Columbia 57 Sailboat Review, Specs, and Listings

Design and Lineage

Tripp’s influence is clear in the Columbia 57’s proportions. She measures 56 feet 6 inches overall, with a 40-foot-8-inch waterline, a 13-foot beam, and 45,000 pounds of displacement. Her unusually long effective waterline was central to the speed profile promoted by the builder.

The 57 was Tripp’s last design for Columbia drawn to the CCA rule, and period owners remember her as one of the most beautiful boats in that lineage. Her estimated CCA rating was in the 45-to-48 range.

The hull is solid fiberglass, with a lead fin keel and a balanced spade rudder aft. The builder attributed some of the boat’s speed to an absolute minimum of wetted surface area and a hull form with a high prismatic coefficient. Wetted-bottom surface measures roughly 645 square feet, consistent with the builder’s claim of minimized underwater area.

Construction and Steering

Columbia Yacht Corporation, then a subsidiary of Whittaker Corporation, built the 57 with a solid fiberglass hull, fin keel, and lead ballast.

One of the boat’s more unusual engineering features is its dual-surface steering system. A keel-mounted trim tab works with the balanced spade rudder aft, an uncommon arrangement on a production boat of this size and era. It was intended to reduce helm load at speed.

Rig and Performance

The Columbia 57 is a masthead sloop with a high-aspect-ratio sail plan. Published sloop sail area is 1,400 square feet. The sail-area-to-displacement ratio is 16.4 with the reference sail and rises to 19.4 with a 135% genoa.

The theoretical displacement-hull speed for a boat of this length is 8.5 knots. Her displacement-length ratio is 298, the ballast ratio is 49 percent, and the capsize screening value is 1.46.

Hull number one, reportedly named Concerto, was ready for the 1969 Transpac and won Class A. Decades later, the owner of hull number ten, Poco Mas, reported that the boat held a constant 13 knots over a ten-mile course on the South Bay in 1987. She was carrying a main and a 150 and outran a Grand B before the account cuts off.

Accommodations and Layout

The available record doesn’t itemize the interior arrangements. Even so, the scale of the platform—56.5 feet overall, a 13-foot beam, and a 40-foot-8-inch waterline—places her volume distinctly above that of typical production cruisers from the period.

Her origins as a Transpac-capable racer-cruiser suggest a balance of berthing and stowage shaped around offshore use rather than bare coastal daysailing.

Specifications in Period Literature

Earlier material, including magazine advertisements, listed the waterline as 40 feet even and displacement as 42,000 pounds, rather than the later figures of 40 feet 8 inches and 45,000 pounds. Buyers and researchers should keep that discrepancy in mind when reading period literature, although the later numbers are the established specifications.

The Verdict

The Columbia 57 is a low-production, high-style, Tripp-designed flagship from a brief period when Columbia Yachts pushed fiberglass construction to ocean-racing scale. She suits an owner who values rarity, CCA-era elegance, and genuine offshore speed more than easy dockage or parts commonality.

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