Going halfers on a Trimaran 40 or 50ft?

[LokiBC]

A friend and I are planning on getting an older trimaran. To start a relaxed cruisers circumnavigation of course!
We are pretty set on a trimaran because of the level sailing and being a little faster. Maybe its from too much Waterworld.
We're looking for a 40-50ft boat. It seems a little big for two or even four people but we expect to have three of us mostly steady and more like 6 or 8 sometimes, maybe during passages.
I learned to sail on a Laser and we have spend a week on a 40' monohull. We also hope to get a little more experience on a 26' mono that we got to try and practice on.

The plan is to buy something in the 50-100k range and we are planning to start looking in March. Hopefully it won't need much for fixes but a bottom job and some maintenance and upgrades wouldn't be too bad. We don't really want to get into anything that would need glassing or wood replaced. We had almost enough of that changing all the wood core on the 26' mono of ours.

Tristars and Cross boats have some nice layouts but any suggestions and advice would be appreciated. The Tristar 45 layout with 4 double beds seems pretty efficient.

Thanks for any info

[jeanathon]

Wouldn't it be better to go thirds on a tri, and halves on a cat?