The master of (multihull) intuition


A long-awaited article that was intended as an update on the latest work of a great friend of this magazine is tragical- ly now being published as a tribute (pg11). But this is not the end of the Ian Farrier story nor of his importance to many thousands of happy multihullers


Twenty years ago we described the Farr-designed Mumm 30 as the most complete all-round keelboat package we had ever sailed; soon afterwards we said the same about the Ian Farrier-designed F-24 folding trimaran (we even bought one – ed). Farrier did more to introduce monohull sailors to multihull cruising and racing than any other designer – ever. His folding F-boats were a work of genius in which ease of use did not detract at all from a high-performance sailing experience. Here Ian revisited his roots after spending the last seven years and a lot of his own money finessing the production manufacture of a smaller, lighter evolution of the very first Farrier trimaran to be production-built in large numbers… the groundbreaking F-27


F-22 sport-cruiser The new-generation F-22 is the 21st- century version of the original F-27 Farrier trimaran that helped change the sailing world in 1986. The F-27 was inducted into the US Sailboat Hall of Fame in 2004 and the F-22 is intended to take the trailable F-boat tri concept to a higher level again. It has been developed in New Zealand


by Farrier Marine (NZ) over the past 10 years, self-financed by the designer to ensure the maximum design freedom. This


58 SEAHORSE


allowed us to experiment with some radical new features and try what might initially look unworkable. The things that didn’t work were exposed, those that did were incorporated. We then just worked on eliminating the obstacles.


The F-Boat evolution It all started in 1967 when as a young engineering student I acquired an unfin- ished 30ft trimaran to go cruising. Two years of hard graft saw it launched in 1969 and a year later I sailed it singlehanded up the coast of New Zealand from Christ - church to Auckland. Several mid-winter roaring forties


storms were encountered on the way but for this ex-monohull sailor the trimaran was found to be fast, safe and forgiving. However, it had various problems and was not yet ideal for serious offshore conditions. I jumped ship to a traditional monohull in Auckland and sailed on to Tonga. However, this experience – solid, but slow and uncom- fortable – quickly convinced me that a well-designed and engineered multihull was the better way to go. I eventually wound up in Brisbane in


1972 where, crewing on a local trimaran, the growing popularity of the monohull trailer-sailer was by now becoming appar- ent. It was also obvious that a wide, stable and unsinkable trimaran would make for a much better inshore trailer-sailer. Better still, at that size the capsize objection was negated as the small monohull trailer-sailer was the more easily capsized of the two types and the ballasted examples could sink. The challenge would be to make a wide


trimaran trailable, so I started working on some ideas and in 1973 came up with a


new trimaran folding system. The neat thing was that there were no hinges in the actual beams while the system actually strengthened the boat globally; folding could be done in seconds and when folded the boat remained stable. A prototype called Trailertri was built


and launched in Australia in 1974. It worked perfectly, and that very same boat is still sailing over 40 years later. The Farrier Folding System patent was


granted in 1975 and various plywood versions of the Trailertri were built in the next few years as we further refined the design and folding system. The Trailertri series soon established itself as a practical cruising option for performance sailors and many hundreds of examples were built over the next 10 years.


The Trailertri The first thing that was apparent was that for a small towable trimaran to sell it would have to offer a reasonable amount of room. Few would switch from a mono- hull if it meant living in a trench, no matter how level it sailed or how much faster it went. So the main hull had to be wider than was normal for a trimaran of this type; while this may reduce performance the attractions of a wide, stable and unsinkable boat would still be significant in the trailable yacht market. And remem- ber too that comparable monohull trailer- sailers could be touchy animals – just moving forward on the side decks could be an adventure. Not so on a trimaran. So the design was done and the wide-


bodied (5:1 main hull length to beam ratio) Trailertri prototype was built. The folding system worked and the boat was


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