The reason you keep turning around early is not the fish and it is not the weather. It is that there is nowhere on the boat to stop being awake. The Aquila 47 Molokai is built around fixing exactly that: a tournament-grade center console deck on a 48-foot catamaran hull, with a queen island berth and a full head underneath it.
The 47 is the Molokai the line was building toward. The 28 established the walkaround deck, the 36 added a cabin and a head inside the console, and the 47 makes that cabin somewhere you would genuinely choose to sleep.
Who It's For
This is the boat for an owner whose program is overnight offshore. You run to the canyons, you fish through the evening bite, and you would rather anchor up than make the run home in the dark and do it again tomorrow. Everything about the specification is pointed at that: the fuel load, the box capacity, and a cabin with air conditioning in it.
It suits a crew that fishes hard and then wants to use the same boat for something else. Hull-side boarding and dive doors on both sides make it a dive platform without modification. A summer kitchen is on the options list, and seating is certified for up to seventeen, so a Sunday with families aboard is not a compromise you have to engineer around.
It is not a yacht and does not want to be read as one. There is no salon, no galley below and no second cabin. If a saloon and a proper interior are what you are after at this length, this is the wrong boat in the right range — Aquila builds cruising catamarans at similar lengths that answer that question instead.
Design & Layout: A Cabin Under a Tournament Deck
Start on deck, because that is where the boat spends its money. It is a 360-degree walkaround, with three Stidd seats across the first row at the helm and boarding and dive doors let into the hull sides port and starboard. The fishing hardware is itemized rather than rounded: a 510-gallon insulated mid-deck fishbox, a 100-gallon aft-deck box, and 90 gallons of transom livewell split across a pair of wells. In-deck livewells, tuna tubes and the summer kitchen are options.
The cabin under the console is what this boat is really selling. A queen-sized island berth, a wet head with a shower running hot and cold water, 12,000 BTU of air conditioning, blinds on the side and overhead glass, and a recessed location for a television. That combination is why a night offshore is a plan rather than an endurance test.
Construction carries carbon fiber through the forward and aft main structural bulkheads and the hardtop, which is Aquila's route to rigidity without putting the weight high in the boat. Dry weight is 22,818 lbs; loaded displacement is 33,400 lbs.
Bridgedeck clearance is 1'1". That is the number to ask about on a sea trial in a chop, because on any catamaran it governs how the tunnel behaves when the sea gets short and steep.
Performance: Three Engine Packages, No Published Speed
Aquila offers the 47 Molokai with twin Mercury V12 600s, quad V10 400s or quad V10 425s, with 400R and 500R options on request. The figures on this page are built on the twin-600 package, which is the important caveat for everything that follows.
Aquila publishes no top speed and no cruise speed for this model on any of those packages — not in the model page spec table, not in the dated spec sheet, not in the page copy. Speed numbers do circulate for the 47, and where they come from a test they were usually taken on the quad-outboard setup, which is not the same boat as the twin-600 build. A figure measured on four engines tells you very little about two.
What the yard does publish describes the mission well enough on its own: 1,048 gallons of fuel on a 48-foot hull, and CE Category B certification for ten with C for fourteen and D for twenty. Category B is the offshore rating, and ten people offshore is a large number for a center console.
Draft is 2'2" with the motors up and 3'8" with them down, on a 14'6" beam over a 45'8" hull.
Ownership: The Honest Conversation
The engine choice is the first real decision, and it is not only about performance. Two V12s and four V10s are different service pictures, different rigging, different parts inventories and different transom real estate. Ask to run the package you intend to buy rather than the one the demo boat happens to carry, and get your build's weights and figures written against that package.
The fuel load deserves respect on its own terms. A thousand gallons is a great deal of weight, and where it sits relative to your load changes how the boat trims. Sea trial it fueled and loaded the way you will actually run it, not light off the dock.
Slip width is the recurring catamaran conversation. Fourteen and a half feet is a catamaran berth at most marinas, and it is worth pricing before you commit rather than after.
Two useful things to test in an afternoon: how the tunnel behaves in a short chop, given that 1'1" of bridgedeck clearance, and how easy the dive doors are to work single-handed with the boat moving. Both are answerable on the water and neither is answerable from a brochure.
Where to Start
The Aquila 47 Molokai is for the angler whose limit has been daylight rather than distance. It carries the fuel and the boxes for a canyon program and puts a real berth, a real head and air conditioning under the deck so you can use them. If staying out is the thing you keep wishing you could do, this is the boat built for it.
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