Trident sailboats: one name, three unrelated builders
"Trident" is not one boatbuilder's story -- it is a name that at least three unrelated companies used independently, in two countries, across three decades. A used "Trident" listing could be a 1960s British pocket cruiser sold as a home-completion kit, a Hampshire-built pilothouse cruiser in the 30-to-40-foot range from the 1970s and 80s, or a French motor-yacht yard's first sailboat -- and nothing beyond the name connects any of them.
Origins and ownership
The oldest of the three traces to Eric White, a former lorry driver and one of four motorcycle-racing brothers who came to boatbuilding almost by accident: he bought a book about fibreglass, rounded off the corners of his old wooden dinghy to make a mould, and built himself a new GRP tender. Building similar tenders for fellow yachtsmen launched White into work as a part-time boatbuilder. He met Alan Hill, then in his early twenties, in 1958 at Cubitt's Yard on the Thames at Chiswick, and asked Hill to design a 24-footer that could be moulded in GRP, with no formal contract and no brief beyond the boat's approximate size. The first hulls were moulded at a boatyard at Isleworth on the Thames; Trident No 1 launched in 1960 to immediate success, reportedly winning the Burnham to West Mersea Race on its very first trial, according to Hill. After about ten hulls, a fire at the Isleworth yard destroyed the moulds and nearly ended the project; White considered emigrating before instead finding a derelict yard at Woolston, Southampton, to rebuild the business as Marine Construction, or Marcon. More than 250 Tridents -- by some counts as many as 275 -- were eventually moulded, two-thirds of them sold as home-completion kits rather than finished boats. The Trident's success funded Marcon's growth into a fleet of larger designs, including the Tomahawk 25, and by the 1970s the company was moulding 19 different GRP designs, among them the Rival range and the Nicholson 45. White sold 80 percent of Marcon to the Land and General Development investment company in 1970, staying on as managing director until he stepped down in 1976; the company went bust in 1979 amid a worsening economic climate, after which White bought back the Trident moulds at the sell-off auction and sold mouldings through Seabourne Marine. Hill went on to design most of the rest of the Marcon range, as well as boats for other builders, including the Vivacity 24, the Duellist 32, the Coaster 33, and the Biscay 36.
A separate, later Hampshire yard, Trident Marine Ltd, built an unrelated 30-to-40-foot range under the Voyager, Warrior, and Challenger names -- no source connects Eric White or Marcon to this line, or its designers to the Trident 24. Angus Primrose designed the range alone at first; by the early 1980s he was working jointly with Bill Dixon, drawing the Challenger 35, which had an earlier centre-cockpit sister, the Warrior 35, and a later wheelhouse version, the Voyager 35. About 300 of the 35-footers alone were built, many of them exported.
The third Trident, built hundreds of miles away in France, has nothing to do with either British company. S.M.A.P.-Neptune, a yard that had previously built only motorboats, launched the Trident 80 in 1975 as its first sailboat -- more than 150 were built in that first year alone. It was designed by Daniel Tortarolo, a French naval architect who later drew the Neptune 80 for the same yard, and won the Semaine de La Rochelle regatta in 1976, its first year on the market. Production ran unchanged for 15 years before ending in 1990, with roughly 600 units built in total, per L'Argus du bateau's records.
Construction through the eras
The Trident 24, one of the first production boats moulded in GRP, was more solidly built than many designs that followed it, according to the Trident Owners Association -- though the earliest examples had wooden decks and coach roofs professionally fitted to the GRP hull, and a handful of owners continued buying bare hulls to fit out in wood themselves; roughly 20 of these wood/GRP hybrids are thought to remain. Most were built in triple-keel form, well suited to shallow, drying harbours, and were exported as far afield as Scandinavia, Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and North America. Trident Marine's Warrior and Challenger models, by contrast, were built on a long keel and modest rig that Yachting Monthly found excelled in heavy weather, if predictable and unexciting in calmer conditions. The Trident 80's hull and deck were laid up in monolithic glass-polyester laminate, offered with a choice of deep or shallow keel, both cast in iron, and an 8hp inboard diesel on a shaft drive.
Lines and generations
Each of the three Tridents amounts to a single, tightly bounded range rather than a sprawling model line. The Trident 24 was Marcon's only Trident-branded design. Trident Marine repeated the Challenger/Warrior/Voyager pattern at other lengths too, including the Challenger 31 and 40, the Warrior 40, and the Voyager 30, 38, and 40, making it the broadest of the three Trident lines even though every hull traces back to Primrose's original design. The Trident 80 stood alone at S.M.A.P.-Neptune, its design unchanged across its entire 15-year production run.
Who Trident is for
A buyer chasing the Trident 24 is shopping a compact, kit-built 1960s pocket cruiser with a devoted owners' association and known engine quirks to budget around. A buyer drawn to a Voyager, Warrior, or Challenger wants a larger, sea-kindly cruiser built for shorthanded, heavy-weather passages rather than light-air speed. And a buyer who finds a Trident 80 is looking at a simply built, unchanging French design from a yard that made its name in motorboats before it ever built a sailboat. Knowing which Trident is for sale -- not just that it's a Trident -- is the first step in evaluating any of them.
