Trikini Shakedown sail

Posted By: Richard L.Poletti
Date: 4/13/00 7:57p.m.

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The Shakedown Cruise Some dialog from a cheap soap flavored my thoughts, "it Îs gotta be wrong because it feels so good". Technically the boat shouldn't have sailed this well; she had been cut in two and rejoined to make her shorter , she had started out as an extreme cutter rig with a wrap around genoa and a quazi-mizzen main but was converted to a standard sloop. She had lost her dagger in favor of a single leeboard and then lost that in favor of a retractable centerboard. She had been hacked and slashed by her previous owner and had seen a lot of backyard engineering. As if that wasn't enough she was an outcast even among her three-hulled sisters the conventional trimarans with their super wide beams and full high displacement amas. She was a DOUBLE OUTRIGGER and in a class all by herself. On the water however, the story became positive; her helm was balanced, her track through the water was laminar, she seemed to point as well as most other boats, she frolicked on a run and accelerated smartly on a reach . Pretty doggone good for an outcast. Our quest on this shakedown cruise was to catch any potential hangup before it could be added to Murphy's arsenal. Fifteen to twenty five knot winds and two to four feet chop was the testing platform .We were pleasantly surprised by most of her original design and build, but being the third owner, much of what was intended had been watered down through "improvements". One of those improvements nearly gave the day to Murphy after all. We were sailing on a very fast beam reach with the wind at about twenty knots and frequently gusting near thirty "true". The apparent wind, ever shifting forward and faster to reflect KINI's acceleration through the chop, stayed well on the high side of those numbers. Lacking any sort of trampoline, the spray off wave tips kept us wet and "cold water in the face" alert. As the wave action and heeling forces tried to submarine the lee float, that whole float structure began a forward/aft see/saw motion. Something was very wrong , but not all that obvious. On my Trikini each outrigger(ama) is attached to the mainhull with two oversize hinges comprised of mast section fabricated beams and called by the Polynesian name aka. These parallelogram hinges allow the ama to be retracted alongside the main hull to reduce the width or beam for trailering and/or access to a berth intended for a monohull. The device that locks the ama in position is sort of a wye shaped cable. Two legs of the wye terminate on the outer hinge pivot points fore and aft on the ama .The third leg attaches to a block and tackle arrangement very much like a split backstay adjuster and finally terminates midpoint on the mainhull so as to allow manual tensioning of the ama locking device via a 5/16" line. This line was stretched and frayed, allowing the front to back motion. I had found the culprit and he was me! The entire device was missing when I took possession of KINI. I had done a quickee re-fabrication job using questionable rope and and had forgotten to correct it. Now that memory lapse might prove very costly. What to do? Small boat Îmainsheet in the hand" conditioning worked in my favor as I tried to luff to reduce pressure on the ama, but Murphy was not going to be denied. The line in question snapped. Kini had lost her stability as the ama folded alongside the mainhull and was heeling dangerously. Another half- repair appeared as the inspection cover on the submerged ama allowed water ingress. We instinctively high-sided our weight and yanked on the wheel to bring the boat up. This was not the time to confuse tiller steering and wheel steering, but just as surely as reflex made me release the mainsheet, reflex built of many years on tiller steered boats made me put the helm over ....the wrong way. With the jib still drawing and the boat seeming to pick up speed off the wind a too short mainsheet would not allow the main to luff. Despite my best efforts to save her, capsize seemed to be a certainty. I was not only helpless to prevent the disaster, I was adding to it. Sometimes the gods laugh at man's efforts, at other times they sneer, not considering man as a worthy opponent. Sometimes we give the gods and Murphy too much credit. This time the latter applied. Defying gravity, the wind and all the rules that should apply KINI rotated 100 degrees and took off happily on a run as if nothing out of place had happened. Shaken, we dropped jib and main to assess the situation. NETS!! Unmarked submerged fish nets had fouled the centerboard at the same instant as the ama lock had broken . My accidental downwind turn had allowed KINI to sail free and stand on her feet. Illusion of foreward motion had been induced by the combination of events and while the broken ama lock was real and a problem, the crisis was past. We resolved the lock problem with some spare rope tied in a criss-cross to secure the ama in the extended position, hoisted sail and continued the checkout cruise until dark . Other than finding the defect in the lock and having to bail a little water , the Trikini checked out OK. She is a great daysailer and with some modification could be a pretty good camper cruiser. With the sail plan as is , she gave us an honest 12Knots+. With the original extreme Cutter rig, I think she would have been much faster. I liked the swing system very much and imagine that a better locking system was part of the original design. I eventually will modify that a bit. As I began this piece saying the boat sails so good that you know it must be wrong. Rich designers comments: Very interesting. Not sure why he didn't supply the block and tackle for the CA system Now I had the Cable so it attached to both OR's and to a U bolt between on the main hull. Heavy cable and a heavy shackle. the cable would not allow the OR to fold. The block and tackle backstay adjustor was to tension the system. Breaking the line to the tackle would not have resulted in what you experienced. Bow of OR might have moved back 6 inches , no more. The original rig was the same as the 6.47. Was a 6.47 mast and was to have used a roller furl on the genoa. He didn't have the furler and thus modified the rig. Actually the tower in the cockpit for the mast was a problem in some way but was a pedestal for the wheel steering. The original sold to him had a trunk but no DB or CB provided, so again for cockpit room he went with the leeboard. I think you discovered by error some of the tricks of sailing the Trikini. As a Double Outrigger it sails a little different than a conventional multihull/cat/beachboat. For the record, It was the design we based the 6.09 under construction on and the 5.2 is based on that. The boat was supposed to have done 20K according to the previous owner. Ascertaining Bruce Number with the right rig would permit this. She definitely needs wing nets. The telescopic system we are using on the 6.09 and 5.2 makes this easier, but we did get a system of nets on the 6.47 that Lee has in MD. Capt. Len ww