1983 Gemini 3000 — Brick, NJ 08723

A 1983 Gemini 31/3000 at Brick, New Jersey, asking $26,900 through Pop Yachts. The model exists because Tony Smith's Telstar trimaran moulds burned in 1981; he restarted on catamarans, and the hulls built through 1990 put a cruising cat inside an ordinary budget. The governing number is the beam — 14.0 ft on a 30.5 ft hull, narrow for a catamaran and deliberately so, because it fits a standard marina slip. That one decision is why Gemini sold to people who could not otherwise berth two hulls.

Two honesty notes. We hold no other 31/3000, so there is no sister to price this one against: $26,900 is the floor of our cruising-catamaran market, not a benchmarked position inside its own model. And it is a forty-three-year-old production boat at the bottom of that market — the price asks a question about condition that only a survey answers.

What the shelf does place is the neighbourhood. Nothing we hold nearby asks less: the next catamaran up wants $9,295 more, and the rest of the comparable fleet runs from $39,000 to $167,400. It sits at the very bottom of catamarans under $100k; that gap is the case for it.

The boat that defines that $9,295 is the 2001 Richard Woods Skua — the same thirty feet, eighteen years newer, and an ocean away in southern England:

Where the money buys length instead, the 1985 Prout Snowgoose 37 at Luperón adds seven feet of the same era's offshore cat for $12,100:

And the yard's own answer is the Gemini 105Mc, the line's next generation — a 1997 at Kemah, Texas, $23,000 above this hull:

But if the brief is the cheapest two hulls we are willing to stand behind, it is this one — the one to survey first: