A catamaran is a type of boat consisting of two hulls joined together by a frame. In fact, the word catamaran comes from the Tamil words kattu, which means "to tie," and maram, which means "wood" or "tree." A catamaran is, quite literally, two trees tied together!
The original catamaran was invented by the Paravas, an aristocratic fishing community on the southern coast of Tamil Nadu, India. They were used as early as the fifth century A.D. by the Tamil Chola dynasty when they conquered the areas we now know as Burma, Indonesia and Malaysia. The first mention of the catamaran in English comes from adventurer and pirate William Dampier who wrote about them in 1697 after visiting India in search of business opportunities. However, the catamaran we know today actually evolved from the swift sail and paddle boats made out of two widely separated logs and used by the Polynesians to travel from one island to another. In the 1870s, an American named Herreshoff began building Polynesian-style catamarans to his own specifications and their speed and stability soon made them popular pleasure craft. In the twentieth century, the catamaran inspired an even more popular sailboat. A Southern California maker of surfboards, Hobie Alter, came up with the idea for "a small catamaran that you could easily take out into the water and sail and take back in." In 1967 he produced the first 250-pound Hobie Cat 14, and two years later the larger and even more successful Hobie 16. That boat remains in production, with more than 100,000 made in the past three decades.