Corsair sailboats: trailerable trimarans built to fold, tow, and outrun the fleet
Corsair Marine is a trimaran builder whose design case rests on one mechanical idea: a hull system light and narrow enough to sail fast, engineered to fold down to trailer width and back out again on the water. That premise runs from the company's founding boat, the F-27, through decades of folding trimarans built first in Southern California and later in Vietnam. Ownership has changed hands more than once, and the boats themselves span a range from pocket-sized trailerable trimarans to performance cruisers approaching 40 feet, but the folding-trimaran idea has carried through every era.
Origins and ownership
John Walton, son of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, founded Corsair Marine International in 1984 in San Diego, California, to build and market a trailerable trimaran designed by New Zealand multihull designer Ian Farrier: the F-27. Walton set up a production facility in Chula Vista and, by his own company's account, worked grinding jobs on the shop floor himself and became the main instigator of the extensive vacuum-bagging systems Corsair developed in its early years; as F-27 sales grew, the Chula Vista plant was enlarged to 27,000 square feet. Farrier resigned from Corsair in 1991 to pursue other designs, including the F-31 and F-22, and ownership of the company passed in 1994 to Australian Corsair dealer Paul Koch and OSTAC — a change that also prompted Farrier's return, when Corsair bought American production rights to his F-31 and had him redesign the F-24 into the F-24 MK II. Corsair Marine relocated its headquarters and production from San Diego to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2006. In October 2010, Seawind Catamarans — an Australian builder founded in 1982 by Managing Director Richard Ward, who started out building "off the beach" catamarans — acquired Corsair Marine; Ward called it "a marriage made in heaven," citing complementary products and manufacturing processes between the two companies. Over the following two years Seawind moved its own production from Australia to Vietnam as well, and the combined companies now employ more than 300 staff at the shared Ho Chi Minh City factory.
The designers
Ian Farrier designed Corsair's founding F-27 and, later, the redesigned F-24 MK II. Born in New Zealand, he began his design career in Australia in 1973 and died in San Francisco, California, on December 8, 2017, at age 70. The F-27 he drew for Corsair became, in 2004, only the second multihull design after the Hobie 16 to be inducted into the American Sailboat Hall of Fame. Corsair's later designs moved beyond Farrier: the Corsair 36, introduced in February 2003, was an in-house design by a team of company engineers and outside consultants rather than a Farrier boat, and after the move to Vietnam, naval architect François Perus — who co-founded the Yacht Design Collective with fellow designer Romain Scolari — was commissioned to design the Pulse 600 for Corsair around the same time as his 2013 Slyder 47 project.
Construction through the eras
Corsair's early boats were built by hand in Chula Vista using vacuum-bagging techniques the company considered a leading advance: a hull's outer laminate, core, and inner laminate were bagged and cured simultaneously, with total lamination time on an F-27 hull running about an hour and a half. Farrier said the F-27 comprised 57 individual molds, and Practical Sailor catalogued the laminate schedule on Farrier-era boats as carbon fiber and Kevlar reinforcement over double-biased fabrics, acrylic-modified epoxy resin, NPG gelcoat, and PVC foam coring, with vinylester barrier coats and isophthalic resin through the rest of the layup, hull-deck joints bonded in a "top hat" method, and bulkheads tabbed to the hull in as many as seven places. Building an F-24 involved almost 50 separate moldings, compared with the two — hull and deck — a monohull typically needs. That approach carried into the Vietnam-built era: reviewers found the 880's hull, deck, and amas vacuum-infused with E-glass, a PVC foam core, and carbon-fiber reinforcement, and the C37 built with a vacuum-bag layup using vinylester resin and foam filling in all three hulls, with Kevlar reinforcing on key structural points.
Lines and generations
The F-27 remains the reference point for the brand: Practical Sailor put it into production in 1985, while Professional BoatBuilder recorded its introduction the following year, with output growing from a dozen boats to 101 by 1991; Practical Sailor later counted almost 500 sold. Farrier stretched that hull into the F-31, which added headroom and was initially produced by OSTAC in Australia before Corsair bought its American production rights in 1994; the F-31 was named Australian Sailboat of the Year and won the Multihull Offshore Championship, both in 1992. The smaller F-24, unveiled in 1991 and rebuilt as the F-24 MK II in 1994, used Farrier's patented folding system to fold its beam from 17 feet 11 inches down to 8 feet 2 inches, and the F-24, racing as Master Blaster, won the Australian Open Championship for trailerable multihulls in 1994. Corsair replaced that smallest model — of which some 250 examples were built over about 15 years — with the Dash 750 and Sprint 750, and later derived the 760, 760 Sport, and 760R from the Dash 750. At the larger end, the Corsair 36 and the C37, built in both fiberglass and full-carbon versions, extended the range toward serious performance cruising, while the Cruze 970 replaced the F-31; Cruising World judged its construction quality better than the California-built 31s it succeeded. Yachting Monthly described the 880 as a keel-up redesign of the F-27 — larger, heavier, and more powerful, with a bigger rig, than the boat that started the company.
Who Corsair is for
Every Corsair, from the smallest trailerable trimaran to the 37-foot flagship, is built around the same proposition Walton and Farrier set out with in 1984: multihull performance in a package that can come out of the water and go down the highway. That combination suits sailors who want speed and shallow-draft access more than maximum interior volume, and who are willing to manage a folding system — and, on the smaller models, a trailer — as part of ordinary ownership. It's a narrower niche than the cruising-monohull market, but one Corsair has now served across two countries and three ownership groups, from Walton's founding through Koch and OSTAC to the current Seawind-owned company.
