Why Would Anyone Want a Trimaran? Am I Crazy for Wanting One?

Every marina has one guy who owns a trimaran, and every marina treats him the same way: half curiosity, half suspicion, like he showed up to the potluck with a dish nobody recognizes. Three hulls. No keel to speak of. A boat that looks like it’s trying to be a bug and a sailboat at the same time. The monohull crowd squints at it over their coffee and asks the question that’s really a challenge dressed up as small talk: “Why would anyone want a trimaran?”

Fair question. Let’s actually answer it, instead of just making fun of the guy.

The Case Against Heeling

Here’s something nobody tells you when you’re twenty-five and think heeling 30 degrees is the whole point of sailing: at some point, you get tired of pouring your coffee sideways. You get tired of bracing a hip against the cockpit coaming for four hours. You get tired of gear sliding off the settee and your dog looking at you like you’ve personally betrayed her.

A trimaran solves this without giving up the thing that makes sailing feel like sailing. Unlike a cruising catamaran — which trades away helm feel for a stable, flat platform that some longtime sailors compare to piloting a houseboat — a trimaran keeps the connection. It still responds to the wheel or tiller the way a good boat should, still accelerates when you crack off the wind, still rewards a sailor who knows what they’re doing. It’s often called the “sailor’s multihull” for exactly that reason: you get the stability of three hulls without losing the feedback that made you fall in love with sailing a monohull in the first place.

The geometry does the heavy lifting. A trimaran’s main hull is slim and efficient, with the two outer floats — the amas — there mostly for stability rather than to carry weight day-to-day. Less wetted surface, less drag, and a righting moment that comes from beam rather than from lead hanging off the bottom of the boat. That’s the whole trick. No ballast. No keel to worry about in skinny water. Just leverage.

What You Actually Give Up

Nobody’s pretending this is a free lunch. A trimaran gives you speed and stability in exchange for two things every old boat sailor cares about: cabin space and interior comfort. That third hull’s engineering — the folding arms, the connecting beams — eats into the money and the volume that would otherwise go into your accommodations. You will not get the wide, party-barge interior of a similarly-sized catamaran. You will not get the enclosed head and the six-foot berths of a comparable monohull cruiser. A trimaran in the 27 to 36-foot range often lives more like a well-built boat five or six feet shorter, because all that extra beam is out in the amas, not over your head in the saloon.

Sailing a trimaran also asks more of you on deck. The lines multiply, the rig demands attention, and these boats are famously sensitive to weight — pack it like a cruising monohull and you’ll sail like one too, defeating the entire point of having three hulls in the first place. And there’s a motion quirk worth knowing about before you buy: trimarans can get genuinely uncomfortable on a broad reach in steep chop, when the leeward ama buries and the boat gets squirrely about bearing off. It’s a real handling characteristic, not marina gossip.

What you get in return, though, is safety that’s hard to argue with. A trimaran is exceptionally difficult to capsize, and even in the rare event that it does go over, the three-hull design and foam-cored construction keep it floating rather than sinking. Compare that to a monohull, where a knockdown with the wrong timing can be a genuinely bad day, and the trade starts to look pretty reasonable.

The Shoal Water Nobody Else Can Touch

There’s one more advantage that doesn’t get talked about enough: draft. Board up, most trailerable trimarans draw somewhere around a foot or two of water. That means the skinny anchorage tucked behind the sandbar, the little cove your cruising buddies with fin keels are eyeing from a quarter mile out, the spot where you can nose right up onto the beach for lunch — all of that is just Tuesday for a trimaran. Drop the board back down once you’re clear of the shallows and you get your performance back. Monohull sailors spend their whole lives sailing around the good anchorages. A trimaran sailor sails into them.

Where the Corsair Comes In

This is where I have to be honest about my own interests, because I’ve been circling the Corsair F24 and F27/F28 for longer than I’d like to admit, and I still might end up owning one someday even though I’ve got a perfectly good Catalina 320 sitting in her slip right now. Every time I’ve gone boat shopping since the year 2000 I’ve had this debate with myself.

Ian Farrier’s folding trimarans hit a sweet spot that almost nothing else on the water occupies. The F-24 folds down to a beam you can legally tow behind a truck, and depending on the source, you can go from trailer to sailing in as little as twenty minutes if you’re practiced, or a more honest couple of hours if you’re not in a hurry. The F-27 and its successor, the F-28, are bigger, roomier, and just as trailerable, with the same patented folding arms that let one person collapse the amas in a few minutes flat.

And then there’s the part that actually matters for those of us sailing the Great Lakes: these boats are shockingly good in light air. Great Lakes sailors know the reality better than most — you can spend half a summer afternoon watching your telltales hang limp while your monohull barely holds steerageway. A Corsair, built to plane and carrying a big, efficient sail plan on a boat that weighs a fraction of what a monohull its length weighs, gets moving in conditions that would leave a heavier boat wallowing. Reports of an F-27 sailing a full two-man race averaging over 17 knots, or an F-24 owner casually mentioning 12 knots boat speed in 15 knots of wind, aren’t exaggeration — that’s just what an ultralight, well-designed trimaran does with a decent breeze.

But the trailerability is the real hook for me, and I think it’s the real hook for a lot of Great Lakes sailors who don’t say it out loud. We’re all sitting in our home marinas, sailing the same stretch of water, reachable in a day or two of coastal hopping, year after year.

A trailerable trimaran breaks that pattern completely. Fold it up, put it on the highway, and suddenly you’re launching into Georgian Bay one weekend and the Apostle Islands the next. Maybe you take a road trip to the Florida Keys over Christmas. You’re not limited to what’s reachable under sail from your slip — you’re limited by how far you’re willing to drive. For someone who’s sailed the same lake for years and started dreaming about water he can’t get to without a delivery crew and a week off work, that changes the whole equation.

So, Why Would Anyone Want One?

If you’re making a purely rational decision, a monohull or a cruising cat is almost always the better deal — more space, more comfort, less money, less to think about at the dock. Nobody buys a trimaran because the spreadsheet says to. They buy it because somewhere along the way they got flat, fast, and quiet in the same boat, and decided that feeling was worth more than a bigger bed. That’s not irrational, exactly. It’s just a different set of priorities than the spreadsheet is built to measure.

I’m not trading in the C320 tomorrow. She’s paid for, she’s comfortable, and she’s mine. But every time I watch the wind die on a July afternoon and my old boat just sits there sulking, I think about a Corsair on a trailer, already three lakes away, tucked into some skinny little cove nobody else could reach.

Old Boat Sailor is written by sailors who’ve spent enough summers on the Great Lakes to know that the best boat is the one that gets you sailing, not the one that impresses your neighbors at the marina.