Slide Job!
When looking at trimaran sites, I found your article on small tris. I didn’t notice any of Kurt Hughes’ designs there, but there may have been. I mention this because I have an 8.5 metre tri which uses the offset sliding beam idea that Hughes uses (he designed 19- and 31-foot tris with ‘sliding arms’) and it works well, bearing in mind that most people don’t fold (or slide) their boats very often.
Cheers,
Brian James ‘BJ’ Vayro, Queensland, Australia (via email)
BJ – “Small Trimarans are Taking Off!” was written by our friend Bob Gleason, the President of The Multihull Source in Wareham, MA. That article (archived at windcheckmagazine.com) was an overview of production boats on the market. The majority of Kurt Hughes’ innovative designs were conceived for custom builds or home builds, with such notable exceptions as the Highfun 19 catamaran (currently in pre-production development) and the Dragon 12 trimaran (being produced by Bluesea Yachts in China), the latter a very cool ‘single-seater’ with a race car-style cockpit.
© Kurt Hughes/multihullblog.com
We’re big fans of fast, fun multihulls at WindCheck, from the Weta trimaran and UFO foiling cat to hyper-exotica like the TF10 foiling tri, and we’re looking forward to a production (and hopefully foiling!) version of Kurt Hughes’ Trikala 19 (pictured), which as you know has a sliding beam system. There’s abundant food for thought on the Kurt Hughes Sailing Designs website, multihulldesigns.com, and his new blog, multihullblog.com. ■
