Visit any yacht club in southern Ontario and you'll see fleets of Canadian-built boats. There are sailboats made by C&C, one of the most famous names in fast cruisers, CS and Hinterhoeller. They have one thing in common: All are old and somewhat tarnished. That's because none has been in production for more than a decade.
Canada used to be a boat-building leader. C&C alone made more than 7,000 yachts in the 1970s and 1980s, making it one of the biggest makers of quality sailboats on the planet. Most went bankrupt or simply faded away in the 1990s, the result of mismanagement, high costs, shifting consumer taste and foreign competition. Today, the market is dominated by French and American names such as Beneteau, Jeanneau and Hunter.
It's highly unlikely Canada will regain its boat-building status. But one company, privately held PDQ Yachts of Whitby, Ont., is making a splash in a niche market that is getting more popular by the year.
PDQ makes only catamarans -- twin-hulled boats that are generally lighter, faster and far more spacious than their monohull counterparts.
The company makes catamarans in both sail and motorboat versions. The diesel-engine PDQ 34 Powercat (the number refers to the length in feet) is proving such a hit with wealthy Americans that the company is building a new factory in North Carolina.
"We want to double the size of the company in two years," says PDQ president Simon Slater, 44. "We have to build where we can deliver year round and we can't do that in Canada."
PDQ -- acronym for pretty damned quick -- is hitting the market at a time when boaters' tastes are starting to shift away from heavy monohulls to lighter, faster boats, much in the same way SUVS are being traded for sedans.
In the 1980s and into the early 1990s, catamarans were fast, funky boats sailed by daring people who didn't fit in with the Polo-clad yachting crowd. Now catamarans are becoming common. Caribbean charter fleets are suddenly stuffed with them; the larger versions are the nautical equivalent of two Winnebagos connected by a tennis court.
PDQ is not going after the mass market for cruising catamarans. Its sailing "cats," as they're called, are luxury offerings aimed at ocean-going boaters who want to pampered as they tack through the teeth of a gale.
The 44-foot Antares cat costs $665,000 (U.S.). It comes with Corian or stainless-steel countertops in the galley (kitchen to landlubbers), cherry-wood panelling, washer-dryer, trash compactor, satellite-Internet connection Optional , queen-sized beds, halogen lighting, flat-panel TV, stand-up shower, air-conditioning, solar panels and dozens of other features that would have been unthinkable in the Spartan, last-generation cats.
"Boating is no longer an adventure sport," Mr. Slater says. "It's now competition for luxury condos and resorts."
For its part, the Powercat, whose price starts at $276,000 (U.S.) and can rise to about $340,000 with certain luxury options, seeks to create an entirely new market.
Most powerboats of that size are monohulls. Because the Powercat has two hulls, it is both roomier and more fuel efficient than the so-called express cruisers, which use extremely high-powered engines to lift the hull over the water, as opposed to through the water, so it can move quickly.
The Powercat goes half way. It skims through the top two feet of the water and can attain relatively high speeds -- 15 knots or so -- with relatively low-powered twin engines of 75- to 100-horsepower.
The big express cruisers, though faster, can guzzle $500 (U.S.) of fuel a day. The Powercat might use a third of that amount.
The Slater family has been messing around with boats since the late 1960s, when they built cats as a hobby and sailed them from Toronto Island Marina. "We built boats because we couldn't afford to buy them," Mr. Slater says.
Some years later, Mr. Slater's father, Alan, an engineer, and friend Harvey Griggs, an MIT structural engineering graduate, realized they could use their skills to build a commercial product for what was then a nascent market for twin-hulled sailboats. The result, in 1989, was the PDQ 34 sailing cat.
It evolved into the slightly larger PDQ 36 and became a great success. Sailing magazine called it a "well-built, nimble-sailing cruising cat" whose value has held up well. The 36 was discontinued last year after a production of 100. PDQ followed its customers -- aging, wealthy baby boomers -- as they moved up the value chain and launched the bigger, gadget-laden PDQ Antares in 2001.
But it was the Powercat that was the breakthrough product. Even the newest sailboats with their electronic gizmos can be hard work, especially for older captains and crew. To appeal to a wider market, PDQ decided to build a catamaran that substituted engines for sails.
"We worked on it for five years before we actually built one," Mr. Slater says. "We took a sailboat, chopped it up and made a prototype."
The result, in 2000, was the Powercat. PDQ's little Whitby factory and the 75 employees can't keep up with demand.
The factory makes about 25 of the boats a year, compared to about four of the far bigger Antares sailing cats. The bottleneck is the Canadian winter. The boats, once completed, have to be stored until the Lake Ontario ice melts in the spring, when they are delivered by water to U.S. customers. (The boats are too wide to be sent by truck.)
To meet demand, and allow delivery throughout the year, PDQ is building a $3-million (U.S.) plant in Edenton, N.C. Mr. Slater was astonished by the town's reception to the prospect of job creation.
Edenton offered PDQ free land and a free new road from the plant to the water. "The mayor, the regional development officer and the town development officer all flew up to Canada to see me," he says.
Building in the United States offers another advantage: It eliminates the cost risk of the rising Canadian dollar, which has been hurting PDQ's profit margins. The company's budget had assumed a 80-cent dollar. The forecast was off by a nickel.
The Whitby factory will not be closed. It will continue to build the Antares sailboat and two planned bigger versions of the Powercat, a 41-footer and a 46-footer. The North Carolina will pump out the high-volume 34 Powercat.
The Powercat has attracted so much attention that Mr. Slater knows PDQ will no longer have that market to itself. Indeed, French builder Lagoon is about to launch a powerboat catamaran with similar dimensions.
Mr. Slater hopes that the luxury appointments and attention to customer service will keep sales, which have tripled to about $13-million since 2000, going strong (he won't reveal the profits, but insists they exist).
On the customer service front, PDQ has started "PDQ U" to train owners how to operate and fix their boats and sends instructors and mechanics on new owners' shakedown cruises.
"The future is bright," he says. "With North Carolina coming and new boats coming, it's like starting all over again. I'm actually starting to have fun now."
Eric Reguly