Left: those familiar with Farrier’s lovely little F-24 will immediately spot the family resemblance to this plan-built F-22 – the design is still expected to begin production building in 2018 in North Carolina. Students of Ian Farrier’s work will immediately jump to the clean beam/hull connection and elimination of the small well that sometimes proved irresistible to a foot while the boats were rigged. It began with the Trailertri (sandwiched here by two F-27s) but it was the F-27 – which somehow squeezed in a workable aft cabin – that changed everything for countless sailors looking for the ideal family cruiser-racer who never thought they’d ever consider a multihull


fast. Equal or better to similar-sized mono- hulls in light airs and significantly faster in stronger winds. Some of the bigger skiff- style planing trapeze monohulls could match us at times, but they were always on the raw edge of control and usually disap- peared aft after a huge wipe-out. Mean- while, we were relaxed, sitting back and on many occasions enjoying lunch at 14kt. But how did we fare against other


trimarans with their narrower 12:1 hulls? Not much difference in light airs but we were definitely slower in a breeze. Not a big concern considering our competition was the monohull trailer-sailer; I pressed on with the Trailertri 18 which retained the wide main hull, but now also had a bigger cabin… getting close to matching the inte- rior volume of some of our monohull rivals. Then a surprising thing happened. We


took part in a long race around Brisbane’s Moreton Bay. On one of the offwind legs a larger, narrow-hulled Buccaneer 24 tri- maran was overtaking us – as we expected. But it was noticeable that when a gust came, enough to get us on the plane, we could now match his speed. In the lulls we dropped off the plane and he would sail on past, but with the next gust we would be back again. We were clearly sailing to a hull speed in moderate winds, but above or below that we acted like a trimaran with genuine trimaran speeds. Obviously, if we could get the wider hull to plane earlier, and for longer, we could come closer to matching the narrow hull boats. The next design (Trailertri 680) had a


slightly wider hull still, but with a lot more rocker to ensure a sensible displacement and good light-weather performance with the lower wetted surface area. It also demonstrated strong performance in light and heavy winds, even when loaded up for cruising; while the narrow-hull trimarans would lose their performance quickly as they loaded up and sank into the water, picking up wetted surface area very quickly. Nevertheless, we were still a little slower overall… but we were happy to accept this as our sales were already five to 10 times that of the ‘narrow’ competition! The success of the Trailertri series led to


my first production boat, a 19ft (5.8m) folding daysailer built by the Australian company Haines Hunter and called the Tramp. The little Tramp was very success-


ful and production peaked at six boats per week. It was also one of the most comfort- able and practical of all my designs to sail. I could rig and launch a Tramp in nine minutes and it was voted 1981 Australian Boat of the Year. However, it did have some weak points.


While it had a huge cockpit that could be enclosed for overnight stays, the lack of dry accommodation below was a definite drawback. I rebuilt my own Tramp with a smaller cockpit to allow this; it was a clear improvement and became the original inspiration for the latest F-22.


Farrier Marine USA Success in Australia attracted wider atten- tion and in 1984 US financial backing was found with a move to San Diego and the establishment of Corsair Marine. The F-27 had quickly been designed as our first US grp production boat and we’d soon devel- oped a full manufacturing facility. The main design advance with the F-27 had been to go to a straighter, flatter hull with minimal rocker to lower the hull speed and ensure early break-out onto the plane. Also, being a vacuum-bagged foam-core production boat it was lighter and did not need the reserve buoyancy of the plywood boats to maintain good performance. The switch in design approach proved


successful and we noticed straight away how the F-27 would step up onto the plane much sooner with little respect for theor - etical hull speed. The new boat just punched right on through. The other notable characteristic was a


bow-up attitude prompted by the use of swept-up stern sections, aft of a straight run, which created negative lift and kept the boat safe from pitchpoling when driving hard downwind. Some crews learned to exploit this further, moving their weight inboard from the floats and aft behind the traveller on the centre hull to keep the stern sections immersed and the bows up. This way the boat could be sailed 2-3kt faster than in regular ‘normal’ trim even without the extra righting moment of the crew out on the floats. We now had a roomy cruiser that could


also perform, able at times to match good multihull raceboats while providing a lot more room. The F-27 prototype Super Fox was campaigned in many big American


regattas, often taking line honours whether inshore or offshore. Production increased and eventually more than 100 F-27s were being built every year. The first F-27 ocean crossing was


completed from Long Beach to Hawaii in 1987, followed a year later by an Atlantic crossing, taking 23 days to sail from Cape Cod to England and then on to Holland. By 2000 Farrier multihulls had crossed the Atlantic six times and the Pacific Ocean seven times, while an F-28 had sailed around the world… Not the intended nor recommended purpose, but nevertheless demonstrating well the seaworthiness of a good small folding trimaran. The next significant step forward was a


rotating mast – previously I had stayed with a fixed tube as the folding system was already new and different enough and I wanted to keep everything else mainstream and well proven to avoid frightening the horses. But once the folding system and construction systems were developed a rotating mast was then implemented on the F-25C and F-28. Of course, rotating masts themselves are


actually simple – there are very well-estab- lished solutions to the usual issues of shroud attachment and load alignment. For our purposes, however, the big problem is to develop a reliable mast-raising system for a mast that can now swivel. This took a while but a foolproof system was eventu- ally developed – not as easy as the fixed mast systems, but close enough. The big plus was a significant boost in perfor- mance, especially off the wind, bringing the F-boats closer still to the good multi- hull racers of the time. With production of the F-27 well estab-


lished, I took a step back from production involvement in 1991 to focus on design; the F-24 and F-31 followed in the next couple of years, both built by Corsair Marine under licence. However, with the whole business growing very rapidly the Corsair relation- ship started to become a little bumpy and it ended formally in 2000; Farrier Marine was established back in New Zealand as a multi- hull design office focusing on new projects such as the F-22, F-32 and F-45 and supply- ing plans for professional and amateur boat- builders around the world. Our next advance was a third-genera- tion folding system which allowed shal- w


SEAHORSE 59


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