Corsair Marine (USA) CORSAIR 27

Every folding trimaran afloat owes something to this boat. The Corsair 27 — sold as the F-27 for most of its life — is the design Ian Farrier built his patent around: amas that swing inboard for the road, a rotating rig, and under 2,700 pounds of boat that sleeps a family and still embarrasses keelboats twice its price. Practical Sailor's review put the trick in one figure: the sailing beam folds to 8 ft 5 in, which is a public road and an ordinary slip. Some 450 hulls left Chula Vista before production ended in 1997, making it the most successful folding trimaran ever built and the reason Corsair Marine exists at all — John Walton founded the yard to build this one design. In 2004 it became the second multihull ever inducted into the American Sailboat Hall of Fame, after the Hobie 16.

Scout watches 25 live askings of the model, averaging $35,828, and the quality shelf holds 1990 at $46,585. A run of 450 boats is what gives a used buyer something to shop; but on a design this old the spread is not a depreciation curve, it is a condition report. Refit history, sails and the state of the folding gear move an asking price further than the year on the transom does, which is why the cheapest hull on a given day is neither reliably the worst buy nor the best one. Which is the argument for reading one boat closely rather than reading the band:

The honest notes are three decades long. Practical Sailor named the drawback plainly — the lack of interior space compared with a monohull — and there is no standing headroom outside the pop-top; Wave Train, sailing one, called the accommodation cramped and strictly minimal and judged the boat a weekend cruiser with occasional stints of a week or two aboard, not a long-range bluewater proposition. The part that costs money is the folding gear, because the folding gear is the boat. Farrier Marine's own beam care bulletin tells owners to walk the beam tops and feel for movement underfoot: that is the symptom of voids in the foam, which show up later as cracks and chips along the beam edges, and a run of early-nineties hulls had exactly that fault put right under warranty. Walk them before you fall in love. If you want the same faith in modern resin with a yard still behind it, the Corsair 880 is this design's replacement three decades on; if the budget is the constraint rather than the ambition, the F-24 is Farrier's smaller answer to the same question. The rest of the fleet lives with the trimarans for sale.