Contour Yachts

Contour Yachts was Paul Contouris's yard in Ontario, Canada — far from any ocean, which never stopped a Canadian yet. After the Contour 30 MkII proved that sailors would buy a folding trimaran with a real interior, Contouris commissioned Cole Beadon to draw something the market said couldn't exist: a folding tri big enough to cross oceans. The result, the 34 SC — Sport Cruiser — bet everything on one idea, the swing-wing: instead of folding the amas up and over like the Farrier system that conquered the production world at Corsair, the 34 SC swings them aft, level, in the water — twenty-four feet of sailing beam becoming twelve and a half at the marina, no trailer, no crane, an ordinary slip. Contour built the folding trimaran for people whose problem wasn't the road — it was the dock. (Denmark's Quorning arrived at the same answer for the Dragonflys, which is about as good as validation gets.)

The engineering was honest for its size: a composite hull with Kevlar and carbon where the loads concentrate, solid glass where the akas land, 4,850 pounds all up — John Kretschmer's review in Sailing Magazine called speeds past 20 knots common, on a boat drawn in the late nineties. The yard itself is long gone, production was never large, and that makes the 34 SC a rare bird worth a watch alert: Scout holds exactly two live hulls as this is written — the 1999 boat in Hudson, Florida at $65,000, whose full file we keep, and a second 1999 hull in Detroit asking $78,000. That narrow band is the whole current market, and it prices a genuine ocean-rated folding 34-footer under the ask of far smaller, far younger boats on the trimaran shelf.

The honest notes, because a dead yard earns them: there is no factory to call, so the owners' community is the parts catalogue and the manual is whoever rebuilt one last. Any folding trimaran lives or dies at its aka attachments, and on a boat this rare your surveyor must have folded one before — the ritual, and why it is never skipped, is in how to buy a used trimaran. None of that is a reason to walk away. It is the usual price of a boat the market forgot to keep making — and at $65,000 for an ocean-capable folding tri, the market's forgetfulness is the buyer's opportunity.