It may be cliché to say it, but the Aquila 48 Power Catamaran is a boat that’s defined by its “wow” factor. When it first launched, Power and Motoryacht magazine lauded it as one of the top 90 boat designs ever produced. With that kind of reputation preceding it, you’d hope it would live up to the hype. Trust me, it does all that and more.
We spoke with Raul Bermudez, the vice president of the charter division for MarineMax Vacations, and we couldn’t have been more impressed with what he had to tell us about the Aquila 48. The Aquila brand got started when Bill McGill, MarineMax’s CEO, wanted to expand into the chartering space. Bermudez headed up the venture starting in 2011 and with the addition of Lex Raas, the experienced visionary behind the catamaran build and design, by February 2012, Aquila was born.
This newly formed team partnered with J&J Design Group (along with Seaway, its development house) and with that much creative firepower at the ready, they came up with the boat you see before you today, the Aquila 48. The boat was designed from the get-go to be a power boat, which makes it quite different from a lot of other power catamarans—or “cats,” as Bermudez called them—because a lot of them are sailboats that were converted to be power boats. He says, “When people convert sailboats to power boats they have to compromise a lot. On sailboats, the hulls have to be very narrow so you can try to sail. The way this boat is designed, the buoyancy and the size of the hulls are more spacious and rounder, so it can carry more weight and it doesn’t affect the performance as much.”
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