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Left—The 57''/17.4m Nube Volante, an
early charter cat, was designed by Roger
Hatfield, a Gold Coast co-founder/owner.
The boat’s drawings are deceptively
simple. Hatfield became a master of
multihull dynamics, in part by analyzing
other designers’ damaged boats that he
repaired after arriving in the Virgin
Islands in the late 1970s. This early
cat—featuring skinny hulls, rocker, quite
veed sterns, and spoon bows—was
inspired by racing boats of the era.
Below—Gold Coast was quick to
embrace the virtues of wing masts—
in fact, the first builder to put them
on commercial craft. The big spars
work well in typical tradewind
conditions. Here, the base of a GC
designed-and-built wing mast on a
46''/14m cat.
Gold Coast’s strategy? It has crossbred
raceboats, cruising boats, and workboats,
and seamlessly melded the theoretical
with the practical.
“We can tack quickly,” Difede
says. “If the phone isn’t ringing for
a day-charter cat, or wave-piercer
ferry, or private sailboat, well, what’s
the phone ringing for? We’ll build
that !” He praises Hatfield’s ability to
divorce a designer’s ego from what
clients require. Thanks to design-andconstruction
flexibility, Gold Coast
recently launched its 93rd custom
boat. Most are 50'' to 65'' (15.2m to
19.8m) in length, though they range
from a 12'' (3.6m) micro-voyaging
sailboat to a 104'' (31.7m) passenger
ferry, and include a stylistic scope that
spans everything from elegant yachts
to floating Humvees.
I
n the mid-1970s Difede was a
surfer, bumming around Mexico
with his brother and high-school
friends from New Jersey. He’d bought
a farm south of the border, but when
that scene turned a little too “wild
west” for his liking, Difede got his
long hair lopped off, packed up the
boards and dog, and headed to St.
Croix.
As for Hatfield, he was focused on
sailing “since my mother’s womb,”
he claims. First racing with his
father and on one-designs at YMCA
camp, and later at Stevens Institute
of Technology, in Hoboken, New
Jersey—where “my passion for sailing
eclipsed my need to study”—he
eventually dreamed of building a
ferro-cement cruiser. Then he spied
designer/builder Jim Brown’s trimaran
plans in The Whole Earth Catalog, in
1973. Hatfield spent two years building
a Brown-designed Searunner 31
(9.4m) with his wife, Cynthia, in her
96-year-old grandmother’s backyard
near Washington, D.C., and another
two years living aboard the completed
tri in the Chesapeake before heading
south. When the money ran out, they
were on St. Martin.
Hatfield’s experience building with
epoxy lured repairwork. “I was pretty
handy and logical about what was
wrong and how to fix it,” he says.
He’d memorized both Searunner 31
and 37 (11.2m) plans: topsides, bottom
plates, frames, cross structure….
“So when I stepped on other
multihulls, I already knew
exactly what to look for.”
Arrangements differed, but the
structures were similar.
He soon met Peter Spronk.
“Everybody loved his catamarans,
but Peter made a lot of
compromises to make really
beautiful boats,” Hatfield says,
noting especially low underwing
clearances to maintain a
sleek profile. “The merciless
pounding these boats took
when bashing upwind into
tradewind waves wasn’t well
received by the underwing
plates, so I was graced with
a lot of repairwork. I developed
X-ray vision,” he says,
becoming so familiar with
Spronk boats that he could
sketch their structures without
going aboard. Spronk’s creative
uses of wood and epoxy
to build lapstrake, multi-chine,
April/MAy 2010 43
STEvE CAllAHAN
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