Why?

I became interested in Farrier trimarans sometime in late 1999. When I discovered that plans were available for home builders, I became interested in boatbuilding as a hobby.

The first question everybody asks is: why build a boat?  My main reason was because I find it a fulfilling way to spend my spare time.  Make no mistake: it's not for everybody, but if you are handy (as in, you can put together a piece of Ikea furniture), you can build a fiberglass boat.

The worst reason for building a boat is to save money.  True, you will probably not end up putting as much money into a Farrier as you would into a similarly-sized new Corsair or monohull, and the money is spent over a long period of time so you don't have to factor in financing costs, but there are too many reasons why it doesn't really make sense financially.  First, there is an enormous quantity of high-quality production boats out there, both new and used.  The builders have much lower materials costs than you will have, and they are hiring labor at a couple bucks an hour¹.   If you aren't seriously inclined to build a boat regardless of the financial savings, you are probably not going to see it through to the end.  If you go through the silly exercise of attempting to account for your time at some labor rate, you will find that your boat costs at least double what a production boat would.  Building a 9-foot foam-core fiberglass dinghy was enough to convince me that I would enjoy building a larger boat.  It was also an inspiration.  Every time I felt bogged down, I remembered how much fun it was the first time a boat I had built myself actually moved through the water, and how much more fun it would be at ten times the speed.  (My cost breakdown is here).

For some reason the second most frequently asked question is inevitably about steam-bending wood.  A glance at my boat is enough to enlighten even non-sailors that there's not a whole lot of steam-bending going on.  Traditional boatbuilding is an art, but one that must be mastered over many years, and it's not the best way to get yourself sailing on your own creation sooner rather than later.  I view those who build traditional wooden boats the same way I view, say, folks who make their own paper or roast their own coffee beans.  Nothing wrong with those hobbies, but not very much like what I do.  Yacht designer Paul Bieker put it best: "...the typical wooden boat scene can be backwards.  Guys in the 1800s were building the best boats they could, with the best materials and methods that were available.  You see these guys today using antiquated construction techniques, with way more wood than they need, and then digging their heels in about anything modern."²

Stitch-and-glue is a great compromise that combines some aspects of traditional boatbuilding (knees, gunwales, etc. are usually fabricated from wood), but avoids the complexities of steaming planks, spiling, caulking, etc. as well as the questionable environmental practice of traditional wooden boatbuilding.  (Where you start by going out into the forest, find the biggest, straightest, oldest tree, of the rarest species, and you kill it.)  It's also much easier to recover from mistakes with "liquid joinery."  My two kayaks and nesting dinghy are made with stitched plywood.  The only drawbacks are popular misconceptions about longevity, the need for hard chines, and the limitation that plywood often cannot take the complex shapes desirable in a larger boat.  Also, because compound curves are stiffer, and plywood can't be twisted into much of a compound shape, plywood boats tend to be heavier.  Perhaps once I've retired and built as many other boats as I've wanted to, and if good boatbuilding lumber can be found from sustainable sources, I'll take up traditional wooden boatbuilding.

Why a trimaran?  For me, the choice was driven more by practical considerations than by any strong desire to be a multihuller.  Trailerability and comfortable accomodation for at least a weekend were important criteria.  Either of those is possible in a monohull, but mutually exclusive.  I knew I would need to move house and workshop at least once while building my boat so it had to be movable both during and after building, which dictated trailerability.  I don't plan to trailer frequently after launch, but the ability to take my boat to some cruising area and leave it safe and sound on the trailer when I'm not there has a lot of appeal, particularly since I'm not retired or independently wealthy, so I'm not going to be cruising for 6 months a year.   I was thinking of Mexico and the Carribean but without long passages down the coast or through the Panama Canal, or expensive deliveries.

The largest trailerable monohulls are still fairly small inside, mainly due to the bulk of the keel.  In other words, the weight of the boat plus keel limits the total size of a trailerable monohull to around 26 feet or so.  With a monohull, the higher aspect ratio the keel, the faster it goes, for a given hull shape.  But the deeper the keel, the less room you have before hitting trailer height limits (on land) or hitting the bottom (in water).  Standing headroom is something I consider essential for staying overnight, having camped on a Catalina 22 for a few years.  A retractable keel would solve the problem, but there are almost no monohulls designed for home-builders that offer retractable keels.  The closest thing is a lifting centerboard, which is notoriously inefficient.  The retractable daggerboard of the trimaran is a fringe benefit.  It allows the boat to be brought close to the beach (onto the beach if you feel the need to sand the paint off the bottom).  The trimaran websites have many pictures of sailors literally carrying the anchor out to deeper water.  No doubt about how well it's set if you can see it a few feet below you.  Plus it would be nice to return to my dinghy-sailing days, when the worst consequence of a  grounding (at least on a soft bottom) was that you pull the board up, hop out, push the boat around, and sail in the opposite direction.

There's an article in Professional Boatbuilder (April 5, 2008) about what is probably the most extreme trailerable monohull, the Rio Hondo 40S.  It's 40 feet long, 8'5" wide, and weighs 8200 pounds, plus perhaps 2500 more for a 3-axle 5th-wheel trailer.  It must be towed with a one-ton pickup, and one with a really big engine at that.  For the sake of making rigging easier (and probably because it's impossible for one person to manhandle the mast), the mast overhangs the entire pickup, out to the hood, which should make turning very interesting as the top of the mast will be in the next lane.  At least it's 15 feet or so off the ground so it should just sweep over the oncoming traffic.  The new owner is going to be in for a rude surprise when he tries to find an RV storage space that's 65 feet long.  All this for a boat whose maximum predicted downwind speed is 10.2 knots, in 20 knots of wind.  I can't tell whether the designer really believed this was a niche waiting to be filled, or whether he just wanted to do something nobody else had done.  He's done a really outstanding job of solving the problem of a trailerable 40-foot monohull, but at what cost?  I can't help but think, "Why not just buy a trailerable trimaran?"

One advantage to a trimaran is speed, but more important is that the speed happens without much heel.  Being able to hit 18 knots with  15-20 degrees of heel is just more relaxing, enjoyable, and fun than half that speed and twice the heel on a similar-sized monohull.  Monohull sailors don't seem to realize or don't want to admit that speed and heeling are directly proportional in their boats.  You can sail a boat that's built like a tank and has small sails, so it will be upright and slow.  Or you can sail a race boat that's built light and overcanvassed, so it's fast but you're sailing "on your ear" all the time.  The only cure is an extremely deep keel with a heavy bulb at the end, which in a boat over 25 feet or so means you can't get into most marinas.  Take a look at a picture of monohulls racing upwind, and you may wonder why it appears that only one or two guys in the back of the boat are actually doing anything while the rest ("rail meat") are simply sitting there to keep the boat upright.  Granted, everybody takes part in the frenzy of activity at mark roundings, tacks, and jibes, but monohull racing crews typically have many more members than required to actually operate the boat.  For me, the lack of heeling is the single biggest advantage of the multihull.  It simply makes sailing a lot easier and a lot more fun.    If you haven't sat on the rail of a monohull headed upwind in chop at hull speed, try this: put 2 legs of your coffee table on the couch, sit on the edge of the table, and bounce up and down while a friend splashes you with cold salt water.  Good times.

But it's not when you're cooking along at 18 knots that the speed of the trimaran is most important.  If you're doing 18 knots, it's because the wind is blowing at least 25, so if you were on a monohull it would feel like you were going like a bat out of hell, even if you were only doing 7 knots.  It's the ease with which you can keep the boat moving reasonably well in most conditions that matters.  On my trimaran, I'm generally moving about twice as fast as all of the monos around me, no matter what the wind speed, unless the wind is really light and that's when they all turn their engines on.  And no, I'm not a particularly great sailor.  I just don't need to work very hard or pay much attention to get the boat moving.  Any reasonably light boat can plane downwind.  The trimaran can plane (or at least exceed hull speed, even if it's not technically planing) while sailing upwind, downwind, or in between.  Finally, it's really a matter of personal preference.  Speed isn't the most important thing to every sailor but I happen to enjoy sailing fast.  For most sailors, sailing a boat that looks like the other boats, and that's an accepted part of European yachting tradition, is more important, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The last reason for building a trimaran is that I feel that there are too many good used monohulls on the market to justify bringing another one into the world, particularly if it involves thousands of hours of labor.  Don't get me wrong: I'm not a multihull bigot.  If I had an infinite amout of money, I would have several boats, and most would be monohulls: a pair of Minis for singlehanded ocean racing and match racing in the Bay, a "spirit of tradition" boat that looks like an old woodie but that has a fiberglass hull and wood-veneer, carbon fiber spars.  Hell, I might even buy a powerboat!  But if I have to have just one, it's going to be the trimaran.

There are some significant disadvantages to selecting a trimaran, too.  Most important is that it's a lot harder to find a place to put it.  Granted, when it's on the trailer for winter storage it tucks in nicely next to the garage and costs nothing, but if you're going to keep it in the water, you're going to have to find an end-tie, or you're going to have to berth it with the floats folded and paint antifouling all over the outside of the floats, or you're going to have to find a marina that will allow you to install a hoist in your berth, which itself is a significant added expense.  The other option is dry-sailing, but that just means it takes a lot longer to get on the water.  As marinas inevitably give way to waterfront condos, wet berths are going to get ever more expensive and dry-sailing is going to become much more common.

The other drawback to trimarans are their lack of space, mentioned above, and that they're not the ideal boat for racing, as I mention elsewhere.

My only real complaint about the modern monohull is the use of canting keels.  If you have to have the engine on, it's not a sailboat.  At best it's a motorsailer.  If you forced canting keel boats to race without the genset or battery banks or whatever they use to power the keel, and if it consequently took 20 minutes per tack to tack the keel, the fad would fade a lot faster.  From Sail magazine: "What is future of canting-ballast technology?"  Juan Kouyoumdjian: "It depends on acceptance. I could argue that a canting-keel monohull is a very inefficient multihull. Imagine canting a keel to leeward and instead of ballast you have air. You would achieve the same increase in righting moment in a ligter solution and in fact you get a multihull. Our sailing community is divided, and choices are made on style or fashion; otherwise we'd all be sailing multihulls."

This comment has caused some heated discussion on the Internets, for sure.  Mostly because it's taken out of context, which was ocean racing.  There are some kinds of sailing where raw speed simply isn't important: one-design racing, daysailing, some coastal cruising.  I suspect that the majority of sailors will always bow to tradition and desire monohulls.  You could say the same thing about cars: if choices weren't made on style or fashion nobody would be driving an SUV.

The final reason, and maybe the most important one, is safety.