Some boats get scrapped after one bad storm. Triple Jack has been dismasted twice, detained by Portuguese authorities, flung upside down across a marina bridge by Hurricane Irma, and rebuilt from the wreckage. She's still racing in the British Virgin Islands today - and now she's for sale.
The 47ft trimaran was designed by multihull pioneer Derek Kelsall and built in 1979 by Frank Wood and his sons in Manchester for the 1981 TWOSTAR transatlantic race. Her debut crossing set the tone: she finished without a mast, towed at the end by a freighter whose cradle broke as she was lowered - free-falling stern-first over the finish line. Wood collected Yachting World's Imperturbability Award for his trouble.
The boat's second act belongs to Steve Davis and Richard Wooldridge, two college friends who found her rotting - technically impossible, since the hull is Airex foam - on the River Exe in Devon in the late 1980s. They restored her in exchange for sailing rights, sailed her to the Canaries with a wildly overloaded crew of six, and eventually bought her outright for £5,000 in 1995. When Wooldridge took a job managing a charter fleet in the BVI, Triple Jack followed, and the pair spent two decades winning major Caribbean regattas including Les Voiles de St Barth, the St Maarten Heineken Regatta and the BVI Spring Regatta, often beating far newer French multihulls despite a rating system with no age allowance.
Then came 2017. Hurricane Irma flattened much of the BVI, and Wooldridge - sheltering in his bathroom with his partner, toddler, cat and three dogs while three walls of his house disappeared - assumed the boat was gone. Triple Jack was found upside down on a bridge at Nanny Cay: mast broken in four places, coachroof crushed, one sponson simply falling off when the crane lifted her. Six years of grinding, fibreglassing and improvisation later - parts sourced from a hurricane write-off and even a tennis umpire chair - she was relaunched, upgraded with a Yanmar engine, epoxy hull repairs, a carbon mast, Dyneema rigging and new sails.
In 2024 she raced the BVI Spring Regatta, the RORC Caribbean 600 and the Multihull Challenge, proving the rebuild sound. With three decades of ownership behind them, Davis and Wooldridge are now looking for a buyer who appreciates classic multihull racing - and has the strength for the huge rig loads of a boat designed in another era. She's moored at Nanny Cay, Tortola, an unexpected piece of 1970s racing history among the charter cats.
