TomCat sailboats: one design partnership behind a two-boat Ontario lineup
TomCat Boats is a family-run Canadian yard whose entire catalog traces to one design partnership: Ted Strain draws the boats, and his son Tom Strain builds and outfits them. That division of labor, more than any broad product line, defines the brand - TomCat has produced exactly two hull designs, the trailerable 6.2 and the 32-foot 9.7, the latter later reworked as the 970S, both from the same Ontario shop.
Origins and ownership
Ted Strain retired from a career in engineering physics in 1995; before long, he and Tom were building catamarans, according to Practical Sailor. Their first boat was the 6.2, a trailerable 20-footer. Work on a larger cruiser began in 2002: the 32-foot 9.7, again designed by Ted Strain - a kayaker and canoeist who had long owned a McAlpine-Downie Iroquois catamaran - and built and outfitted by Tom, who brought sailing experience ranging from dinghies to 50-footers along with university training in chemistry and physics. TomCat built to order, with owners given a great deal of input, in Ted Strain's words, "from the type of resin through to layout, décor and outfitting," and the company describes building each boat to its own design specifications while leaving room for individual customization. Aeroyacht of New York served as TomCat's U.S. sales representative for the 9.7. By the company's own account, TomCat Boats has been family owned and managed for more than twenty years.
Construction through the eras
The 6.2 was built around a single, high-aspect-ratio foil-shaped centerboard and rockered hulls, giving it exceptional maneuverability; twin interconnected rudders and boards that all rotate up gave it shallow draft and beachability, over foam-core, fiberglass-skin sandwich construction the company describes as light and strong, providing flotation for an unsinkable structure, with enclosed hulls and a self-draining bridgedeck.
The 9.7 carried Ted Strain's engineering further. Its midsections are semi-circular, for maximum displacement with minimum drag, while hulls that sweep up slightly toward the stern produce U-shaped aftersections that reduce wetted area and add dynamic lift. A thin, NACA-foil-shaped centerboard lowers through the bridgedeck itself rather than through a conventional keel trunk, giving lift on both tacks and built to kick up, rather than break, if it strikes bottom; twin rudders kick up the same way. Strain kept tophamper to a minimum, folding the coachroof and cabin house into one aerodynamic form, and carried the main structural load on a four-inch-wide solid-fiberglass beam along the cabintop, set on posts, in place of a bulkhead - much of the boat is vacuum-bagged laminate. Beam tops out at 16 feet, a figure Strain set at the point where wider hulls would push trucking costs up, and he began the design with ergonomics first, aiming for headroom and visibility that would suit sailors from five-foot-two to six-foot-three. Below, there's no interior liner; a brushed-white gelcoat paired with veneers and solid trim was meant to soften the "ice-box effect" bare fiberglass can produce. Built to order in a 10,000-square-foot facility that Practical Sailor placed near Newmarket, Ontario, and that a later SAIL Magazine review instead located in Caledon East, Ontario, the yard, per Practical Sailor's review, had delivered twelve of the new 9.7s since 2004.
Lines and generations
The 32-foot cruiser TomCat began developing in 2002 carries more than one name: it's the 9.7 in TomCat's own model line, but early press called it the 970 - under that name, it debuted at the Annapolis Sailboat Show roughly eight years before SAIL Magazine's 2012 review of its successor, the 970S. The 970S shares the original's hull and deck molds - built of hand-laid fiberglass in vinylester resin with Corecell coring in both hull and deck - but redesigns the cockpit; the original carried its helm amidships, with two companionways leading into the saloon. TomCat's own site names its current lineup as the 970S and the trailerable 6.2, and Blue Water Sailing described the 9.7 as "the big sister to the original 6.2," an entry-level performance cruising catamaran from Canada.
Who TomCat is for
TomCat suits a buyer drawn to a small, engineering-led yard rather than a large production line - one where a single designer's reasoning about foils, beam, and structure runs through both boats in the catalog, and where the builder and the designer are, quite literally, father and son.
