Trudeau Twenty Writeup

For seasoned and beginning SL sailors alike – Jane Fossett as an article on SLSailing.com with everything you wanted to know about the Trudeau Twenty. Handling tips, tactics for gaining maximum performance on various points of sail (with charts and graphs, no less!), and much, much more  – wow, theres a lot there that even I didn’t know! Thanks for the terrific writeup, Jane :)

The Leetle Cat!

Discontinued

Our latest Trudeau Classic Yacht was inspired by the Beetle Cat, a wooden one-design centerboarder catboat well-known up and down the northeastern US coast. The Original Beetle Cat Boat, named after the family who designed and originally constructed it, was introduced in 1920 and over 4,000 have been built to date. The Beetle Cat class has a long and varied history – it is one of the oldest classes raced actively and probably the only one still made of wood.

The design was taken from the catboats that were used for fishing in shallow waters along Cape Cod. The wide beam, with the rudder not extending below the bottom of the keel, and centerboard that lifts up are features that make this boat ideal for shallow waters. She is a boat that can be beached. The generous beam makes her unusually stable. Made entirely of wood, (oak frames with cedar planking) with no ballast, she is non-sinkable and the large decked area forward on the boat means spray falls on the deck rather than inside the boat. The rig is similar to that used on the old, large-size Cape Cod catboat, with the mast well forward, using a single sail.

The Trudeau Leetle Cat, with it’s single sail, is also easy to sail and ideal for novice SL sailors. While she is the leetle-est and lowest cost boat in the Trudeau line, she is not lacking in features including windshadowing, functional centerboard and sail reefing.

Customization

To keep the cost down, the Leetle Cat comes in one finish from the Trudeau boatyard. But we are publishing Photoshop PSD templates for infinite customization. Follow the links for Hull (1.07MB), transom naming (117KB) and sail (5.55MB) graphics. (see this page for step-by-step naming instructions – Leetle Cat follows the Sea Sharp procedure).

Other Features of the Trudeau Leetle Cat include:

• Can be sailed either solo or in collaboration with a crewmate. You can assign skipper permissions to others as well.
• Realistic sailing including functional reefing for overpowering winds, centerboard and the latest sailing feature for the Trudeau fleet – boat to boat windshadowing.
• Moving tiller, rudder and helmsperson animations. Hard a-lee is *really* hard a-lee on the Leetle Cat :)
• Onscreen HUD provides button control for the common boat handling commands and display of environmental conditions. An included 2nd info-display only HUD is geared towards regatta racers.
• For overriding the fluky SL winds, artificial wind strength and direction commands which are translated into apparent wind. SLSF windsetter compatibility prompts you for acceptance of racewind.
• Masthead pennant functions as apparent wind taletell.
• Since sim crossings can be unpredictable, copy and modify permissions.
• Extra goodies such as autorezzing drydock cradle when rezzed inworld over land.

Dimensions:
Trudeau Leetle Cat – 29 prims,  17.7 ft (5.34m) LWL, 21.6 ft (6.6m) LOA, 8.9 ft (2.7m) beam, 1.4ft (.42m) draft board up, 3.45ft (1.05m) draft board down.

“Beetle Cat” is a registered trademark of Beetle, Inc.