Choosing the yacht
Catamaran or monohull in the Andaman Sea
Should I charter a catamaran or a monohull in Phuket?
The short answer
Should I charter a catamaran or a monohull in Phuket?
In the Andaman the catamaran wins more decisively than it does in most cruising grounds, and the reason is not the deck space. It is draught. A catamaran draws about 1.2 metres against a monohull's 2 metres, and the anchorages here are shallow, the approach to Koh Panyee silts continuously and several bays shelve gently. A catamaran also does not heel, which matters over a week with eight people aboard in 32 degree heat. The monohull wins on price, on upwind performance and on the actual pleasure of sailing, and if the group came to sail rather than to be somewhere, that is not a small thing.
The comparison
| Catamaran | Monohull | |
|---|---|---|
| Draught, 14 m yacht | about 1.2 m | about 2 m |
| Heel under sail | None to speak of | 15 to 25 degrees |
| Deck and saloon space | Considerably more | Less, and it is all on one level below |
| Cabins for 8 | Four, one in each corner, all private | Four, two of them next to each other |
| Week for 8, bareboat | $6,500 to $9,000 | $4,200 to $5,000 |
| Upwind performance | Poor | Good |
| Anchoring in shallow bays | Easy | Limited |
| Motoring, which is most of a Phuket charter | Efficient on two engines | Efficient, slower |
Why draught decides it here
Phang Nga Bay is shallow and it silts. The last miles into Koh Panyee are genuinely thin water, several of the bay anchorages shelve a long way out, and a lot of the pleasure of the cruising ground is anchoring close in under a limestone wall. Eighty centimetres of draught is the difference between doing that and watching it from further out.
Why heel decides it for most groups
Over a week, with people who are not sailors, heel is the thing that separates a holiday from an endurance event. Cooking on a heeled boat, showering on a heeled boat, and getting an eight-year-old to sleep on a heeled boat are all worse than the flat alternative.
The honest case for a monohull
It is a third cheaper. It sails properly upwind, which a charter catamaran does not. And if there are sailors in the group, the difference between sailing and motoring with the sails up is the whole point of chartering a sailing yacht at all.
Most Phuket charters do far more motoring than the brochure suggests, because the passages are short and the schedule is fixed. If the group genuinely wants to sail, say so at the enquiry stage: it changes the yacht, and it changes which itinerary makes sense.
Last checked 6 September 2026. Rates, fees and regulations in this market change every season, so figures on this page are correct as at that date and not afterwards. How the figures are gathered.