A couple years ago my husband, then boyfriend, told me he wanted a trimaran. My response was of the pretty typical haha-whatever-you-say variety, and the subject was spared very few thoughts for the next year or so.
I didn't even know what a trimaran was, and every time I typed it into Google I misspelled it trimeran. I have always been mountain girl with a fondness for the desert, not an ocean-goer. My time away from the mountains and near the ocean has been marked by a strong desire to return to the mountains, and a dissatisfaction with the nonexistent elevation gain/loss around our current home. We had sailed on a borrowed sixteen foot day sailer a handful of times, but it never captured my imagination in the way that a long bike ride high in the Sierra Nevada mountains did.
But then in the summer of 2012 we ran into a neighbor (not literally) while out sailing the O'Day. He had a 24 foot Corsair F boat that he'd had gotten a great deal on, and he let us climb aboard to check it out.
This is not actually his boat.
What can I say? Do I need to say anything? Look at that thing.
I was sold.
Over the course of the fall Cody researched used trimarans and we found a number of prospects. We went to the New England Boat Show (where I met Devon McCourtey!) and oogled Corsairs. In February we found one that looked like it might fit the ticket, and it was within our price range. It was located Ontario, about 8 hours away. We contacted the owner and told him we were really interested and would love to come see it. He said he had another interested party but wouldn't sell it until we were able to drive up for a look. He lived about 2 hours northwest of Niagara Falls, so I insisted we make a weekend out of it.
In front of a very frosty Niagara Falls - Canadian side, naturally.
We drove up early so we'd have daylight enough to see the falls. They were pretty amazing. It was also amazingly cold. We walked around, visited a brewery, and stayed in a pretty sweet little motel. The next morning we headed up to London to see the boat. Actually, it was in London that we met up with the sellers (awesome Canadians) and they drove us an hour further north to see the boat at its winter storage location up on Lake Huron. First we stopped in to visit the guy who owned the barn Tri-oomph was stored in. He is a retired aeronautical engineer who was building Farrier F-22 tri in his garage, as well as a hovercraft. Yeah, you read that right. A hovercraft. Bad ass.
Eventually we made it up to the storage barn and got in to see the boat. It was absurdly cold in that barn (Ontario in February, go figure). I had on long underwear and insulated boots and a down jacket and a hat, and by the time Cody spent 2 hours meticulously going over the entire boat with the owner, Jim, I was about as cold as I'd ever been in my life. But Jim knew all the details we'd be interested in and was very careful to point out anything that needed replacing or reworking. We were both pretty stoked (or, I would have been if I hadn't been borderline hypothermic. We got hot chocolate on the drive home - Jim paid since we didn't have any Canadian money (hahahahaha) - and that warmed me up. In the car Cody was asking him how much he'd take for it, and we quickly settled on a price and agreed to purchase it. We gave him a deposit, then went back to his house where his wife, Carleen, cooked us lunch and we reviewed the boat plans, checked over the sails, and talked about the history of the boat. We got going much much later than we'd planned, as Cody had to work the next day, but we had a lovely time hanging out with our new friends and getting all the details on the boat. We agreed to come back when the snow melted enough for him to pull the boat out of storage to pick it up.
This is Jim's picture of Tri-oomph at dock on the reservoir in Ontario where they primarily sail.
So what is Tri-oomph? She's a home-built Farrier Trailer Tri 720 (#74 to be exact), plywood and fiberglass construction, 23 feet long, fully spec'd for cruising. Jim and his father built her in the late '80s. Jim's father had built dozens of boats in his lifetime, and Jim and his siblings and grown up racing small sail boats. Several years ago Jim and his father decided to built a new, updated trimaran because Jim really wanted to go do some multihull racing. They built a new F-22 out of foam and fiberglass and shaved about 1000 lbs off of Tri-oomph's weight. I'm told under a strong wind the new boat, christened Raise A Little Hull, can go 20 knots. You can water ski behind a boat at 20 kts, so that should tell you something.
Why is she green? Well, when they were kids attending regattas they had three boats of similar design that they would sail, and they were all green so the competition wouldn't be able to tell them apart. They continued the tradition with Tri-oomph, and later with Raise A Little Hull. Both the name and the color grew on us pretty quickly once she* was ours.
*When we were first visiting Jim and Carleen I thought it was so funny that they referred to a boat as "she" and "Tri-oomph", as in, "We love to cruise on Tri-oomph, she's so comfortable!" But after almost a year of boat ownership I totally get it. It's way more than an "it", and saying "the Tri-oomph" is just stupid.
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