Anonymous wrote:

An interesting project indeed.

As you say though, with effectively 3 hulls to maintain them bottom cleans, paints and anti fouls are going to take a village and deep pockets.

Considering the shallow draft, I don't think that's really the case.  Each hull is much smaller than the single hull of a monohull.  In addition a monohull of that size will have a much higher displacement and tons of ballast, so the net amount of submerged surface may be about the same.   There is also the fact that a boat like this can be beached for service, which with the exception of a bilge keel mono, is not practical with most monohulls.  Being beachable means that you can do it in increments over a period of time, eliminating the haul out and intensive work to get it all done quickly.  

     It would be interesting and informative to have an actual square footage comparison between this an a 39' monohull.  It might surprise you.

    It's a larger boat that interests me personally, but just for comparison, here's a 40' monohull out of the water.  Compare the amount of bottom between the two.

                                                                H.W.

I stumbled across a 39' Horstman on Craigslist with an Aerorig  in Florida.  Bigger than anything I would want.  These things have an amazing amount of space inside.   The first thought that crossed my mind is that this is most of the way to being a junk rig already with it's rotating free standing mast.   The icing on the cake is the fact that it appears to have a fractional rig.... though there are no photos with the sails up.    The complexity of the big rotating free standing mast on bearings seems like it would be at odds with the simplicity of a junk rig, but the engineering for a free standing mast, and mast location are already done. If I were ready to pull the proverbial trigger, this would be hard to resist at least checking out in spite of it's excessive size.  The interior living space in these things has to be seen to be believed.   The problem with space is the human tendency to fill it with "stuff".    A rather huge boat...  It would be within my means to buy, but not to own  ;-(

                                                                  H.W.

Tristar 39 Craigslist

Horstman Website photos