Telstar sailboats: one designer's story in two acts, four decades apart
Telstar is the work of a single designer-builder, Tony Smith, split across two distinct chapters separated by a factory fire and more than twenty years: an English folding-trimaran maker that built upward of 270 boats through the 1970s, and an Annapolis, Maryland revival that reintroduced the name as the Telstar 28 in 2003. The two eras share a name, a designer, and a folding-wing engineering idea, but they were built on different continents, in different materials, for different markets.
Origins and ownership
Smith, born in Lowestoft, England, started sailing at eight and built his first boat—a 24-foot trimaran to Arthur Piver's plans—at 19, sailing it solo across the Channel from Britain to France in 1964. He crewed on another Piver trimaran in the first Round Britain Race while studying engineering in England, then in 1967 built a second, 25-foot trimaran to his own design in his parents' garage. That boat became the prototype for a third: the folding-wing, 26-foot Telstar, named for the satellite that had linked English and American television, which entered production around the turn of the 1970s (accounts differ on the exact year, giving either 1969 or 1970). Smith ran the business from a factory in Sandwich Marina on England's south coast—the same marina where fellow multihull builder Derek Kelsall was based—building more than 270 Telstars over the following decade, including the first of eight Telstar 35s in 1974. Two years after production began, Smith brought a Telstar to the U.S. Sailboat Show in Annapolis; by then the boat had become one of the more popular trimarans on the European market.
In 1980 Smith and his wife, Sue, shipped the Telstar molds and moved the family to Mayo, Maryland, founding Performance Cruising. A few months later—and after twelve more Telstars had been built—the factory burned down. Authorities determined it was arson: associates of a worker Smith had fired mixed a hot batch of epoxy and set it beside a bucket of acetone. Molds for an Aristocat catamaran that Smith had bought before leaving England happened to be stored in a separate building and survived. Out of that loss, Smith designed and built the Gemini catamaran using the salvaged molds; the first hull, christened Phoenix, launched about a year after the fire, and roughly 1,000 Geminis followed over the next three decades. The Gemini's commercial success gave Smith the footing to revive Telstar: in 2003 he designed the bigger Telstar 28, which he called the "T2," and by 2005 the yard was building two a month on the same line as the Gemini. Performance Cruising remained a family operation on Back Creek in Annapolis, with Sue, son Neil, daughter Laura, and son-in-law Will Hershfeld all involved in running it.
The designers
Every Telstar, in both eras, traces to Tony Smith alone. The 2003 revival added a second generation to that lineage: Neil Smith, who had graduated from the University of Delaware in 1998 with a mechanical engineering degree after a research project on vacuum-infusion methods, joined Performance Cruising as an engineer and worked alongside his father on the T2's design. The idea for the new boat came out of a 2002 family meeting, where Neil, Laura, and Will Hershfeld wanted something with more fun and excitement than what was then on the market. Smith drew a firm line between his own trimarans and the folding trimarans built by Corsair Marine, designed by Ian Farrier: he called comparisons between the two inevitable but maintained the boats were "distinctively different," describing Corsair's as performance boats built to appeal to the racing crowd.
Construction through the eras
The original Telstar 26 used a folding-wing trimaran design, and that basic idea carried through to the American T2, which added new ama-folding hardware and a new mast-raising system. Where the Gemini catamaran that funded the T2's development used solid laminate, Smith and his son built the T2 in sandwich construction with closer attention to resin control, aiming to shed weight; the main hulls were initially hand-laid up over ATC Core-Cell foam core, with a planned shift to closed-bag vacuum infusion already in place. That shift eventually cut roughly 800 pounds from the boat and allowed Kevlar reinforcement in high-load areas of the outriggers and hull. About 80 Telstar 28 hulls were built alongside the Gemini production line before the 2008-09 recession hit; Telstar production stopped in 2009.
Lines and generations
The lineup splits along the same line as the company's history: the English-built Telstar 26 and a small run of eight Telstar 35s from the 1970s, and the American Telstar 28 "T2" from the 2003 revival. No boat bridges the two eras—the original molds were lost in the 1981 fire, and the T2 was a new design built for a different market more than twenty years later.
Who Telstar is for
A Telstar buyer is choosing a folding trimaran from one of the type's earliest builders, whether that means a 1970s English original from the design's first popular wave in Europe, or a 2000s American T2 engineered by a father-and-son team with a specific eye toward weight and construction quality. Either way, it's a boat built by a yard that also founded the Gemini catamaran line out of the ashes of its own factory fire.
