2005 Philippe Riviere Polynésie 42 — Guadeloupe »

A 2005 Polynésie 42, asking $210,600 through cat sale GmbH & Co. KG. This is a plans-built boat: Philippe Rivière sells the design and individual builders execute it — a strip-plank epoxy centre hull drawn tulip-shaped for interior volume, with folding, demountable floats. It is the smaller sister of his Polynésie 45, and the brief is the same: a liveaboard ocean cruiser first, pitched on habitability and reserve buoyancy rather than racing lines. The numbers agree — 30.84 ft of beam under 41 ft of hull — and a 2005 build puts this hull at the very start of the design's record.

Two honesty notes. Plans-built means the boat is as good as the hands that laid it up; we hold no condition data and have not surveyed it, so the survey carries more weight here than it would on a series boat. And there is no sister ship on our shelf — $210,600 has no like-for-like benchmark.

What the shelf does place is the money. Among our bluewater trimarans it sits in the gap between the older production folding tris near its length and the modern series cruising tri: the ask buys volume, not pedigree.

The pedigree route at similar length is the 2008 Corsair 37 at Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhône — a production folding tri, three years newer, $91,800 less:

The identical $210,600 buys, to the dollar, a 2021 Tricat 30 at Cannes — sixteen years newer with a yard behind it, but eleven feet shorter:

And where the same brief is answered in series, the 2021 NEEL 43 at Le Marin is the production cruising trimaran two feet up, for $145,800 more:

But if it is the platform itself you are after — maximum living volume on a 41-ft trimaran — nothing else on this shelf does what this boat does: this is the one to survey first: