After testing the Cove 16 on the Dart, I headed further west to see another multipurpose motorboat that’s small, trailable, able to go a long way on a gallon of fuel and designed to earn her keep in the local waters.

As her name suggests, the Powercat 525 has two hulls. With an outboard on each, she can hit 30 knots or more – not that getting from A to B as quickly as possible was what Barry Philpott had in
mind when he built the prototype seven years ago.

Barry, who runs the boatyard on Bryher, in the Isles of Scilly, was operating a fleet of hire boats at the time and needed a stable, seaworthy rescue craft that would be economical to run and easy to beach. Low freeboard, so he could haul people out of the water, was another essential.

Twin hulls seemed the logical approach, especially since he had already developed and built several larger catamarans on the islands. He refined the lines of the Powercat in conjunction with Rob Feloy, who worked with Nigel Irens on several projects including Enza, the giant cat in which Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and Peter Blake set a round-the-world record for the Jules Verne Trophy in 1994.

Despite her diminutive size, this is clearly a cat with pedigree, based on years of experience and with a good dose of high-tech know-how mixed in for good measure. It’s significant that, like the larger Cheetahs built by Sean Strevens on the Isle of Wight’s south coast, she was designed to do a job in treacherous waters where no single-hulled boat was a suitable alternative.

Having tested a number of motor catamarans in recent years including the Cheetah (PBO 404), the Motor Cat (PBO 450) and Andy Fox’s 24ft Ecocat, I have become convinced that these boats offer many significant advantages over their single-hulled equivalents.

But as the only one I’ve seen under 20ft (6.1m), the Powercat places herself in direct competition with hundreds of small RIBs, dories and sportsboats.

One of the crucial areas in which the cat scores is in fuel economy. Most boats will go fast if you fit big enough engines and can live with the cost and inconvenience of frequent re-fuelling, but Barry told me that a pair of Yamaha 15 four-strokes would drive the Powercat at about 17 knots and take her 90 miles or so on two 25lt tanks of petrol. A typical RIB of similar size would have at least 50hp on the stern, much of it needed to push the Veed hull over the hump and on to the plane.

Of the two cats I was going to try on Bryher, one was seven years old and running 15hp Yamahas, while the more recent one sported Yamaha 30s and a higher level of fit-out.

Barry explained that, in the early days, most Powercats were supplied as simplyequipped work-horses with small engines – often twin 9.9s, which are good for 12 knots. Over the past few years, however, he has found increasing demand for highperformance leisure boats with bigger engines and plusher seating, as on the newer version with the sportsboat finish.

Although this suggests that the boats are, perhaps, drifting away from their roots, the positive side is that the appeal of the power catamaran is finally being recognised by a wider audience.

As soon as you step aboard a Powercat, you appreciate her incredible stability: she hardly moves. The rectangular shape also means lots of usable deck space, with plenty of room for seating and stowage mouldings that you can ask Barry to arrange as you please.

Another attraction of the twin-hulled configuration is a deck that’s above the waterline, so any water drains through the transom scuppers and there’s no need for covers or bilge pumps.

The positive impression builds further as you set off, because the Powercat slices through the water totally unperturbed by wavelets that would normally cause slapping and banging on a RIB or conventional rigid monohull. I even took photographs standing on the bow of one boat as we ran parallel to the other at about 14 knots. If you let go of the wheel, nothing happens – the boat continues to run straight as you walk around the deck.

Wash at any speed is minimal. What little the boats produced was greatest at seven knots, and by 10 knots both versions barely left a ripple. Not surprisingly, the more fully-equipped model with the 30hp engines floated a couple of inches lower at the stern, but the only detectable difference in performance was at maximum speed. The 15s peaked at 18.5 knots, with the 30s reaching about 23 knots.
Barry reckoned a tweak to their alignment would have given us 26 knots.

Where the Powercat really showed her mettle was in the rough water between the islands. We had a Force 7 kicking up a 0.9-1.2m (3-4ft) chop on top of the Atlantic swell, so the trough-to-crest height was regularly over 1.8m (6ft). Yet on the boat with the twin 15s, I kept the throttles fully open as we made into the seas at 17 knots. We flew off a crest periodically, landing with a gentle thud and staying remarkably dry. Similarly, there was no need to throttle back with the waves on the beam, on the quarter or dead astern. ‘You won’t be able to do anything that will get me worried,’ Barry had assured me, so going down-hill I drove the boat into the troughs in a way I would otherwise never have done without a little familiarisation. Not once was there even a hint of a broach: every time the leeward bow popped up and the boat kept on tracking as if on rails.

Builder: Blue Boats,
Bryher Boatyard,
Isles of Scilly
TR23 0PR
 
Tel: 01720 423095
Fax: 01720 423011

Email: info@powercats.co.uk
Website: www.powercats.co.uk