South Sound Sailing Society Ship-to-Shore :

Letters : Raising a Little Hull

Did you notice that there is a new, very fast, rather strange looking boat racing with us? I thought you might want to know a little more about her, so I invited the builder to comment.

Late in the afternoon on this September 8, I backed my trailer down the Eastbay boat launch with my ‘new’ boat on it. In the last three and a half years I put in almost 7,000 hours of work on her , not counting those planning sessions at 0300. Anticlimactially, the boat floated off the trailer and quietly floated next to the dock. Strider, my home built F-9A, was finally on the water.

1. Why did you want another boat? Our first boat was a water ballasted McGregor 26, need I say more?
   
2. Why did you want a faster boat? One can take losing to Vela only so many times.
   
3. Why a tri? A trimaran counteracts sail forces by spreading them out, while a monohull uses lead weight. The lighter the boat, the faster the potential.
   
4. What is the speed potential for the boat? The fasted reported speed to date for an F-9A has been 28 knots, in ideal conditions.
   
5. Why a trailerable boat? The ease, convenience, and lower storage costs of keeping the boat in dry storage, as well as the potential of expanded sailing range, if we choose to trailer the boat to distant launch sites.
   
6. Why an Ian Farrier design? Over twenty years of designing and engineering trimarans, Ian has developed a proven safe and seaworthy system of building trailerable performance boats, with cruising amenities.
   
7. She folds? How? Ian designed a modular mounting folding system that creates easy alignment and simplified connections of the three hulls. The folding system is composed of connecting beams and struts that allow the pontoons to move horizontally across the water with little effort. When closed, the pontoons tuck under the main hull.
   
8. Why build yourself? To afford the boat that we wanted I needed to invest my time, since we didn’t have the money to purchase the production F-31. At that time, Ian was making plans available to amateur builders, giving the skilled amateur the opportunity to produce a professional looking boat.
   
9. How is she built? A strip cedar plank core, covered with conventional fiberglass cloth, all held together with about 55 gallons of System 3 Epoxy. Sanded fair and painted.