Sailboat Review: Rapido 40. The all-carbon-fiber Rapido 40 trimaran is a sailor’s dream boat: quick, stable and ready for blue water, by Mark Pillsbury, Cruising World magazine, 6 May 2024.
An edited extract of the original article appears below.
… And then there’s the trimaran crowd, which, on a boat like the Rapido 40, gets the best of both worlds. Fast, flat sailing upwind and down? Check. Shallow draft for cruising in skinny water? Check. Lots of room to spread out on deck, and generous accommodations below for a cruising couple with kids or occasional friends? You bet.
The Rapido 40 is designed by the high-performance team at Morrelli & Melvin, and is built in Vietnam by Triac Composites. Rapido was co-founded in 2014 by Paul Koch and Richard Eyre. Koch is an old hand at trimarans—he was formerly president of Corsair—and he says that there is a market out there, albeit a niche one, for performance-oriented, oceangoing cruising trimarans.
Underway, that package provides plenty of horsepower, as my Boat of the Year judging colleagues and I would discover on Chesapeake Bay this past fall. It was a ride where we all vied for the dubious honor of top tiller hog.
In 10 to 12 knots with the small jib rolled out, we skipped along at close to 8 knots, according to the GPS. Things got really lively when we rolled up that sail and unfurled the big dog. Twelve knots and change was about top end for us in those relatively light conditions.
And boy, was the Rapido fun to sail!…
The Rapido 40 has more-than-adequate living space… The raised cabin top and windows all around provide 360-degree visibility and 6-foot-6-inch headroom… And the composite work was clean as a whistle…
Workmanship and equipment was top-notch, just as I’d expect on a boat built to go places.
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