Catalac sailboats: one hull form carried by five different builders
The fullest account of Catalac's history comes from a single catamaran-reference site's retrospective on the marque, built substantially on interviews with Tom Lack's son John. It's the story of one hull form that outlived its own creator's production run by a decade, passed hand to hand across four more companies after an accident forced Lack out.
Origins and ownership
Tom Lack's company built hundreds of Bill O'Brien-designed Bobcat catamarans through the 1960s before creating a design of its own. In 1970, having ended Bobcat production, Lack worked with naval architect John Winterbotham - commissioned in 1968 through Winterbotham's firm, MG Duff Ltd - to launch the Catalac 9M, the first boat in the range and its main model for the next two decades. The 8M followed in 1975, then the 12M and the 10M, all built at Lack's yard in Christchurch, Dorset. Across the whole run the Lack family built close to 1,000 cruising catamarans in total, roughly 600 of them Catalacs; the same retrospective notes that Tony Smith, who had worked for O'Brien alongside Lack at the same time, went on to build the Gemini catamarans - which it suggests explains why the two boats' layouts resemble each other so closely.
The 12M's introduction was a hit at American boat shows but put unusual financial strain on the company, and production by the Lack family ceased around 1985 after Tom Lack was seriously injured in an auto accident. What followed was a fragmented succession. Catalac Catamarans LTD, a company unrelated to the Lack family, built 10Ms until 1989. Tom Lack's son John Lack then finished two 10Ms that CCC had started but not completed, and kept building 8Ms through at least 1990. Around 1995, Hythe Marine Services LTD of Southampton began building an updated 10M, the 11M, with stern scoops that added roughly 1.5 feet of length and moved all sail-control lines back to the cockpit. Over that same stretch, Blue Water Catalacs Ltd bought the 8M/9M moulds and brought the design back as the Catalac 900, building 26 of them over about a decade, alongside a few boats in the unrelated Solaris catamaran range. By John Lack's own secondhand account, the 10M moulds later used at Hythe were eventually cut up and discarded, and the 12M moulds were last known to be somewhere near Weston-super-Mare - reports worth holding as owner-reported rather than independently confirmed.
Construction through the eras
Every Catalac shares the same underlying hull logic: a hard-chine "V" section, load-carrying form with flared bows to limit spray, built to stay stable under sail alone rather than lean on a keel. On the 9M specifically, that took the form of solid fiberglass, chined hulls with heavy rocker and a deep V forward that flattened out toward the stern, a combination that did away with the need for a keel entirely. Hulls and the cored fiberglass bridge deck were molded as one piece and bolted together, with three-quarter-inch plywood bulkheads bonded in; the rig throughout the range was a Bermudan sloop on a masthead. Around 1980, the 8M and 9M received an official Mk II upgrade: a newly designed skeg-hung rudder system, replacing the earlier lifting, dinghy-type rudders, brought in specifically to answer complaints about windward performance. It worked - reviewers judged the change a real improvement - though the boat has to hold 5 to 6 knots of speed for the system to perform as designed. When Blue Water Catalacs revived the 9M as the 900 in the 1990s, it reworked the cabin further still, eliminating the main hatch and extending the doghouse into a fully sealed cabin entered through a cockpit door.
Lines and generations
The range runs from the 8M up to the 12M, plus the later 900 revival. Two accounts disagree on which model actually led the range: Wikipedia's entry on the marque calls the 9M, with 255 built over two decades, "the most successful model in the range," while Yachtsnet's archive listing for the 8M instead calls that boat "the most popular model of the range." The 10M, its Hythe-built successor the 11M, and the Blue-Water-built 900 all belong to the post-Lack chapter of the story: variations on the same hull, built by companies that weren't the original yard, none of them a runaway sales success in its own right.
Who Catalac is for
Author Charles Kanter, writing about the range, judged that Catalac catamarans - more than 600 built and sailing - had probably brought as many hours of "happy, comfortable and safe boating" to more people than any comparable production vessel; he also thought the Lack family could have sold many more of them in North America if not for what he called a poor marketing plan there. Tom Lack backed his own design with a standing wager: he authorized a standing cash reward - never claimed, by the source's account - to anyone who could document a Catalac sailing with one hull out of the water. A Catalac buyer, in other words, is buying into a hull form its own designer trusted completely, sold by a small yard that never quite matched its engineering with its reach.
