It all started after doing the Baha Ha-Ha in the fall of 2000 on my Newport 33 "Tiger Beetle" I ended up in La Paz in the Sea of Cortez.
After sailing some 1500 miles from San Francisco to Baja California I decided that I wanted a larger boat, Tiger Beetle is a great boat but she is a little on the small side to spend long periods of time on, and that is the plan for the future.

After the finish of the Baja Ha-Ha in Cabo San Lucas we shared the finger pier with Profligate a 63' catamaran and the mother ship of the Baja HaHa. I liked the speed and the room of a boat like that and I spend a lot of time looking over that and other catamarans owned by people I met in the trip down. Researching the price of these gave me a severe case of sticker shock. A modern used cruising catamaran in the 40 foot range sells for 200k and up and that was a little out of my budged..

Then the light bulb came on and I decided to build one myself and save the labor cost and also have the satisfaction of building my own boat.
The next step was to figure out what kind of cat to build and that took several month of looking over designs. I pretty much immediately scrapped the ugly ones and spend another month going back and forth between several designs.

Around June 2001 I settled on a design by Gary Lidgard for a 43' performance cruising catamaran and I purchased the plans shortly after. Gary had to make some minor design changes from the stock plans for me and the plans arrived in the late summer of 2001.
The hunt for a piece of land to build it on started. I live in on a house boat in downtown San Francisco and I did not want to have to travel to far to get to the work site as that would not allow me to spend an hour here or there working on it.

It is now late December 2001 and I am sitting on Tiger Beetle in the Marina La Paz working on this web site and it looks like I will be signing a lease with the Port of San Francisco for a small piece of water front land about 3 minutes from my house overlooking the San Francisco bay and about 200 yards from the Bay View Boat Club, my favorite watering hole. I don't know if that is going to be a good thing or a bad thing but I figure I will probably get lots of advice from my fellow club members if I need it or not.

ROTKAT is a Dutch word that means #%$@*!! CAT And I am sure that I will have to say that a couple of times before this project is over.

Arjan