2008 Corsair Marine CORSAIR 37 — Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, France

A 2008 Corsair 37 at Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône, asking $118,800 through Hellomulti. This is the flagship of the Corsair Marine range — an enlargement of the Corsair 36, drawn after production moved to Ho Chi Minh City in 2006, and one of the largest folding trimarans on the market. The yard's signature is the folding system Ian Farrier built the brand on: 25.6 ft of sailing beam collapsing to about ten, a 37-footer that pays a monohull's berth fee.

The model's brief was to carry Corsair's trailer-and-regatta idea into genuine cruising — a private aft cabin and a real shower in a hull still meant to sail like the sport boats. Two honesty notes. The model is generally dated to 2009, so a 2008 paper year is worth pinning down at survey. And with no sister ship on our shelf, we cannot say whether $118,800 is keen for a Corsair 37.

What our trimaran shelf does place is the neighbourhood. The nearest relative is the 2003 Corsair 36 — the design this one was grown from, also in France — at $78,424: a $40,376 premium for five years and the flagship hull. Everything newer runs the other way: every trimaran we hold from 2010 on is smaller than this boat and asks more, $180,360 to $237,600 for 30 to 35 feet.

If that premium is the sticking point, the Corsair 36 is the same idea one generation back:

Where the instinct runs to newer rather than bigger, the yard's current answer is the 2019 Cruze 970 Sport — eleven years newer, a size down, $106,200 more:

And outside the yard, the 2010 Dragonfly 35 Ultimate is Denmark's big folding cruiser — two years newer, two feet shorter, at exactly twice this asking price:

But nothing else here folds a 37-foot platform into an ordinary berth for $118,800 — this is the one to survey first: