The 49-Foot Average: What 86 ARC Entries Say About the Boat I'm Pricing
The average boat crossing the Atlantic with the ARC is 14.9 metres, and a third of the fleet is multihulls — which made my 50-foot cat look a lot less like a stretch.
The number that stopped me this week: 14.9 metres. That's the average length of a boat in the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers this year, according to World Cruising Club's own entry figures. Call it 49 feet. It's almost exactly the size of the cats I keep pricing, and I'd assumed the typical crossing boat was smaller and older than what we're shopping for.
The second number is the one I'd have bet against. World Cruising Club says multihulls have doubled to a third of the fleet over the last ten years, and the December rally update calls this year's "a record-breaking third." That update counted 86 entries from 45 nations, 74 different designs or builders, boats launched anywhere from 1972 to 2024, and crew from 8 months old to 83. Nobody gave me a catamaran-only count, so I'm not going to invent one. But one boat in three is a lot of hulls.
Why it matters to me is less about fashion than about support. When a third of a fleet is multihulls, you get a crowd that has already solved the boring problems: how to haul a cat in the Canaries, who in Las Palmas knows saildrive seals, what the dock talk says about a particular daggerboard or bridgedeck design. Rally dock gossip is not a survey, and I'd treat it as a lead, not a verdict. Still, the more cats that cross, the faster the failure patterns get said out loud.
The history is a good reminder to keep my own plan in proportion. The first ARC in 1986 drew 204 entries from 24 countries. Since then, the organisers count 7,890 yachts and more than 30,000 people. That's a lot of families, retirees and first-timers who got across with a decent boat and a decent weather call. It doesn't make the crossing small. It does make it ordinary enough to prepare for properly.
What I'd actually do with this number: stop treating a 49-foot cat as the ambitious end of the range. For a family of six, it's the middle of the fleet. The harder question is the one the average hides. If the typical boat is 49 feet and a third are multihulls, what does a fully loaded family cat weigh at the dock in Las Palmas? I've already run that gap once against the Outremer 51's payload, and the answer wasn't comfortable.
I'm going to pull the rally's multihull entries next, by length and age, and see whether the family boats cluster where I think they do. If someone has seen the real division breakdown, I'd like to compare notes. My running boat list is in the worksheet.
