Performance
Industry-Leading Performance
Balance builds live-aboard performance catamarans for oceanic adventure travel. We do not craft racing cats or charter cats. Our catamarans strike a careful balance between performance underway and comfort at anchor.
Customizable to fit your unique performance needs
Some of our owners are deeply driven by performance and prepared to make equipment compromises to sail faster, or, in some instances to spend more for us to lighten their catamarans with additional carbon. Some ask us for a bit less cabinetry, a reduced amount of equipment, and are quite prepared to place their boat on a “performance diet.” While others give up a bit of speed to carry more gear to gain greater comfort and livability. At Balance we allow our customers to define just the right “Balance” for themselves.
Why carbon? Why foam? Why both?
Performance cruising catamarans face a tension that’s hard to resolve with conventional construction. Serious sailors want hulls slender enough to move quickly through the water and respond to the lightest of breezes — but they also want to load it up with everything a liveaboard life requires: tankage, provisions, gear, tools, water toys, and the general accumulation of belongings that comes with living aboard full-time.
Add weight in the wrong places, or use too much heavy material to get the strength you need, and a catamaran loses the very performance that not only makes her more enjoyable to sail but also safer. Build too light without enough structural integrity, and you compromise safety and longevity. Build her too heavy and she is no longer much fun to sail, as well as a sitting duck when faced with fast-approaching weather fronts.
This is the problem we’re solving at Balance with every design:
Foam core hulls and decks
Reduce weight while adding stiffness and insulation, without sacrificing structural integrity.
Solid carbon components
Placed where loads concentrate — chainplates, bulkheads, beams, and other high-stress zones — delivering strength and stiffness without the weight penalty of heavier, less efficient materials.
Targeted carbon reinforcement
Layered into the structure at exactly the points where it's needed, rather than uniformly across the whole boat, so every gram of material is doing real work.
What a lighter carbon build means for you on the water
Speed and responsiveness
Less structural weight means less skin friction through the water, and a boat that accelerates and maneuvers with less effort from the wind.
Stiffness where it counts
Carbon's high stiffness-to-weight ratio means less flex under load, translating to a more efficient, more controlled ride across a range of conditions.
Payload capacity without compromise
Because the structure itself is lighter, more of the boat's designed carrying capacity is available for the things liveaboard sailors actually need to bring — without dragging down performance.
Durability built to last
Carbon in high-load areas is engineered specifically to withstand the repeated stress of long-term cruising, not just a single passage.
Engineering, not just materials
Every Balance model goes through the same disciplined question during design and engineering: where and how can we maximize the combined benefits of foam core and carbon in this specific hull? The answer looks different on every model we craft — different sizes, different load cases, different cruising profiles all call for different solutions — but the goal is constant: a structure that is as light as it can safely be, and as strong as it needs to be.
That's the Carbon difference. It's not a single feature or a single part of the boat, it's a design philosophy carried through every model we build. To learn about the carbon options offered for each of our models, visit the page for the model of most interest to you.
Standards & Classifications
Balance Catamarans are fabricated to achieve either CE, Category A offshore classification or ABS Offshore Classification. All our yachts meet or exceed these standards. Our operator’s manual conforms with CE Category A Offshore classification.
