Piver Nimble 30

Description

The Piver Nimble 30 (often just called the Nimble 30 or Piver Nimble) is Arthur Piver's groundbreaking 30-foot cruising trimaran, marking his first true ocean-going design and the boat that put modern cruising trimarans on the map. Launched around 1959–1960, it was the vessel Piver himself used for the first recorded North Atlantic crossing by a trimaran in 1960: he trucked the demountable boat across the US from California to Massachusetts, assembled it, and sailed from Swansea, Mass., to Plymouth, England (via the Azores) with a small crew. This voyage proved the concept's seaworthiness and sparked huge interest in his plywood/fiberglass amateur-build designs. Piver later sailed an original or similar Nimble on an 11,000-mile South Seas cruise (returning to San Francisco in 1965), further demonstrating its bluewater potential. The Nimble bridged his early small prototypes (like the Frolic 16 and Nugget 25) and larger cruisers (Lodestar 35, Victress 40), emphasizing lightweight construction, trailering/demountability (beams removable to ~8 ft width for road transport), and surprising comfort/speed for its era.