Three Hulls: A Sailing Outrigger for Adventures Near and Far
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Three Hulls: A Sailing Outrigger for Adventures Near and Far

By John C. Harris
March 2023

Most of the sailing pics here were
nabbed from Billy and Sierra's
Instagram page.

Watch start-to-finish construction videos for this project, and a video following Talulah's 2023 Everglades Challenge adventure.

I'll let the multihull gurus fight over the question of whether this is a "trimaran" or an "outrigger." I think of trimarans as boats that are optimized purely for sailing. An "outrigger sailing canoe," on the other hand, is understood to have a wider variety of uses.

A "variety of uses" is an understatement, perhaps. When handed the design brief last fall, I recall whistling and thinking: "Now THIS will be interesting."

Billy and Sierra Swezey are among that marvelous cohort who have turned an ocean-cruising lifestyle into a full-time job. (Or is it the other way around?) It seems straightforward enough: Billy and Sierra entertain office-dwellers like myself with their compulsively watchable YouTube Channel, Tula's Endless Summer, while they get to play in boats.

It SOUNDS easy, sure, but these guys work looong days...and that's before they start editing their video footage into watchable content. I fear that the popular YouTube channels have conditioned us always to expect nice video production. But count on 2 to 4 hours of editing per minute of video, and that's if everything goes perfectly.

I digress. Billy and Sierra have leveraged their way up through several major cruising yacht restorations, and their next ride is going to be a medium-large cruising catamaran. Understanding better than most that we go to sea...to see new shorelines, the couple have calculated that carrying a capable coastal exploration vessel on the deck of the new catamaran will multiply the fun.

Thus we get to that tricky design brief: An expedition machine that could store in a 12-foot by 4-foot rectangle on the mothership's deck. Compared to the more usual monohull dinghy, Billy and Sierra perceived that once the mothership was swinging from two anchors in some snug harbor, they could go further, faster, and have more fun in a small multihull.

Multihulls always benefit from length, so early in the process it was resolved that if four feet of bow and stern could be unbolted, that would give us a 20-foot main hull, a length at which the performance gains become pronounced. The "amas" (the term of art for the "outriggers") would be 12 feet long, enough for genuinely respectful upwind performance, if not fly-two-out-of-three-hulls-like-those-crazy-French-yachties performance.

Watch the first in a six-video series about the Tallulah Outrigger project:

Talulah Sailing Outrigger, a Lightweight Trimaran You Can Build by CLC

The final configuration. Scroll down for photos!

"Tallulah" Vital Stats:
20'0" Length Overall
21" Vaka Beam at Deck
16" Vaka Beam at Waterline (650lbs Displacement)
12'0" Ama Length
9" Ama Width
~300lbs Max Ama Displacement
7'0" Max Beam (Outriggers Extended)
385lbs: Dry Weight, Fully Rigged.

An "Oceanic Lateen" rig was chosen, because it's a powerful sail that doesn't require a lot of tricky controls, and because it's super-easy to hoist and to stow. 90 square feet is plenty of horsepower to drive a hull that's less than 18" wide at the waterline!

Fitting a Mirage Drive proved trickier than we thought, but it will push the boat at the speed of a human jogger on shore.

The KISS principle was in force when it came to the geometry of the folding akas (or crossbeams, for the laity). No tricky scissors-action type stuff, just a single pivot that tucks the amas up against the main hull, for a stowed width of four feet.

Tallulah making knots in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a screen-capture from a video posted by Justin Hu during the March 2023 Everglades Challenge, just a couple of days ago as I post this. (Thank you, Justin!)

This is where we started, in CLC's shop, the second week of January 2023.

And just over 35 days later, Billy and Sierra had the boat in the water in Florida, with three weeks to get the boat sea-trialed and ready for the 250-mile Everglades Challenge.

It was an unusually adventurous build process, even by CLC "Hysterical Boatbuilding Marathon" standards, including more "design-as-we-go" than I'm proud of.

We were lucky to have some ringers on hand, including Turning Point Design composites whiz (and former long-time CLC colleague) Joey Schott. Joey led the charge in vacuum-bagging carbon fiber onto the inside and outside of the vaka (the center hull).

Joey also fabricated the carbon fiber "channel" components of the folding crossbeams.

The amas were carved from pink styrofoam insulation. In theory, milling these on a $300,000 CNC machine should result in only a bit of light sanding before the addition of structural epoxy and fabric sheathing. In fact, a soul-crushing programming error resulted in a string of late nights with "murder boards" and about 10 pounds of microballoon-and-epoxy fairing compound per ama. If everything went perfectly in the prototype shop, the gods would be jealous...

The outboard sections of the akas were laminated from Sitka spruce.

Fitting Tallulah with a Hobie Mirage Drive took a good bit of iteration in the design of the trunk. Iteration, I note, that continued right up to a few minutes before the start of the Everglades Challenge.

There was a lot of work (and rework) on the ergonomics of the rear cockpit and Mirage Drive.

Cutting the bow and stern off of a perfectly good canoe...

The Pink Nightmares amas were sheathed with carbon twill fabric, with a light scrim of S-glass over the carbon to handle use and abuse at the dock and on shore.

Trial assembly of all the bits and pieces on the last day at CLC. It was more "trial" than "assembly" and I'll need to be in a better mood to explain exactly why it was thus. In the end it all worked, and I'll lay that burden down by noting that builders working from CLC plans and kits for this design in the future won't have any issues...

Billy and Sierra conducting sea trials in Florida in the run-up to the Everglades Challenge.

Sailing trials in February 2023.

At the start of the Everglades Challenge, March 4th, 2023.

The usual last-minute rigging tweaks.

Yours truly even caught a cheap flight to Florida to pitch in, and to sunburn his pasty midwinter hide.

And they're off! Ugly weather resulted in two-thirds of the competitors launching from a more protected starting line, south of Tampa Bay.

On the 250-mile course, which ends at Key Largo.

A reef in the big mainsail. Trampolines offer comfortable seating and righting moment.

Early accounts suggest that the boat is fast and easy to handle. Note that the Mirage Drive can be lifted out easily and the trunk plugged while sailing.