In The Beginning...

Since I had never done any fiberglassing before, the first thing I did was to buy plans for the Foamee. The Foamee is a 9-foot sailing dinghy built using almost exactly the same technique as a Farrier trimaran.  On April 22, 2000, I spent $626 on my first batch of boatbuilding supplies: Divinycell, polyester resin, 10-oz fiberglass, and glassing tools.  I started in the garage below the apartment in SF, and launched in June. The initial version had no provision for sailing, just rowing. I enjoyed building and learned a few things about foam and fiberglass. The most important lesson was never to use polyester resin again.  The stench is unreal, and stays in your clothes and hair long after washing.  They styrene that causes the smell is terrible for your health.  You have to wear a respirator often enough when building a boat because of the sanding, so if you're using polyester you're essentially wearing it all the time.  Styrene probably gets you high and makes you stupid, but I wore an organic respirator because I can't afford to get any dumber than I already are.

I purchased the plans for the trimaran on July 17, 2000, with no idea how to build the boat, or where I was going to build it, or even when I was going to build it since I had a full-time job and commuted 100 miles a day from San Francisco to San Jose. Around August, I started purchasing materials and equipment. I also purchased plans for the Glen-L Sea Kayak, and started building in September in the studio below the apartment, since I had been bitten by the bug and needed to do something, even if it wasn't my dream boat. By my birthday in mid-October, the first sea kayak was basically complete, although without real hatches, and painted primer gray. We launched in Tomales Bay. In December, I started work on the second kayak in the two front rooms of the apartment.

I had launched the Foamee as a rowboat, and used it a handful of times around the Bay.  By February of 2001, I completed the Foamee's conversion to sail: rudder, daggerboard, daggerboard trunk, rear seat and foredeck with mast support. All of those small parts took a long time to complete (maybe a third of total building time), which would be an important lesson for the trimaran. I launched the second kayak in March of 2001.

If I were to do another small boat, (and I probably will sometime in the future), I would build a foam-cored boat to one of Marples’ Constant Camber designs, or build a boat with plywood bottom and foam topsides.  I could use a layer of ply or veneer as the inner skin, giving it a wooden-boat look, and vacuum-bag the entire laminate stack on the mold, giving it a smooth finish.  Plus it would be really light, probably more so than the Foamee with its layer of mat and polyester resin.  The downside is that foam is expensive, and marine plywood not much cheaper, so materials would be twice as expensive. 

I decided to build a Farrier trimaran after exactly one sail, which is one more than loony Donald Crowhurst had before he decided to sail a Piver nonstop around the world, so I'm in good company.  I had discovered the Farrier designs early in 2000, and sailed on one at a broker in Alameda.  It sailed like a dinghy, turned on a spot, and was very quick.  The broker, Gary Helms, demonstrated its ability to turn continuously in 360 degree circles without touching the sheets.  I liked it.  Gary is one of those truly great brokers who managed to sell the boat (or at least the concept) without talking your ear off about it.  In fact, Gary didn't say much at all, he simply answered questions with simple facts.  The problem was that new a Corsair 31 cost $100-$140k, and even the more recent old ones still cost at least $85k.  Then I discovered that Corsair was producing a boat that was designed to be constructed by home builders.  I was hooked.  I did consider some other multihull designs, but not particularly seriously.  None was trailerable with the Farrier's ease, and none came as close to being able to look like a professionally-built boat as the Farrier.  And if I’m going to spend more than $50k building a boat, I don’t want to make it look homemade. 

The Ericson that I currently share with my brother and a friend is a great boat, but at some point you get bored of puttering around at 5 knots, because it limits a daysail to the same old circuit of the Bay: South Beach, Treasure Island, Angel Island, Alcatraz.  Your sailing is also much more limited by tides and currents than in a faster boat.  Obviously you always need to consider tides, but there are many days when we simply can't get away from South Beach without motoring because of adverse currents of 4+ knots.  On our typical daysail, if we feel like really going far and if the tides are right we can make it out the Gate, but Drake's Bay and Half Moon Bay are 2-day trips (1 down, 1 back).  We've gone to the Faralones a few times, but that's a dawn-to-midnight trip in our boat.  We could trade up to a sportboat like a J/boat or Express, but we’d be gaining another 2-3 knots at best, and sacrificing things like standing headroom.  While a monohull racer derives its speed from hull shape, rig tweaking, or a radical keel, a trimaran derives its speed solely from its form.  I don't believe the multihull to be inherently superior; it's simply a personal preference.  (My only anti-monohull pet peeve is the canting keel, which turns a boat into a motorsailer because the engine has to be running for it to work properly).  Long after I had discarded a friend's advice to buy a boat like an Express 27 because it had no cabin space, no water heater, and no amenities, I realized that almost all of the time my sailing was daysailing, so I didn’t need to be able to sleep 5 or feed 10.