I have always been fascinated by multihull sail boats. Well it looks like I will be getting the opportunity to own one.
I am a member of the yahoo groups multihull forum
and one of the other members there (Capt. Len) has a 23 ft trimaran (Trikini23) that he wants to go to a good home.
It is a boat he has been restoring for the last few years. (if I understand right he is the designer and original builder of the boat and ended up getting it from the second owner a few years ago. you can see the story of this in the Deja Vue trikini post by Capt. Len) It had been basically abandoned and was sitting in an orchard. I can understand his not wanting to leave it there. Circumstances now are such that he doesn’t have time to finish restoring her and because of damage to his house in Cape Coral, Fl. from one of the recent hurricanes, he needs to have her moved from where she is to begin repairs of his house.
He offered her to members of the multihull list and on his website trikini.com for free to a good home so that she would live to sail again. 🙂
It looked like a great opportunity for me to get a small multihull to sail and I contacted him about it. He did have one solid condition for anyone that he gave her to (If I am unable to finish restoring her and get her to sailing again, I have to work with him on finding her a new home where she will be restored and sailed.) This was an easy condition to agree to. Its always sad to see a boat on the hard falling into a heap of scrap from disuse.
The next step is getting her from Florida to my home in South Carolina. It is 700 miles one way. Capt. Len was willing to loan me a trailer to bring her back here on but I would still need one here to move her around and to put her in the water. He is willing to sell the trailer she is currently on for $500 and this to me is a good deal. It would cost me a couple hundred dollars just to return the trailer to him if I borrowed it to transport her, and it is already set up for her. It would save me buying and even more importantly customizing a trailer to work with her.
After coming to an agreement with Capt. Len I called one of my best friends Steve Luff. (it’s kinda scary how many thing one or the other of us have dragged the other one into in the 12 years we have been friends) and said “Hey, do you want to go on a road trip to Florida?” lol after explanations of the reason for the trip he was all for it. 🙂 (He thinks he is going to get to go sailing with me on her 🙂 lol well he’s right 🙂 ) So two weekends from now we will head out on a Thursday evening planning to come back on Saturday. We have a good friend Teresa that lives in Ft. Meyers Fl. just over the river from Cape Coral that we are planning on staying with. I just got off the phone with her and it is all arranged 🙂
Things to do is
1. Get the lights for a light bar for the back of the boat. Capt. Len says that with the out riggers in the in position the boat is about 8 ft wide for trailering. So I need to create an 8 ft wide beam to mount on back of boat with lights and wire to run to vehicle hookup.
2. Make sure I bring lots of tie downs and bungee cords for securing rigging, mast, boom, and other misc gear that goes with the boat.
3. Take a drill, sawzaw, and some other basic tools that I might need to attach light bar to boat. It’s never a bad idea to be prepared.
4. Get a spare tire for the trailer.
I will update with other stuff as I think of it.
I am going to post Capt. Len’s accounts of restoration he has done on the Trikini23 already. I have created an account in his name and will post them in chronological order bye the dates he wrote his log in. You can see all these posts as well as new ones by me about the trikini by sorting by category Trikini23 here on the website. This is now done.
Capt. Len has told me that he would be available to advise me as I finish working on the Trikini23 but that it will be my boat and I will need to be the one that comes up with how I want it to be finished, not how he would finish her. This is exciting. I already think I have some ideas but since I haven’t seen her with my own two eyes I am not getting to far ahead of myself. I have to base anything I do on reality 🙂 it doesn’t work otherwise.
Oh well time for me to get back to real life 🙂 I will post more as it happens.
Scott
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