Rigged to Rip: How Trimarans Maximize Speed and Simplicity
Most of us monohull sailors don’t let on that we ponder alternatives to deep-draft keels and the lead or iron we lug around. We do watch with some envy as multihulls slip blithely over the shoaling parts of the Great Bahama Bank and meander about the skinny waters of Chesapeake Bay. Curiosity often leads to serious conversation, and before long, there’s a new interest in the next boat show.
At the moment, there’s no for-sale sign taped to the mast of my own cruising monohull, Wind Shadow. But I’m nautically curious and always on the lookout for worthy sailboats. I also realize that cruising conditions vary, as does the sailing interest and skillset of each crew. So, when I go boat-looking, I like to recall the seafaring wisdom of an old shipwright: “Be sure the tool you choose is the right one for the job at hand.”
The same can be said about sailboats. When the job is coastal cruising and the setting is an abundance of estuaries, bays, rivers and sounds, plus some short-hop ocean passagemaking, the right tool may very well be a light, agile, folding-ama trailerable trimaran. Its generous sail-area-to-displacement ratio means that even light winds will become a viable sailing breeze. Weight is the enemy, and payload limits must be viewed as sacrosanct numbers, not to be exceeded.
Sailing this kind of trimaran is akin to taking a street-legal sports car onto the track. Set a little less than full sail, don’t crowd the corners, and the encounter will be a free and easy romp. Push too hard in either case, and the ride gets more challenging.
In both cases, well-practiced contingency plans pay off. These include keeping track of true-wind speed and sail-combo setups. Treat increases in sea state the way a driver handles a wet track. Factor in variables such as crew size and competence, along with how willing you are to push the limit, and contend with the consequences.
Trimaran advocates Charlie and Nona Pucciarello are good examples of hardcore multihull sailors who have transitioned into performance cruising. They savor the time spent sailing from anchorage to anchorage as much as they enjoy the harbors they visit. Charlie’s years of dinghy racing at the US Naval Academy and his aircraft carrier flight ops as an F-14 pilot left certain performance expectations in play, but today, he’s a more sedate airline pilot. Years of racing and cruising a Farrier-31 led to the Pucciarellos’ current Corsair 37, an appropriate blend of adventure and relaxation.
As a couple, they demonstrate that sailhandling and safety go hand in hand. Their routine is anything but a dialed-back reefed-down slog. Hot Chocolate is set up to expedite sail trimming and reefing efficiency. Hardware upgrades vary from optimized winches to lead-block locations selected to maintain a fairlead. Charlie and Nona doublehand the Corsair 37, and they used the underway experiences garnered aboard their F-31 to help fine-tune the bigger Corsair. Their “been there, done that” database is equivalent to that of the veteran sports-car driver who has spun out a time or two and knows what’s necessary.
They like the idea of the latest headsail-handling hardware used on small to midsize trimarans, to minimize crew time on the foredeck. Either a reacher or an asymmetric spinnaker can be tacked to the retractable sprit pole. The roller-furling operation is initiated via an endless-line roller furler. It relies on a single large-diameter sheave that replaces the more-familiar roller-furling drum. The control rope is an end-to-end spliced loop with only one turn around the grooved and caged furling sheave. The double line is fed back to the cockpit using a series of twin-block fairleads.
These foilless furlers substitute a stiff torsion-resistant line as the connection between the tack and the top swivel. Sails with narrower head girth (drifters and reachers) use a bottom-up furler. These units are designed to initiate the luff twist at deck level and then allow the torsion cable to project the furling rotation aloft to the head swivel. Because of the asymmetric spinnaker’s much-fuller head, it’s advantageous to have the furling process begin aloft and progress in a downward fashion.
Top-down furling tends to be a bit more of a challenge. Sailors who are new to endless-line sprit-pole sailhandling are better off starting out with a moderately sized drifter/reacher (aka screacher) and handling it with a bottom-up endless-line furler.
The mainsail on the most efficient sailing multihulls is indeed a force to reckon with. And at the heart of good seamanship is knowing how to reef efficiently, along with recognizing when it’s time to do so. The process has been helped immensely thanks to lighter, stronger, much-less-stretch-prone cordage, and more-efficient turning blocks and rope clutches that lock line into place with the jaw hold of a gator. The absence of a backstay means there’s room for a square-top full-batten main, with lots of sail area aloft. It warrants a dedicated reefing winch, lazy jacks and a hammock, or a stack pack-style mainsail containment system.
Every multihull sailor needs to develop a keen awareness of form stability and how it relates to angle of heel. The monohull sailor has a safety valve in the form of secondary righting moment derived from ballast. It delivers capsize resistance at deeper angles of heel. This secondary source of stability is missing in multihulls.
However, widespread high-volume amas provide buoyancy that acts in opposition to the heeling moment. When the angle of heel is less than 20 degrees, a multihull’s resistance to capsize is far greater than that of a monohull. Still, in heavy weather offshore, large swells affect wave-face geometry, and the water plane on which a vessel floats can become steeply inclined. This can significantly decrease the influence of buoyancy derived from stability. Heavy-weather storm tactics for multihulls take this into consideration.
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