The $575,000 Catana 47 with a $200,000 receipt and no new sails

The Multihull Company has a 2010 Catana 47 lying in Charleston at $575,000. She's called Trident Tides, four cabins and four heads, and the listing leads with the line that always gets my attention: more than $200,000 in recent upgrades.

I read that line the way I read a client's brokerage statement. Not "how much did you spend," but "what did you spend it on, and what does the absence tell me."

Here's what's on the receipt. New 2025 Yanmar 57s with new SD-60 saildrives. New thru-hulls. Updated instrumentation. Renewed fire suppression. 800 watts of solar, a 2019 Onan 7.5 kW genset, an Aqua-Base watermaker, a 2025 Raymarine Quantum radar, Starlink, and a bow locker converted into a workshop. Somebody who actually uses boats spent that money. Repowering a 47-foot cat is a genuinely miserable job, and doing it with new saildrives and new thru-hulls at the same time is the correct order of operations. Whoever owned this boat wasn't dressing her for sale.

Now the absence. Two words don't appear anywhere in that list: sails, and rigging.

A 2010 boat is on original standing rigging unless someone says otherwise, and sixteen years is well past the point where underwriters get interested. Every offshore quote I've collected for the 50-foot cat we're researching has had a rigging clause buried in it somewhere — usually ten to fifteen years, sometimes phrased as "or last professional inspection." A re-rig on a Catana 47 runs $25,000 to $35,000 depending on whether the mast has to come out. Sails are worse. A performance cat asks more of its sail plan than a Lagoon does, and a full wardrobe here — main, self-tacker, screacher, code zero — is $35,000 to $45,000 from a loft that will actually cut for a daggerboard boat. Call it $70,000 to $80,000 for the pair.

Then the boards themselves. Catana's lifting daggerboards are the whole reason you buy a Catana instead of a Fountaine Pajot — they're what let her point, and what keep her from sliding sideways down a wave face on a beam reach. They are also the most expensive thing on the boat to get wrong. Case wear and bearing condition do not show up in photographs. That's a haulout and a surveyor who has seen a Catana before, not a general multihull guy with a moisture meter.

I'd add a Mantus M2 105 on 300 feet of 3/8 G4 — about $4,500 — because I'm not taking anyone's word on ground tackle with four kids aboard.

So: $575,000 asking, with $75,000 to $85,000 of deferred maintenance I'm fairly confident is sitting behind that number, plus a survey risk on the boards I can't size from a desk in Bend. Applying the 7.2% median discount I wrote about last week gets you $534,000, and I think that's the wrong way to run the math on this particular boat. The discount is an aggregate. This boat has specific problems, and specific problems price better than averages do.

What I'd offer with my own money: $495,000, subject to survey, rig inspection, and a board-case report. If the boards come back clean, I've bought a fully repowered performance cat with fresh electronics for roughly $570,000 all-in once the rig and sails are sorted — call it $60,000 under where a comparable Outremer 45 trades, for a boat with more volume and enough cabins to put every kid somewhere.

If the boards are chewed, I walk, and I've spent about $3,000 finding out.

That's still the cheapest research I do.