PDQ sailboats: light, foam-cored Canadian cruising catamarans
PDQ built sailing catamarans in Whitby, Ontario -- three models bearing its name, the 34, the 36 and the 32 -- before the company's story shifted into power catamarans and, eventually, into a new marque entirely. What set the sailing boats apart was a consistent engineering discipline: keep the boat light, because a heavy catamaran is a slow one, and let that discipline extend down through the keels, the cross beams and the resin systems.
Origins and ownership
PDQ Yachts was established in 1987 to build sailing catamarans, setting up shop in a Whitby, Ontario facility that had once built the well-known Whitby 42 ketch. It started out devoted to cruising catamaran sailboats before later expanding into power catamarans, carrying its sailing heritage into those power designs by prioritizing light weight even where that meant using more expensive materials. That later expansion eventually closed the sailing chapter: Antares Yachts launched in January 2008 when Rob Poirier and Ted Clements bought the Antares catamaran molds from PDQ after the company decided to focus solely on power cats. Poirier had previously served as a vice president at PDQ.
The designers
PDQ's sailing catamarans are sometimes credited in used-boat records to naval architect Steve Killing -- but that credit is a byline mix-up. Killing, a naval architect, wrote the magazine review of the PDQ 32 that described the boat's design brief; the review ran in Canadian Yachting's Sailpast in 1995, with Killing as its author, not the boat's designer. The actual designer was Alan Slater, who worked to a brief aiming to keep the performance lineage of the 36 while shrinking the 32's interior space and cost. PDQ's boatbuilder was Alan's son, Simon Slater -- a father-son team, not a single person -- who was described as "a principal of the company" in a 2012 profile. PDQ's chief engineer, Ted Clements, only joined the company in the late 1990s, after the sailing 32, 34 and 36 were already established, and his work belonged to the power side of the business; the design credit for PDQ's sailing catamarans rests with Alan Slater alone.
Construction through the eras
The 32's hull is a vacuum-bagged, foam-cored laminate built with vinylester resin, with a carbon-fiber structural cross beam, or aka; the builder kept its dry weight to 5,500 lb through careful material selection, on the logic that a heavy catamaran is a slow one. Crash tanks sit fore and aft, and the keels are set unusually far forward. Those keels also run shallower than a monohull's, because catamarans sail at higher speeds and faster water flow over the keel creates more lift, requiring less keel area -- the 32's hulls are only 33 inches wide at the waterline, which is what makes such shallow keels possible in the first place. The payoff was practical: the shallow, flat-bottomed keels let the boat sit upright unsupported on land or on a tidal mud flat. Buyers could order the 32 with either twin 9.9 hp Yamaha outboards under the cockpit or straight-drive 18 hp inboard engines in each hull.
The 36 followed a related engineering logic. Its keels are NACA foils, secondarily bonded to the hulls so that a grounding or collision won't breach the hulls' watertight integrity, and built to support the boat's full weight when hauled or careened. Hull and deck are joined on an outward flange with 3M 5200 adhesive and stainless fasteners, and vacuum bagging keeps resin flow uniform through a triaxial-fabric laminate in epoxy or vinylester resin.
Lines and generations
The 34, built from 1988 to 1991, was PDQ's earliest hull; in 1991 the builder extended its hulls to add stern steps, creating the 36, PDQ's first catamaran design under that name, with roughly 100 built. Sailing magazine credited it as designed for family cruising rather than as a charter boat. The 32 followed in the mid-1990s as an aft-cabin variant of the same performance lineage, with a production run of roughly fifty boats.
Who PDQ is for
Buyers drawn to PDQ's sailing catamarans tend to value speed and shallow-draft versatility over interior volume -- boats that could ground safely on a tidal flat or sit upright ashore, powered by a straightforward drivetrain rather than a complex one. The three models sit close in size and share the same lightweight, foam-cored construction philosophy, with era and cabin layout -- forward on the 34 and 36, aft on the 32 -- doing more to separate them than any change in engineering approach.
