own boat for long enough now that I've stopped reading them the way the marketing departments want me to. So here's how I'd walk the docks if I were there, and why one number does most of the sorting.

The eight boats, sorted the way nobody sorts them

YACHT's Michael Good published the multihull preview two weeks ago with hull length, weight, and base price for each debut. I converted, divided, and re-ordered. Displacement per foot of hull length is a crude metric, but crude metrics that you can compute from the brochure are worth more than sophisticated ones you can't.

• Outremer 48 — 48.0 ft, 10.5 t (23,100 lb), ~219 kg per foot. From €1,416,000.
• Windelo 55 Sport — 53.3 ft, 12.8 t (28,200 lb), ~240 kg/ft. From €1,844,500.
• Leopard 43 — 42.6 ft, 14.7 t (32,400 lb), ~345 kg/ft. From €712,800.
• Fountaine Pajot FP 48 — 47.3 ft, 18.4 t (40,600 lb), ~389 kg/ft. From €799,640.
• Aquila 50 Sail — 49.1 ft, 19.2 t (42,300 lb), ~391 kg/ft. From €1,409,900.
• Lagoon 47 — 45.8 ft, 18.0 t (39,700 lb), ~393 kg/ft. From €809,200.
• Simbad 55 — 57.7 ft, 28.0 t (61,700 lb), ~485 kg/ft. From €3,558,100.
• Fountaine Pajot FP 55 — 55.7 ft, 32.1 t (70,800 lb), ~576 kg/ft. From €1,660,000.

(The Aquila 45 Sail is also debuting at 14.38 m and 16.1 t, but the yard hasn't published a price, so I've left it off the ranking. And a caveat that matters: builders are not consistent about whether "weight" means light ship, half-load, or something in between. Treat the numbers as directionally right and the ordering as more reliable than any single figure.)

Look at the gap. The Lagoon 47 and the Outremer 48 are within two feet of each other in length and within €600,000 in price, and the Lagoon carries 80% more weight per foot. That's not a styling difference. That's two completely different answers to the question "what is this boat for."

What you're actually paying for

Divide price by displacement and the picture gets sharper. The Lagoon 47 comes in around €45,000 per tonne. The FP 48 is about €43,000 per tonne. The Outremer 48 is roughly €135,000 per tonne, and the Windelo 55 Sport about €144,000. You are paying three times as much for every kilogram of boat, and what you're buying is the absence of the other kilograms: vacuum-infused laminates, foam core where the production yards use solid glass and plywood, carbon in the Windelo's rig, daggerboards and their trunks instead of stub keels, and a deck and interior that were engineered to a weight budget rather than to a showroom.

That is the whole trade. Nobody at Outremer or Windelo is going to tell you the Lagoon is a bad boat, because it isn't. Lagoon has built over 7,000 catamarans and the 46 was one of the best-selling cats in its size for most of the last decade. The 47 that replaces it will almost certainly be the best-selling boat at the show. Heavy production cats are heavy because heaviness is cheap, and cheap-per-foot is what most of the market wants. A 46-foot boat with four cabins, a flybridge, and a forward cockpit for €809,000 is an astonishing amount of floating real estate. If your plan is the Med in summer and the Caribbean in winter with a charter-management contract paying the slip fees, the ranking above is upside down and the Lagoon 47 is the right boat.

Our plan is not that. Our plan is five years and roughly 30,000 miles with six people aboard, and a big chunk of those miles are downwind in 15–25 knots of trade wind where a 10.5-tonne boat with daggerboards will average 8.5–9 knots and an 18-tonne boat with stub keels will average 6.5–7. On a 3,000-mile Galápagos-to-Marquesas leg that's the difference between 14 days and 19. Multiply that across a circumnavigation and it's weeks of extra exposure to weather, weeks less in anchorages, and a meaningfully different fatigue budget for two adults standing every watch.

The part the performance yards don't lead with

Here's the honest other side, and it's the one I keep coming back to on the worksheet. Light boats are more sensitive to what you put in them.

Our payload for a family of six on a five-year trip is not small. Two adults, four kids who will be 5 through 9 by the time we're mid-Pacific, water and fuel for a 20-day leg, three months of provisions before a Pacific crossing, a 3.4-metre RIB and 20 hp outboard, a full spares kit, a medical kit that's already the subject of its own post, dive compressor, school books, and the 800 lb of lithium and solar that any modern cat carries. I've been estimating 2,800–3,200 kg all-in, and I suspect I'm still low.

Add 3,000 kg to an 18-tonne Lagoon and you've increased its displacement by 17%. Add it to a 10.5-tonne Outremer and you've increased it by 29%. Every performance cat's polar diagram was drawn at light ship or a modest half-load, and the number the yard quotes for max payload is real but the boat is not the same boat at that number. Waterline goes up, bridgedeck clearance goes down, and the margin you paid €600,000 for shrinks with every case of canned tomatoes. This is exactly why you see Outremer owners with a kitchen scale in the galley and why the used market has plenty of "performance" cats that have been sailing at production-cat speeds for years because the owners filled them up.

The heavy boat is more forgiving of you. It was designed to carry a charter party of eight and their luggage without changing character. It'll carry our six and change character less. That is a genuine argument for the Lagoon or the FP, and it's one I don't hear the performance crowd make on the other yard's behalf.

Three things I'd check on the dock that aren't on the spec sheet

Bridgedeck clearance, loaded. The number that matters is the gap between the water and the underside of the bridgedeck with the boat sitting at cruising displacement, not in the brochure rendering. On a 46–48 foot cat I want to see at least 75 cm (30 in), and closer to 85 cm on the lighter boats that are going to squat when we load them. The production cats have been getting lower for years because interior headroom sells and clearance doesn't. You can measure it with a tape from the dinghy dock. Take the tape.

The forward cockpit door. The Lagoon 47's headline feature is a door from the saloon directly into a huge forward cockpit. The FP 48, the Aquila 45 and 50, and the Simbad all have forward cockpits too. It's clearly what the market wants. I'm not sold on it for offshore work with small kids. It's a large opening in the front of the saloon, on the face of the boat that takes green water when you bury a bow, and it's a second route for a four-year-old to get to the foredeck without passing an adult in the cockpit. I'd want to see how it dogs shut, what the sill height is, and whether the yard has a hard cover for it or is relying on the door itself. If I couldn't get good answers I'd consider it a liability I was paying for.

Where the helm is and what you can see from it. Flybridge helms put the driver 3 metres above the water and 6 metres from the cockpit where the kids are. Bulkhead helms on the Outremer and Windelo keep you at deck level, with a view of the sails and the person in the cockpit, and a wet ride when it's blowing. There's no right answer, but there's a right answer for a specific crew, and ours is two adults who are never both free at once. I'd stand at every helm on the show and imagine a 0300 sail change with a kid awake below.

The boat I'd walk to first

The Outremer 48. Not because I've decided we're buying one — the 51 and the 52 are still on our list and a well-kept 2019–2021 Outremer 51 at $1.1–1.3M is the boat I think about most — but because it's the newest example of the only design philosophy on the show that starts from the same question we're asking. It replaces a legendary boat, the 45, and it does it with ten layout options, centreboards, and a light displacement that leaves real room for our 3,000 kg before it turns into a production cat.

Second, the Windelo 55 Sport, because I want to see whether a 12.8-tonne 53-footer with a carbon rig at €1.84M is a serious cruising boat or a fast one that will need $60,000 of owner modifications before it's ready for the Pacific. The price puts it well above our budget, but the engineering is where the category is going and I'd rather see it now than read about it later.

Third, and this is the one that would surprise the performance crowd, the FP 48. At €800,000 it's the most boat for the money on the show, and Fountaine Pajot has been quietly closing the seakeeping gap with the performance yards for a decade. If the bridgedeck clearance is honest and the forward door dogs like a hatch, it's a real candidate for a family that would rather spend the €600,000 difference on five years of cruising than on two knots of boat speed. I ran that exact trade in the cost framework post last month and it's closer than I expected.

What I'll do with the spec sheets when the show closes

Every debut goes into the worksheet. The eight boats above get scored on the same 47 criteria as the used listings I've been tracking, and I'll publish the ranking the week after the show with the yard-quoted numbers replaced by whatever the sea trial reports say once YACHT, Multihulls World, and Sail publish them. My prediction, for the record: the Outremer 48 tops the list, the FP 48 lands in the top five and above the Lagoon 47, and the two 55s and the Simbad fall out on price and displacement before anything else gets scored.

If I'm wrong about the FP 48, it changes our plan. A family that can get 90% of the seakeeping for 55% of the money buys a different boat, sails a year earlier, and keeps €600,000 working in a portfolio for the whole trip. That's not a small thing for a wealth advisor to write down. So I'd rather be right, but I'd rather know.