[PCW] Lagoon

[by way of Georgs Kolesnikovs]

From: "Hugh Murray" <hugh@catamarans.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 08:09:31 -0400
Organization: The Catamaran Company


I wanted to respond to the letter below in order to ensure that there is no
mystery as to what is going on with the LP 43 /LP 44.

Lagoon is still building the LP 44 at their Belleville plant through Jan
2007 but all production has been pre-sold so unfortunately there are no
boats available for interested buyers. The new Electric Lagoon 420 is going
to be built at the LP 44 plant in Belleville and demand for this boat has
been so good (over 100 advance orders) that Lagoon decided to build two sets
of molds to double production. The bottleneck with this plan is that they
needed not only another set of molds but a production line to build it on so
rather than build half the boats in Belleville and another line in St
Gilles, where they build the L 380, L 410 and L 440,  they decided to use
the LP 44 production line to build a second line of L 420's in Belleville.

Currently the new L 420 is sold out until Nov/Dec 2007 so at this point it
seems pretty unlikely that that the LP 44 will restart again before 2008 but
that is totally dependent on the continued success of the L 420.

There is no plan to drop the stick on the L 440 and make it a power cat (but
that is always subject to change!) but there is a plan already in place to
do exactly that to the new L 420. There are already drawings out there for
an LP 42 with flybridge.

As regards LP's in charter, Catamaran Charters, the charter arm of The
Catamaran Company, in Tortola have 2 of them with a third one coming.
Neither of these boats have experienced powertrain problems nor have they
missed a single charter due to mechanical issues. They had a pretty
successful year in terms of weeks of charter in 2005 and 2006 and we would
not be sending a third boat to Tortola if it was not a success.

I hope this has answered more questions than it has raised.

Hugh Murray
President
The Catamaran Company


>A Lagoon dealer told me that Lagoon is considering stopping production of
>the power cats as they take 2-3 times longer to manufacture than the sailing
>cats and they can't keep up with the demand for the 420 and 440 sailing
>cats.  They are considering a few modifications to the 440 sailing cat, like
>scraping the rig, and selling it in a power version.
>
>The Lagoon power cats have been less than successful charter boats with very
>problematic power trains comprised of custom parts with very short life, at
>least around warm salt water, and loooong supply times.
>
>Bob Phillips,
>Another Asylum, Tortola, BVI