Lori - B

Characteristics:

Morrelli and Melvin Design & Engineering (Huntington Beach, CA) was chosen to aid in the design of this commercial fishing catamaran for Mr. Mike Leary (Portsmouth, NH). Commercial fishermen have been slow to adopt the catamaran hull form. The Lori - B has proven herself worthy as a practical, logical and stable work platform for fishing the notoriously rough waters of the Gulf of Maine and has found many advantages over the traditional mono-hull gillnetters in the fleet.

The increased workspace, greater speed and superior stability in bad weather have proved this vessel on the water and exceeded the owner's expectations. Mike was pleased to report that "the guys on deck don't even know when it's rough out, unlike my old monohull which was much more difficult to fish from in rough conditions". He further reports that "Lori-B meets all of our performance criteria and is much faster than the rest of the steel hull fishing trawlers in the fleet. Recently we ran through seas that blew the windows out of the other fishing boats. Our vessel didn't have any problems in those conditions, and allowed us to get back much earlier than the rest of the fleet.