raingutter regatta catamaran profile--left

A Fast Raingutter Regatta Catamaran Design

 raingutter regatta catamaran profile--right

Looking for a fast, stable, good-looking Raingutter Regatta boat design? Here it is!  

Regatta catamaran in action These pages provide plans for a Raingutter Regatta catamaran that my two sons (and now several others) have used in winning pack races and "most original design" awards the past two years.  Included are pictures of boats, digital movies of actual races, and directions for building one of your own--all at no charge, as a service to Scouting.  The ideas behind the design are also listed to help you develop even better ones.

All materials needed (except paint, glue, and decorations) are in the Cub Scout kit, and it's not much more difficult to make than the standard boat (much easier than a good Pinewood Derby car, too). Check your local race rules before building to be sure that this design meets all of your pack or district's requirements.
Problems with the standard Raingutter Regatta boat design
Our boats--description, pictures, and movies
Why the CubCat design is better
Build It!
Project values
Decorating and racing tips for any boat
Copyright
Contact the author



Problems with the "Standard" Regatta Boat Design

Talk to anyone who has watched the standard Cub Scout raingutter regatta boat in a race, and you'll hear that it doesn't work well.   The design has a number of problems:
  1. It's too heavy.
  2. The center of gravity is high and the sail is too tall, so the boat rolls easily.
  3. Because of the shape of the hull (the pointy bow, in particular), the standard boat tends to steer to the side when it rolls.   So the boat first rolls, then turns to the side, and finally gets stuck sideways across the gutter as the bow drives into the wall.
  4. The curved (looking down from the top) sides of the hull tend to turn the bow into the side of the gutter when the boat brushes against it, again causing the boat to get stuck sideways.
  5. The sail design is inefficient, so scouts often have to blow hard to get the boat to move.  This behavior is unpredictable--depending on where the blow strikes the sail, the boat sometimes goes, and sometimes doesn't.   Scouts find this frustrating and tiring!
  6. The standard sail design easily gets caught on the edges of the gutter.
  7. Many scouts and Akelas don't know that the sail must be anchored to the mast or hull to prevent it from spinning.   A boat with a spinning sail won't move.

The CubCat...

The catamaran design described here overcomes all of these problems, providing a fast, stable, predictable boat that kids love racing and watching.  Here are pictures of the ones my scouts have built the last two years (scroll down for links to movies):

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regatta boats-rear


The blue boat is the oldest of the three, and is built to a 1-7/8" beam required by that district.  Since this was our first time building a cat, we played it safe and used masts.  It's a pack champion, and would have taken the district, but we moved away before the district race.  The other two boats were built for this year's race, in a district with no beam restrictions, so a 2.1" beam was used.  The sail design is more advanced--no masts were used, and the top spar was added.  These were the two fastest boats in a pack "fun race".  Well, the green, open-decked boat finished ahead (won 3 out of 4 heats head-to-head with the yellow-decked boat), but I think that better technique and the lung capacity advantage enjoyed by my Webelos scout had more to do with that than any feature of the boats.

And here are some movies of cats in action.  Best times to complete the course are under 4 seconds.  Stepping through these frame-by-frame shows that the boat gets "on plane" during a good blow!  The "self-righting" and steering improvements described below can also be seen.  Note the sizes--downloads may be slow. Sorry about all the face blurring--an unfortunate necessity these days.
Link / Description Type / Size
 Things to Look For...
CubCat vs standard boat
 320x240 QT (1.5 MB)
 Speed comparison w/ std boat; self-righting
CubCat vs keel-less standard boat
 320x240 QT (1.5 MB)
 Self-righting; planing; why std boat needs a keel!
CubCat vs CubCat
 320x240 QT (1.0 MB)
 Fastest runs here; planing; importance of technique


...and Why It's Better

A number of features make this design much faster and better-handling than the standard boat.  (Feel free to use these ideas in developing your own boat designs.)
  1. It's light--the boat can be built to perform well without the keel or mast in the kit (up to 50% weight savings).
  2. It's stable--the catamaran hull has much less tendency to roll than the standard one, and when it does roll, it doesn't steer to the side as much.  It naturally holds a very straight course down the gutter.
  3. The sides of the hull are straight, so when they brush against the side of the gutter, the boat doesn't turn its bow into the wall and get stuck.
  4. The sail design is more efficient, and is more forgiving of blows that aren't aimed perfectly into it.
  5. The sail edges won't get caught on the gutter.  In fact, the rounded front corners of this sail tend to bounce off of the edge of the gutter, so the boat often rights itself when it tips (you can see this happen in the movies).
  6. The sail is firmly anchored to the hull (can't spin).

Things Scouts Learn from This Project...

Besides learning a few basic things about sailboat types and design (what a catamaran is, importance of weight, center of gravity, sail shape/size, etc.), this project is a great way for scouts to experience that good ideas and "outside the box" thinking really do make things better, and that being "different" in an effort to make something better is good. My scouts quickly learned to handle the boat much better during practice (they could see their own progress), and came away with an appreciation for the value of practice and preparation, in general.  And it was fun!  The kids loved building and racing these "different" boats, and got many favorable comments at the races.



Copyright

The designs and boats shown here are original works by my sons and me.  This material is made available for personal, noncommercial use only.  While personal use and web links to these pages are welcome, redistribution or sale of this material in any form is prohibited without express written permission from the author.  Sports team and product logos used in boat decorations are owned by their owners (not me).  Other than such logos, all material on these pages copyright © 2002 by Carl Schott , all rights reserved.