Well BALANCED

A 44-foot catamaran that punches above its weight, the Balance 442 is a performance-oriented platform that's also ideal for ocean sailing and living aboard.

- HERB McCORMICK

This February, I was on a powerboat off Anse Marcel on the French side of the Caribbean island of Saint-Martin when a fleet of fast performance-cruising multihulls set sail into the windy Anguilla Channel for the rally portion of the annual Caribbean Multihull Challenge. A pair of Balance 442 cats named Sage and Umoya, with reefed mains and drawing spinnakers, were blasting their way into the channel’s whitecapped waters, roiled by the 20-plus-knot easterly trade winds.

Though they were practically the smallest cats in the fray, the 442s were more than holding their own against the bigger craft, which included a quartet of Balance 482s including company president and founder Phil Berman’s In Balance). Five months earlier, during our annual Boat of the Year contest, Id sailed the very same Umoya in somewhat lighter air. Now I knew what the 442s looked like under sail in sportier conditions while hauling the mail: buoyant, sprightly and packed with horsepower. The yacht’s angular aesthetics are crisp, clean and, to my eye, quite fetching. There’s a deck-stepped mast and a working sail plan consisting of a big, square-topped fully battened mainsail and self-tacking jib; relatively narrow hulls with high freeboard and curved, wave-piercing bows that maximize waterline length; an integral sprit for the reaching and running sails; and a substantial coachroof topped with solar panels and accented by generous, tempered-glass windows.