Telstar sailboats for sale

Buying a used Telstar: two boats built decades apart by one designer

A used Telstar is either an English-built folding trimaran from the 1970s or an American-built Telstar 28, or "T2," from the 2000s—there's no gradual evolution between the two, since the original molds were destroyed in a 1981 factory fire and the T2 was engineered from scratch more than twenty years later. That split matters more to a buyer than it would with most brands: the two generations were built on different continents, in different materials, by different-sized teams, and share little beyond a folding-wing trimaran layout and a family name. Knowing which era a listing falls into says more about what a buyer is getting than the model number does.

Which era to target

The original Telstar 26, and a small run of Telstar 35s, came out of Tony Smith's Sandwich Marina factory in England across the 1970s—more than 270 hulls in all before the 1981 fire that ended the line. The Telstar 28 "T2" is a different generation entirely, engineered by Smith and his son Neil starting in 2003 with a build process that changed over the run itself: the yard moved from hand-laid-up construction to vacuum-infused hulls partway through, a shift substantial enough that it's worth confirming which method built a given T2, not just which era it came from.

What to inspect across the range

On the T2-era boats, Practical Sailor's testers flagged no provision for an escape hatch—worth checking directly on any Telstar 28 under consideration, since it's not something a later refit necessarily adds. The T2's redesigned amas connect to the center hull through boxes that rotate a full 180 degrees to fold the boat; given how central that folding mechanism is to the design in both eras, confirming the hardware still operates smoothly is a reasonable check regardless of which generation is on offer.

Navigating the lineup

Beyond the era split, the lineup is narrow enough that model choice mostly comes down to which generation fits a buyer's plans—a smaller 1970s original from the design's popular run on the European market, or the larger, later-engineered T2. The full model directory on this page breaks out the specific years and lengths.