Honesty is forced onto you at that point! And I agree with you on "stuff". We don't own anything other than this boat and its contents, we live full-time on it away from marinas, and we have no intentions of "camping" for many years. "Stuff" is heavy and slows boats down. Multihulls in particular. We go on grand crazy bends of throwing stuff off - unused tools, cookware, clothing, books, etc - but only achieve a hundred pounds at most. Heck, with our two engines, I have to carry 60-80lbs of motor oil, filters and coolant because we don't have easy access to them when needed. Since we often spend 6 months at a time in areas with absolutely no provisioning other than random local eggs and veggies, it is not unusual for us to be carrying 500-700lbs of liquids other than water, let alone that much in canned and dry foodstuffs (flour, etc).

We fall in the middle of "stuff" from what we see in other cruising boats. However, what we hear on this and other forums is how many people are cruising as minimalists and are berating people who have "condos" and are taking showers that use more than 2 trigger pulls from a spray bottle, and are using egregiously large dinghies instead of paddling around a 5' peapod, etc. All of these people must be cruising different grounds than us. Or lying.

Those we do see cruising without much "stuff" are generally very young people traveling everywhere having the time of their lives, or older (usually singlehanders) cruisers who have drifted into certain bays near bars and will never leave. We used to be the former, and hope never to be the latter. Right now in our lives, though, we enjoy and do not feel the need to defend our "stuff".

Lengthening hulls is one advantage of a catamaran general hull design. It is next to impossible to lengthen a monohull more than superficially above the water without significantly changing its sailing and handling characteristics, but catamaran hulls can essentially be pulled out as far as wanted with no major issues. At some point, one would also need to move the rudders and possibly engines aft to maintain steering ability, but other than that, the prismatics don't change, the boat doesn't heel so there is no consideration necessary of dynamic hull shapes at different attitudes, the hull profiles are simple semi-circles all the way, have relatively little underwater volume and what is underwater is pretty linear and unchanging.

Our extra two feet gave us back our weekender performance, so we are happy. Right now, it is difficult and saddening to contemplate that someday our liveaboard gear might be taken off of it.

Mark