Maine Cat sailboats: a mechanical engineer's garage-built answer to catamarans he thought could be better
Dick Vermeulen quit his job as a commercial general contractor to open a boatbuilding business at a time when only a handful of companies were producing catamarans at all. As a mechanical engineer, he believed existing catamaran hulls could be designed better, and that conviction is what put him in a garage in Maine drawing his own boat rather than buying someone else's. Everything Maine Cat became over the following decades — a small, family-run yard building composite sailing and power catamarans on the Maine coast — traces back to that starting premise, carried by the same person from the first hull to the last one documented here.
Origins and ownership
Vermeulen began designing the company's first boat, a 22-foot sailing catamaran, in 1991. By 1993 — the year Maine Cat later listed as its founding date — three employees, working initially out of Vermeulen's garage, were producing the Maine Cat 22 for customers all along the East Coast. Success with a second model, the 30-foot Maine Cat 30 introduced in 1997, let the company move to its current site in Bremen, Maine, build its workforce up to 23, and introduce a 41-foot catamaran. By 2007, nearly all 20 employees involved in manufacturing had logged a decade or more in the boatbuilding trade, some more than 40 years — a workforce Catamaran Guru would later describe simply as a family-run business on the coast of Maine. Ownership stayed with Vermeulen throughout: Soundings marked the company's 20th anniversary in April 2013, and a July 2017 Cruising World profile described the Maine Cat 38 as conceived, designed, manufactured, and sold by one man — Vermeulen himself, working by then with a dozen craftsmen in midcoast Maine.
The designers
The Maine Cat 22 carried more than one set of hands. Robert Perry's review of the boat traced its origin to Vermeulen, working with Mark Raymond — a Landing School student who did the computer lofting and working drawings — while the hull plug itself was built by Dick Newick. Production of the finished boats was managed by Peter Walsh, another former Landing School student. Vermeulen returned to a similarly collaborative process years later: he designed and built an unnamed 38-foot prototype on his own, then worked with computer guru Steve Hudson on lines-fairing to develop that prototype into the Maine Cat 41. Catamaran Guru credits Vermeulen alone with designing the later production Maine Cat 38, dating that design to 2014, as an evolution of his earlier boats.
Construction through the eras
Across its history, Maine Cat built its boats from a lightweight, durable Core-Cell foam core coated with composite fiberglass. Catamaran Guru called the resulting "open design" catamaran concept — cockpit and saloon merged into one continuous space — revolutionary when Maine Cat introduced it, noting it was later widely emulated by builders including Catana and Nautitech. That same core-and-fiberglass approach carried through the range: SAIL Magazine's review of the Maine Cat 38 found a thermo-formed Core-Cell PH core with hull and deck layups infused in 100 percent vinylester resin, married to daggerboards, tumblehome bows, a dramatic reverse sheer, and chainplates set outboard of the side decks to keep the foredeck clear; an "LS" version went further, stripping out woodwork to cut roughly 600 pounds. Wave Train's review of the Maine Cat 41 pointed to hull-form choices behind that same idea: individual hulls set narrow and well apart, with a bridgedeck elevated well above the water. The trailerable original carried its own signature engineering: the Maine Cat 22, with 13 feet of beam, hinged on centerline to fold down to 8 feet 6 inches for towing.
Lines and generations
The lineup grew in stages. The Maine Cat 22 came first, in production by 1993; the Maine Cat 30 followed in 1997, framed by the company as a 30-foot version of the 22. The Maine Cat 41 came next, launched late in 2004, and was selected as Cruising World magazine's multihull Boat of the Year in the over-40-foot category around 2005. Maine Cat also pursued a power-cat line in the same period: the prototype of the Maine Cat P-38, billed as the world's first diesel/electric-power catamaran, had its first sea trial in Muscongus Bay in March 2007. Catamaran Guru dates Vermeulen's design of the later production Maine Cat 38 — introduced as a more enclosed, pilothouse-style cat — to 2014. By a mid-2017 count, Vermeulen had launched 130 boats since the company's founding: 63 Maine Cat 30s, 24 Maine Cat 41s, a 47-foot power cat, and the original 22-foot Dick Newick-hulled design.
Who Maine Cat is for
Cruising World's 1999 review of the Maine Cat 30 captured what the brand has offered from its earliest boats: "a kick-your-shoes-off, let-your-hair-down kind of a boat with an open-faced honesty about itself," the magazine wrote, praising the model's simplicity and efficiency. That character splits along size lines within the lineup — Vermeulen himself called the Maine Cat 41 the "had-everything, liveaboard monster boat" of the range, in contrast to the simpler 30 — so buyers choosing between models are really choosing between that original stripped-down ethos and a fuller-featured cruising boat built by the same small Maine yard.
