Quorning Boats DRAGONFLY 28

The Dragonfly 28 is a boat shaped by a traffic regulation. Folded she measures 2.54 metres across — one centimetre under the European road-trailer limit — and almost everything else about her follows from a refusal to go a centimetre over it. The patented Swing Wing system swings 21 feet of sailing beam back to that road width from the cockpit, without tools, in under two minutes; Quorning Boats has been building the arrangement at Skærbæk in Denmark long enough to make it look inevitable, and put this one into series in 2009 to replace the 800. Owners talk about her the way people talk about good tools: fast, strangely upright for the speed, balanced on the helm, and finished like furniture rather than like a boatyard apology.

One name covers three boats. Touring carries a shorter aluminium rig; Sport and Performance go taller and carbon, and the Performance added wave-piercing floats with roughly a fifth more buoyancy and beams tilted so the leeward float digs in later. YACHT's generation test is blunt about what that buys — the Performance, it says, tempts you to play with fire, and a sailor new to three hulls may be happier with the calmer original set-up. On a secondhand listing this is not a trim level. It is which boat you are buying.

Scout watches 1 live askings for the 28, averaging $166,374. Read that average with the rigs in mind: on this model the money moves with the rig and the inventory far more than with the model year, so an average across the name is a blunt instrument and a straight year-against-year comparison is close to meaningless. Ours asks $166,374, and the file is where you establish what is actually being sold:

The honest notes. Owners report that the 28 does not carry weight well: loaded with cruising gear and stores, the edge that justified the price goes flat, and a boat bought for its numbers can disappoint the first time it is packed for a fortnight away. Blue Water Sailing found the five-berth claim optimistic — three or four aboard is the realistic version — and flagged the outboard controls mounted under the cockpit locker lid, so the locker stands open while you manoeuvre. The cabin is bright, but 28 feet is 28 feet: this is a fast couple's boat, not an apartment. And the Swing Wing that makes her a trailer boat is precision machinery, so service history matters more here than on cruder systems. The yard still sells the parts, which cuts both ways — nothing is unobtainable, and nothing is cheap.

If the appeal is the folding idea rather than this particular execution of it, the boat the Swing Wing was invented for is the Dragonfly 800, and it changes hands for a fraction of the money. The shelf where folding and open water are both required, rather than one or the other, is the folding ocean trimarans.