Rod Gibbons

Rod Gibbons has been selling catamarans longer than anyone else in North America. In the 1980s he captained his Catfisher 32 sail-cruising catamaran on an epic, 9-month/9,000-mile singlehanded voyage: from the English yard to the Azores, among the Caribbean's Windward and Leeward Islands, up through the Bahamas, and finally from Miami to NYC. He subsequently became the North American Catfisher importer. The boat was a hit, and during the next six years Rod imported-and-sold all the CF-32s built by the British yard.

Gibbons is the author of the all-time bestselling book on sail-cruising cats, THE CRUISING CATAMARAN ADVANTAGE. He also wrote NO-COST BOATING,

From 1995 to 2008 his company, Cruising Cats USA, was the U.S. Pacific Coast dealer for Lagoon, Fountaine Pajot and Gemini catamarans. More recently Gibbons has designed numerous, elegant, twin-hulled houseboats via his company, Eco-Sea Cottages. Rod's other creations include motor cruising-cats unlike anything else currently available: models such as the Savanti (31' to 43'), and the truly unique LuxeCat designs (36' to 50').

Curiously, Rod's first career was unrelated to boating. For 19 years after university, he was a professional stage & TV actor based in NYC. He appeared in such hits as the Broadway thriller "Child's Play," and was a featured actor on such TV "soap operas" as Love of Life and Another World. In the 1970s and '80s he was lead actor in more than 100 TV commercials.

Rod currently enjoys living wherever there's a sandy beach and a waterside view.