When you hear the term Catamaran Distance Racing you probably think of the "ironman" events like the former Worrell 1000 or the new Tybee 500, Great Texas Catamaran Race, Outer Banks 500, or the combined Atlantic 1000. These are events only available to the very best catamaran sailors who are also well funded and blessed with plenty of free time.

But what about the rest of us who love to get a chance to sail our cats in open water? There is an event in Ocean Springs Mississippi, organized by the Coast Catamaran Club (CCC) and hosted by the Ocean Springs Yacht Club (OSYC), that allows us to get a taste of sailing "out there" with just the dolphins for company, without breaking the bank or our boat. It's the Slip To Ship Regatta, May 29-30, Memorial Day weekend. Racing in an informal atmosphere from OSYC to Ship Island, a low barrier island about 14 miles offshore. The format gives you the feeling of a much longer race since it can be difficult to spot Ship Island until you have sailed straight out into the Gulf of Mexico 8 or 9 miles, but the reward of eating the "best chicken ever" will be waiting on the island as you swap stories about your crossing.

You probably will not find a regatta with the diversity of catamaran sailboats in one race, of course the latest cats and hotshots will be there, the I20's, 18HT's, I17's and FX-1's will be represented, but a lot of us will be there in our old Prindles and Hobies joining in the fun. It's also one of the best regattas to convince your non-sailing "significant other" to join you for the weekend, accommodations within 1/2 mile include everything from free camping on the grounds to 4 star hotels across the bridge at the Biloxi Casinos.

Den Burg, April 22nd 2004 – After the first two weeks of subscription, the 27th Zwitserleven Round Texel already counts three hundred participants. As of April 1st, sailors can register themselves for the world’s biggest catamaran race. On Saturday June 5th will start their battle against the elements. They will have to face the surf at ‘Paal 17’, the current, wind and waves during the long-distance of hundred kilometres. The ProAm-race on June 4th will offer press, sponsors and relationships a foretaste. But anticipatory pleasure can also be found in the promo area.

About six hundred catamarans are expected to appear at the starting line of the 27th Zwitserleven Round Texel. As soon as the helicopter gives a smoke signal, the coloured fleet leaves for the light house in the north and returns by the Waddensea to the finish at the North Sea. If the wind is sufficient, the first finishers need about 3,5 hours for rounding Texel. Tros Radio 3FM will broadcast live from the beach.

Every once in a while we will run an article on the "super sized" beachcats that are out there. These performance oriented catamarans fill a unique niche in our sport. This article first appeared in Yachting Magazine, August, 1979.

THERE ARE, to be honest, few really new production boats, vessels of such original conception that they demand a different yardstick by which to judge them. In recent years, the first Hobie cat and the J-24 are two examples of new concepts that have succeeded, but there are far more failures--hoats with a single, brilliant idea that are lacking elsewhere, boats whose builders have just enough funds to go off half-cocked, boats that are exciting but not quite thrilling enough to cause cautious buyers to break from convention.

And if the person who builds a genuinely different boat faces these odds to begin with, the creator of a new concept in multihulls has an even greater problem making the leap to credibility, just because it's a multihull. Given this state of affairs, the early success of the 27-foot Stiletto is remarkable: Not only is it a boat that breaks ground in several directions at once, but it's a catamaran as well.

In Beach Cats, it came as no surprise that Puerto Rico's 2004 Olympic Tornado team of Enrique Figueroa and crew Jorge Fernandez aboard Movistar/Suzuki/Red Bull defended their title, winning three races to clinch their four-race series and top 12 boats. This was the first year in recent history that the Beach Cats were not divided into spinnaker and non-spinnaker classes. Sailing to a Portsmouth handicap while other classes sailed to the Caribbean Sailing Association rating rule, the Beach Cats were dominated by Figueroa's Hobie Tiger, an 18 footer with spinnaker that is popular in Europe and is similar to Figueroa's Olympic Tornado. Close on his heels in second was the Hobie 16 Exodus/Ensysa, sailing without a spinnaker and skippered by another, but unrelated, Enrique Figueroa, also from Puerto Rico.

Two notable women's skippers--Rosarita Martinez (Carolina, PR) aboard the Hobie 16 Yuisa and Susan Korzeniewski (Liverpool, N.Y.), sailing the Hobie 16 WOW--competed in preparation for the Hobie 16 Worlds to be held in Cancun the first week of May. Martinez, who has sailed this event for the past five years and won her class in 2001, is the 2003 Hobie 16 Continental Women's Champion. Korzeniewski is a past Continental Women's Champion and a veteran of the grueling Worrell 1000 event for catamarans. Martinez and Korzeniewski finished fourth and eighth, respectively.

Read more for the rest of the Rolex Wrap-up and complete results. Hi Res Regatta Pictures

Yahoo.com chooses TheBeachcats.com as a source for sailing news.

Yahoo! recently introduced a new content feature to their My.Yahoo.com page that allows users to display RSS news feeds directly in their customized page. I was pleased to find that TheBeachcats.com is listed as a news source for keywords 'sailing' and 'catamaran'. This means that news, stories, announcements, and tips that you submit to TheBeachcats.com will get even wider readership than before. TheBeachcats.com was already syndicated by major news syndicators like Moreover, News Now (UK), and Syndic8.com so this will bring catamaran sailing news to even more people.

Of course, I would like it if everyone just used TheBeachcats.com as their home page, but this is the next best thing. You can display up to 10 headlines from this site directly in your My.Yahoo.com page. And don't forget that you can syndicate the headlines from TheBeachcats.com on your own website by following the directions at Web Syndication Instructions.