Sailor (and fisherman) Jack Molan shared the following story with me a few days ago. His tale about refurbishing a Brown Searunner trimaran is utterly fascinating. (This story just may be for you if you currently want to own and sail a trimaran but have to overcome obstacles to get the boat you want).

The Searunner isn’t a small trimaran, but Jack’s story is compelling for a number of reasons … especially the part about how synthetic line/rope products are now impacting the sailing world (including the trimaran community).

So without any further ado — here is Jack …

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The full story of how I came to the 34′ Searunner “Corazon” would cover 25 years or more. When I was much younger I found a copy of the Searunner manual and became very hooked on Jim Brown’s way of sailing. It just made perfect sense to me … from the design parameters, to being able to build it yourself, to keeping it simple and getting out there and using it.

These were not yachts by any means, but more of an extension of my desire to explore and live more simply. But they also combined an amazing combination of speed, comfort, cost, and all the other things that perplex designers as they start to conceive of a boat. These boats were never designed by a marketing division, or built to appeal to the shiny chrome and teak crowd at all. As such, they were something of a mystery to many … like, “Oh, it’s a trimaran,” … and leave it at that. I think the design is a brilliant combination that is just right for me.

I don’t want to try to justify too much. A boat is truly an emotional vehicle — like your preference for a certain motorcycle. Is it Harley or Hybusa or maybe a Honda Trail 90? It has to grab you individually.

Anyhow, my wife and bought our first Searunner in 1984. It was a well-built 37′ from the SF bay area. I brought it up the N. California coast and Oregon Coast, and it had a 10 H.P. Honda outboard on the stern.

I spent a couple years adding a Yanmar engine and all, but as the good Lord showed us, it was not time to take off cruising, much as we tried. We had our second kid and swallowed the hook for a while. I sold the boat to a friend, who eventually took it to Costa Rica and lost it on a dark stormy night while he was on land.

Move forward to 2006: We had one kid left at home. I have been Capt. of a 125′ Trawler in the Bearing Sea for all these years. I’d spend the summer in the fog in Alaska, and come home to horrible weather on the Oregon Coast on my time off. We wanted to find some sunny place to live.

I had been in contact with the owner of a 34′ Searunner named “Slick.” He told me how he lived onboard for 8 months a year and hauled out in Late May and came to Utah to live in the summer. Summers in the Sea of Cortez are like a pizza oven. :-)

His boat was for sale and was in Gauymas. About half way down the Sea of Cortez on the mainland side. We went to see the boat and a funny thing happened. While staying in San Carlos, we fell in love with the place and the people. After 4 days I finally got down to see the boat (about 20 KM away).

The boat was a mess really. The dirt from the desert was thick everywhere, and the boat had had no one around for quite a while. I crawled through ever place I could find, trying to ignore the dirt. Construction looked good. It had aircraft grade spruce stringers, marine grade ply, and all standard epoxy. But it looked like it was at the end of wear cycle and would need a lot of elbow grease. But you must realise, I was under the “boat spell” It is that emotional connection to your dream that flows through the boat.

Well …….back at San Carlos we decided we’d like to live here in the winter. I stayed aloof a bit, because I did not want a house, I wanted a boat. :-)

As we were leaving Church on Sunday the Pastors wife took me aside and said, “You need to go look at house my friend is selling.” She never said anything about ocean front or anything, just that we needed to go look at it.

Well, as you drive up to this house you cannot see the ocean. It’s blocked from view by the houses. As the door was opened, I saw a Valiant 40 anchored right there in the front windows!

I walked in the house and right out on the deck and said, ” I have no idea how we can do it Lord, but I am suppose to buy this house.” I went out on the sand and on my knees I was both praying and writing numbers in the sand. I came back and sat down with the seller, and I told her I did not want to get up until we came to a deal. Things like this … I do not do! It takes me a week to shop for an alarm clock.

My wife and daughter were just as excited — and blown away. Anyhow, we got the house and left the next day. I came home and told the Searunner owner I was out of money. I mean, I walked off the edge down there! I think he was as astounded as we were. Eventually, however, I also bought that boat. And I’m so glad I did.

Over the first two years I owned it I told myself to ignore the cosmetics as much as I could and just sail and use the boat. We are very fortunate to be able to have it in front of our Mexican house. I can row out and be sailing in 10 minutes alone. I’ve done this a lot … almost every day we’re there.

I removed the boat’s radar and traded it for the biggest fortress anchor they make. I can sail on and off the buoy so I almost never used the outboard (9.9 Yamaha). It ran lousy anyhow. I gathered a number of things I would want to do to the boat “someday.” The list was long…I avoided it. Well, “someday” came about a year and a half ago. I came down Oct. of 2007. The boat has its own trailer. All the trimarans in San Carlos have a their own trailers. We can get it hauled and stored very reasonably when we’re away.

The boats decks were worn out. Paint would rub powder on you anywhere you sat. I couldn’t get the boat clean, and it was ugly. The fiberglass had “zippers” — the cracks you get when the fiberglass is cracked. Paint had been rolled on the deck with no regard for fittings. Without taping off the fittings, everything had white splashed up on the sides. Looked very sloppy.

San Carlos Sonora is a really good climate to have a boat – a desert with a 2-month wet season that doesn’t rain much. I was not too concerned about rot for that reason. But the boat had suffered from too much UV in its life. I got a hold of the local expert on paint and glass work … a man named Fransisco. He told me there was no easy way to do it right. So we agreed to strip the entire deck from all around the edges and into the cockpit. I spent 3 days just removing fittings. There were so many screw holes, plus a half a 5-gallon bucket of screws and fittings … that weighed a lot!

Fransisco and two guys used grinders to take off the glass right at the edge, then just stripped all the glass by hand. It came up pretty easy. Some places were still bonded well, but not many. We spent the next month filling and sanding and filling. We found a small spot where it had termites. But it was easy enough to cut away the bad area until we got to good wood. The entire deck was recovered with 6 oz. fiberglass and epoxy. But the real work was always the sanding and filling, sanding and filling, sanding and filling … you get the idea.

I figured that since we were this far into it, we’d better do the hulls also. They were good as far as the fiberglass went. They just needed some dings filled, then a lot of sanding and fairing. Fortunately, the hulls were very fair to start with. I’d leave for work in AK and get reports that some days they were working and some days not. By the time I got home though, everything was very close to being ready for paint.

The boat now looked like a total mess! Anything I’d not removed from the inside was covered in sanding mud. Those guys liked to wet sand a lot. The Mexicans possessed good “body and fender” type skills, and it showed in the kind of work they were doing. I estimated it took these 3 guys about 3 months of full labor before the boat was ready for paint.

The priming and painting only took two days. We used 5 gallons of awl-grip … and it came out very pretty. Our family had to go back up north for the summer afterwards, so we left the boat on the trailer. All painted but not put back together. When I got back this fall, in early October, my wife asked, “So what do you have … a couple weeks to get it ready?” I just shrugged my shoulders, I really didn’t know.

I had a rudder to rebuild and then drill mount. There was a self-steering tab to build and mount. There was a bottom to paint. All the deck fittings had to be found and refastened. And there were new windows to purchase and install. New tunnel tramps to build and mount, bow tramps to remount with a new system. Before Thanksgiving she asked again, “Will we be able to take family out for a sail on Thanksgiving?” All I could do is shrug my shoulders.!

I was working a good 8 or 10 hours a day by myself. It was really enjoyable work actually. I didn’t feel pushed at all. I wanted to do it right. In the 3 months I worked, I saw my skills improve. One of my jobs was to sand and paint the spreaders. By the end of the 3 months I could see what a lousy job had been done, so I re-sanded and repainted (and striped) and used much better paint. I found much help online in various forums. (When it came to a project. Just ask and you can get plenty of advice!)

I could have just rolled on another coat of bottom paint. But I took the sander to it and found 7 coats underneath! So I proceeded to strip the bottom. This is when I was really glad the boat is only 34′. It took two weeks to get that paint off. (The full suit, gloves and goggles program). Man it was a chore.

There was a coat of soft copper paint that would gum up anything lighter than 36-grit. I can handle a grinder pretty good, having sanded surfboards, etc. By the time the bottom was stripped, I had a pretty good amount of deep swirls in the fiberglass, and a few grind through spots. I didn’t want to sand into the fiberglass anymore to smooth it out. So I applied a coat of epoxy with fillers over the entire bottom. This filled the swirls. Then I came back and sanded the entire bottom again with a palm sander and 60-80 grit. Much better! :-) When the bottom paint went on, it looked sweet … very smooth and slick!

Before I could install the new Plexiglas windows, I thought I’d better paint the panels on the inside where they mounted. Well … that took another two full weeks. There was sanding, filling, sanding, filling, san … well, you get the idea. I used Bright — Sides one, part polyurethane. It’s a very touchy paint, but looks great when done right.

I used a two-sided foam tape when mounting the windows that is used to mount glass on skyscrapers. They even use it for glass overhead on ceilings. It’s a one shot deal when you put the glass down, but everything came out well. (It’s a 3M product).

During this time I also worked on getting the materials gathered for the rig. I had panned all along to use a product called Dynex Dux to replace my SS wire rig. (Note from Small Tri Guy: Click here to read about the special synthetic rigging Jack used to rig the Searunner trimaran.)

I’m very familiar with Dux, as we have used it for the last 6 or 7 years in the big boat trawling we do in Alaska. I had found where there were a few people who had already tried it and had good success. Two years ago, I changed out my running backstays with 7mm Dux … and the lifelines and all my halyards over to 3/16” Dynex .

The difference is Dynex is SK-75 and Dynex Dux is the same material that has been heated and stretched. This process makes the material stronger and much less prone to creep or stretch. It takes on properties of wire by doing this. But it has the lightness and no twist of 12 strand rope!

It feels like a waterski rope. This process is performed in Iceland at Hampidjan fisheries. They first developed it for fishing, but have since expanded to oil service, tugs, etc. The 7mm Dynex Dux has a breaking strength of 15,500 lbs.

The wire I was replacing was 7/32” and ¼”. The ¼” SS wire when new is 6900 lbs. of breaking strength. Yet the Dux is 1/9th the weight of SS wire size for the size. I also made my headstay and sailstay out of 9mm Dux. This comes in at 26,500 lbs of breaking strength.

My thinking was that I’d use the bronze hanks on my headsails, and I may need some extra beef for chaff. I’ve since switched to “softies” or soft hanks — made from 5mm Dux. I also use these for shackles all over the boat to replace heavy, expensive and non-user friendly shackles, halyard shackles, tack shackles etc.

Going to such a small halyard rope is a good study in some of the challenges facing a sailor using Synthetics. I had the 3/16” already, so I looked up the strength and found 5,000 of breaking strength. After a lot of searching, I found a load chart for halyard loads. With my boat it is an average of 2,000 lbs … with a peak at 3,000 lbs. My goal is to see what I can “get away with” as long as I am day sailing and close to home.

Here is the problem. You have a line that is plenty able to haul and hold as a halyard, but your human hand cannot haul it with any force at all. It is just too small! One solution to up the size of the halyard material until it feel comfortable to the hand. This way, you end up with a 10mm rope. With increased windage, it’s way more expensive, and you find it all coiled on your deck doing nothing after you haul the sail up.

Look at it backwards! I have used a few different solutions and all have their advantages and disadvantages. It’s easy to take a cover braid off from another rope (in fact, ask your rig supplier, as he may have some as the strip ropes at any given time). You can use the small Dynex as the new core and milk it on the length you need. This way it becomes like an older wire to rope halyard. The raw Dynex never touches your hand, or the winch.

It cheap, light, and low windage. Depending on the cover material, it may absorb water. Dynex does not absorb water; in fact it floats.

Another solution I prefer is to take the 3/16” Dynex and run a smaller line up inside. I’ve used some SK-60 Dynex – as I had it available – and made the line fat to where I needed it for my hands. This kept everything very light, and didn’t absorb water.

I spliced up the entire rig using the old wires as models. It took me 11 hours to splice it all up. I’m pretty fast because I have done a lot of them. But a Searunner has a lot of ropes … a headstay, backstay with split bridal, 2 running backs, stay sail stay, 2 upper shrouds, 2 lower shrouds, a forward baby stay, 2 aft baby stays … did I forget anything?

I think it was 26 splices and was fun work for me. My father was with me one afternoon. He is an old logger and was just blown away by this synthetic stuff. (They are using it logging also).

(Publisher’s note: I’m preparing to speak with Jack more about these synthetic lines and how they can be used to rig small trimarans. If you’d like to be notified when this information is ready for publishing then please click here.)

After the launch, we towed the boat over to the bay with the Hobie power skiff. I left the outboard off the trimaran. It was great to be back in the water after so long. My friend John Franta (who works for the supplier of the rope and fittings) joined me for the first sail the following day. We went out at first sight of a touch of wind. The wind here typically starts around 10 or 11 and builds all afternoon. The boat scooted along on what looked like no wind. John figured we were doing wind speed or better at 5-knots of boat speed using a GPS. He said he never saw a boat sail so well in very light, to no wind. :-)

Tacking back and forth, we tightened up the shrouds. Soon we were scooting along at a steady 8 knots, and the wind was not much more than this. We peaked at 9 knots before I called it off. The rig was still getting dialed in and I did not want to go bashing around too soon. But he way the boat felt was entirely new. It would lift a hull and just stay there and go forward … no hobbyhorse, no pendulum at all … so steady, so easy on the helm.

I was very pleased with how it steered. Lining up the rudder and bolt holes getting drilled out was nerve racking. You can bind a rudder if you miss. It is a one-finger operation now.

I went out everyday except one the first week of the year — all light air by choice … sailing on and off the buoy. I had a couple in there 70’s out one day. They’d never been sailing. Half way through, they were saying, “Maybe we should get a sailboat.” That made my day.

I believe the mark of doing something well is to make it look easy … like mogul skiers, or anything that requires complex moves to come together. That is how it feels on this boat. It is a great feeling.

The boat is back on the trailer now and I’m bound for Alaska for the winter season. I want to thank Joe for allowing me to “talk story.” I’m convinced after being involved in boats for 35 years that the smaller the boat, the more you use it. I have always wanted to build a boat. I have the plans for Chris Whites 20-footer Discovery. Maybe someday, when we’re done traveling.

I feel the 34′ Searunner is just right my wife and me to go exploring. But man, it can be big sometimes too! I measured it off one day and figured it has as much deck area as a 55′ to 60′ mono-hull. When you go to tape off the waterline to paint, you go down one hull, and back up, and another down and anther back up because you’ve got 3 hulls. That was when I was really glad we weren’t doing a 50′ Trimaran that I’ve dreamed of. Reality in the workyard is a good elixir.

That is about it for now. I feel very fortunate to be able to do the things I can do. Hope you enjoyed the blurb … :-)

– Jack (& Joanne) Molan, San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

To read Pt2 of this story, which contains information about the synthetic lines that ideal for marine use (including trimarans) click here.

To read more about the Searunner trimaran discussed in this post, click here … http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f48/trimaran-esp-searunner-owners-14322.html