Seeking info on Tri-Star or Piver trimaran 23 to 27 Feet

Horses for courses boys ! While the world thinks it needs warships it really does need boats like Pivers that people with carpentry skills can bang together to enjoy the water without spending a fortune. V hulls have their place, being soft riding in a seaway and easy to construct because not everybody has a ship yard. They worked for thousands of years carrying the polynesians over more of the worlds water than any other hull form in ancient time. It is great that we have new material and design options available to us but appropriate technology is a important concept to practice in a world of decreasing resources. I for one am happy to boat green by updating an older boat built of wood that is not available on todays market. I'm recycling another and planning on updates to take advantage of developments over the last few decades in both design and technology but will also take a hard look at environmental impact. To me the best thing about epoxy is how it can make the trees I use in building last long enough for replacement wood to grow. I also work with man made fibers like e glass, s glass, dynel, vectra and carbon fiber etc... where needed and appropriate but try to use them responsibly as they do not generate atmosphere for the planet while maturing into planking. I like to race and think the developments brought to all have been great but think the yacht polish has a awfully high price to go with it. I paint my boats with waterbased latex above and waterbased antifouling below because it is responsible and easily touched up after every day use. If we raced our boats in classes based upon knots per dollar we would probably see different line ups. I have had fun passing quarter million dollar cruising cats in my low dollar vintage barnstormer (they fing it very upsetting especially as I'm using old sails) but am equally cheerful when being passed by a kid or old man with a beach cat. Horses for courses ! They all have their place and can teach us all something while creating diversity on the water. So sail nice, you can always learn from the other guy if you don't close your mind to different tacks. (Go easy on those jibes!

 

Well said Cav 2 couldn't agree more.

 

Vee hulls

I've had the pleasure of sailing on a Wharram up by Toronto, a 40'er I think. The owner/builder had sailed down to the Carib with his family, returned and went back to work. I did a race with him against other multi's in the Toronto Multihull Cruising Club's fleet. We had moderate wind and frankly I was very pleasantly surprised at how well the Wharram cat did without boards or fins of any kind. We didn't go maxi racer speeds of course, but this oldish home built cruising boat did just fine for a cruising boat, and held it's own nicely against the other boats, which included an open wing Searunner 31 similar to the one I owned at the time.

I think a good wooden boat made with plywood or veneer and WEST System coating, perhaps with a glass sheathing outside can be a surperb boat built with "green" in mind, and last a long time if reasonably cared for. Certainly a well built Wharram cat is easier to build than a Searunner or a Tri-Star, probably better than the Pivers, though having been a a few from about 25' to 40' they sailed okay, but certainly nothing like today's hot designs.

"Horses for courses" is a very sensible approach to take indeed.

 

Reasonability, at last!

You've hit right at the spot. My Nugget will never go as fast as a Rogue Wave, nor will I ever race the Jules Verne, but the simplicity of it's chined hull has allowed her former owner to build her to last 50 years sailing past latest generation monohulls and milionary balcony cats...

As I said in a previous post I think it is a shame and a serious lack of respect for all of us not blessed with resources to build a fancy modern rocket to have such a respectable entity of boat design, responsible for having designed an armada, generalizing that all Piver designs are rubish, especially when so many sucessfully crossed oceans time and time again...

I wonder how much of that armada will outlast a nicely built and maintained Piver, or even come close in being so respected worldwide

Again, if all of us thought the same most of us would probably be ashore riding bicycles instead of being on the water enjoying our crap boats...

Have fun!

 

My oldest and best male friend owned a Piver 25 (maybe stretched to 27) when I had my 25' Searunner. It sailed fine, though he wasn't the best sailor though he thought he was. We had some nice times on his boat and on mine, including sailing out for fun weekend on Fire Island, going to a club, meeting some nice looking women there (Hey, wanna see my boat?), sleeping aboard at anchor, etc. I think my Searunner was faster, but his had solid wing decks so walking around his boat was a little easier than on mine, with trampoline side decks.
I'm very turned off by the current trend of having "pocket" cruisers starting at around 30' at a cost of $150,000 or more, and I've given up Multihulls mag, and just let my Cruising World subscription expire for the same reason.

Check out "Good Old Boat", which though mainly monohull oriented, is only about "Good Old Boats", glass, affordable, available, and as much fun as the lastest boat your high priced specialist surgeon just bought, at a cost more than double what my house costs!

 

pedcab,

Doubt that any of the Landlubbers would be riding a bicycle that they built themselves too mate......there is so much snobery about home made boats, yet they can be the best boats built....regardless of cost , because they all are works of passion. It takes a lot more effort to build a boat than it does to write out a cheque.....

 

Landlubber - I ride a recumbent trike as well as sail, and there's a local recumbent club called "MARS" (Metro Area Recumbent Society) that has a few members who designed and built their own bikes. Designs include carbon fiber framed velomobiles with full fairings amongst the bikes.
Go to www.recumbents.com/mars/ and check out what members ride and what some have built. It's as cool as boats/multihulls, only different. You still get the wind in your face without a fairing too!

 

Ah, bicycles. I favor a Schwinn cruiser myself, but I sometimes consider this:
http://www.rqriley.com/xr2.htm

 

We have had 3 searunners in town in the 25 yrs ive been here and i have donr work on all 3, 2 were 31s,one was supposedly pro built in the early 70s in Michigan,it was not well built,poor plywood, glassed with polyester etc and eventually suffered structual damage,it was cut up and hauled to the landfill,the other 31 was homebuilt locally by a father and son with few skills and eventually ended up in the same landfill.The 25 i had the pleasure of repairing last year after it dragged its mooring and went ashore,now this boat was also supposedly built by a father and son in Michigan but with excellent workmanship and at 28 yrs of age apart from the damage is in as good a condition as any boat of its age i have seen,it is completly unrestored,original 2 part paint,lots of nice details, i tell this story because the difference between the first 2 and the third is in the choice of materials and quality of workmanship.I sailed on a Tristar 35 that a friend of mine built in the early 70s and it sailed well and had tons of space,unfortunatly he also did poor work and it also ended in the scrap heap. Many of those older designs were great boats that have lasted well and are much better cruisers rhan most of the higher performance boats of today,i cant even think of a modern tri id go offshore in while hundreds of the old ones are just quietly going about their business,even the Pivers.
Steve.

 

Yeah, I've seen that web site before. I think he's an industrial designer doing a lot of cool design stuff. Carbon fiber is nice, but still very expensive.

 

It's easy to Knock Piver, but hindsight is twenty twenty vision.
Piver , by writing about crossing oceans in his designs, was the greatest trimaran booster of the early days of multihull development.
He and James Wharram between them enthused huge numbers of people to build their own "Escape Machines" and go sailing.
Admittedly Pivers designs were simple , even crude by modern standards, but they worked and sailed all over the world. A lot of those people went on to build more advanced trimarans and catamarans when the second generation designs came along. Derek Kelsall made the breakthrough with his foam sandwich, round bottomed "Toria" in 1966. Hedly Nicol and Lock Crowther were in there too. My friend Dave Green built a Piver Victress, and I built a Nugget. Dave went on to build a Brown Searunner and cruised the Carrabean, returning to build the first Kraken 40,"Ringo", which subsequently set a record in the 1969 New York Bermuda race. and I built the first Buccaneerr 28.
But it was Piver who kicked it all off, and nobody can take that away from him.

 

only one choice here - Farrier's F24mII. quick, trailerable, big enough to cruise, safe, easy, quick -oops, did I repeat that?

 

So nobody builds their own tris anymore in NZ? About 20 years while in San Francisco on business I met the Webster family in Sauslito. They were NZ farmers who built a cat over a two year period (center cockpit turned aft cockpit, forget the designer however), sent sailing to Japan, Alaska, down the Canadian & US coasts with 3 kids (who were 8, 10, and 13 when I met them). Theywere heading back to NZ so their kids could return to land based schools, have their old friends, have a more "normal" life again. Somewhere I may have photos of them along with notes from a semi-formal interview I did with them.

 

Fred Said :- So nobody builds their own tris anymore in NZ?

Tell that to Samnz or Jamez, building in NZ as we speak.

 

Duuude, it was not a serious comment, just a reply on the commercial Farrier tri. I mentioned the Webster family as they were home builders who did something very cool and wonderful - managed their farm while building the boat that took them on a 3+ year adventure with 3 young kids! How many people can claim that, or give their kids such wonderful adventures before they're 15!

I KNOW there are people home building multis in a lot of places, you've just got to find 'em.