Shipwrights & Builders
The yards we deal in.
124 sportfish, center console and superyacht builders this house knows by hull. Every one of them has a page here with what is available now.
Sportfish & Convertibles
26 yards.
The convertible and custom sportfish yards — Carolina cold-moulded houses, Florida production builders and the handful of shops that still lay up one hull at a time.
Rybovich & SonsCaptain John “Pop” Rybovich opened the yard on the Intracoastal in 1919 doing repair work for the commercial fleet, and the family invented much of modern sportfishing from it — the fighting chair, in 1933, among the first. From the late 1940s the brothers Tommy, John and Emil built the boats that defined the type for the next half century.ListingsMerritt Boat WorksBrothers Roy and Ennis Merritt opened a repair and charter yard in Pompano Beach in 1948 and started building their own custom sportfishermen in 1955. The 37s and 43s they turned out through the 1950s and 70s — alongside Rybovich — are where the modern fishing yacht comes from. Now a third generation, building 43 to 86 feet.ListingsJarrett BayRandy Ramsey was running charters when two of his regulars lent him the money to build a boat; the result was the 52-foot Sensation, put together in a rented shed with dirt floors and a leaking roof. Jarrett Bay has delivered over a hundred custom and semi-production sportfishermen since, from a 175-acre marine park on the Intracoastal.ListingsBayliss BoatworksJohn Bayliss spent twenty years as a mate and then a captain out of Oregon Inlet before opening his own yard in Wanchese in April 2002. Around a hundred local craftsmen build there, every hull to its owner’s specification — the yard’s own claim is that no two Bayliss boats have ever been the same.ListingsSpencer YachtsCaptain Paul Spencer had been running charters out of the Outer Banks since he was a boy and took his licence at twenty; in 1996 he started building instead. Spencer runs two facilities — hulls cold-moulded at Manns Harbor, then finished at Wanchese, where the paint shop, metal shop and carpentry are all in-house — turning out fully custom sportfishermen from 37 to 87 feet.ListingsF&S BoatworksJim Floyd learned cold-moulding from Ricky Scarborough Sr. in Wanchese before building his own first hull, the 59-foot Fin-Ally, in 1996. F&S boats are triple-planked Okoume over Douglas fir with glass and Kevlar, marrying Carolina flare to a longitudinally stepped variable-deadrise bottom; convertibles run from around 50 to nearly 80 feet.ListingsPaul MannPaul Mann has been building Carolina-style sportfishermen under his own name since 1988, incorporating as Mann Custom Boats in 1992 and working now from a 40,000-square-foot shop. Thirty-eight yachts from 52 to over 80 feet, built plank-on-frame, on jigs, or a combination — whichever the owner’s boat calls for.ListingsScarborough BoatworksRicky Scarborough Sr. spent a few weeks in 1976 building a sportfisherman under Captain Omie Tillett, understood it, and started his own shop the following year. Close to a hundred boats have come out of Wanchese since — the first big one a 44-footer in 1981 — and Ricky Jr. has carried the yard on since 2004.ListingsSunny Briggs BoatworksSunny Briggs built roughly seventy boats between 35 and 70 feet from 1985 until he retired in 2021, every one to its owner's fishing style. He was the first on the Outer Banks to build a Steve French-designed hull on Applied Concepts' computerised jig system — the moment the Carolina custom yard met modern composite tooling.ListingsTribute PerformanceRich Scheffer founded the yard in 1992 and named it Tribute — to Jim Smith and the other builders who taught him. Three generations of boatbuilders now, turning out custom sportfishermen from 37 to 86 feet.ListingsWeaver BoatsJim Weaver started building in the 1980s and the family has been at custom sportfishermen since 1999 — cold-moulded, Chesapeake-styled, from 43 to 97 feet, and known for a level of interior detail that is unusual even in this company.ListingsWhiticar Boat WorksCurt Whiticar built his first boat at fourteen; in 1947 he bought an army mess hall at Camp Murphy for $425, took it apart by hand and reassembled it on Willoughby Creek as a boatyard. He built more than sixty boats before retiring from full-time building in 1986 and died at 106; the family still runs the yard.ListingsWillis Custom YachtsFormed in 2021 by Stuart boatbuilder Mark Willis and investor Brooks Smith, and immediately the buyer of American Custom Yachts’ sixty-four-acre yard — with plans for another 90,000 square feet of build space. Willis himself has been building custom sportfishermen since 1983.ListingsWinter BoatworksTim Winter and his crew have designed and built close to forty hulls over twenty years — convertibles, express sportfishermen, walkarounds and centre consoles, all custom, all out of the North Carolina sportfish belt.ListingsAmerican Custom YachtsA yacht builder and marine service yard on the St. Lucie Canal since 1992, on a property of nearly sixty-four acres that was a fixture of the Stuart marine trade for decades. Its assets were acquired by Willis Custom Yachts in 2021.ListingsBlackwell BoatworksA custom Carolina yard on Harbor Road in Wanchese, building sportfishermen from around 50 to 72 feet as well as power catamarans.ListingsGamefishermanBuilding mid-size classic sportfishermen from Stuart since 1985, in cold-moulded wood and in fibreglass, from 30 to 55 feet. Every boat since 2008 has been drawn by naval architect Erwin Gerards on a bottom designed around modern engines; Release Boatworks acquired the company more recently.ListingsGarlington YachtsRichard Garlington started building in Stuart in 1980, and the yard has spent four decades on one thing: the custom express sportfisherman. The hull is the work of Dan McCarthy, a former U.S. Navy submarine designer, and it is built as a cored composite — glass, Kevlar and carbon over closed-cell foam, resin-infused — which is where the soft, dry ride in a head sea comes from.ListingsJim SmithThe line starts with a boat called Boca Jima in 1959. John Vance, who had worked alongside Jim Smith for years, took the company over in 1989 and still builds to the same method — cold-moulded wood, custom to the owner, from 48 to 105 feet.ListingsL&HBuilding sportfishing yachts since 1992, each one finished to its owner’s specification rather than to a model line.ListingsMark WillisMark Willis has been building custom sportfishing yachts since 1983 and established Willis Marine in 1990. In 2021 he co-founded Willis Custom Yachts and took over the former American Custom Yachts yard in Stuart.ListingsHatteras YachtsWillis Slane wanted a boat that would take weather better than the wooden ones he was fishing, so in 1959 he built one out of fibreglass. The 41-foot Knit Wits launched in 1960 as the first fibreglass yacht of its size, and the material has been the industry standard ever since.ListingsViking YachtsBrothers Bill and Robert Healey bought a struggling wooden-boat shop called Peterson-Viking in 1964, renamed it and moved it next to their marina. It became the largest builder of sportfishing yachts in the world.ListingsBertramDick Bertram saw C. Raymond Hunt’s deep-V hull in 1958 and founded his company on it in 1960. The prototype, Moppie, won that year’s Miami–Nassau race in weather that stopped most of the fleet — which is the moment the offshore sportfisherman as we know it starts.ListingsOcean YachtsJack Leek founded Ocean in 1977 and its first boat was a 40-foot Super Sport of his own design — the start of a New Jersey line that put a lot of anglers offshore for the money.ListingsCabo YachtsFounded in 1991 by Henry Mohrschladt and Mike Howarth to build offshore sportfishermen on the west coast. Brunswick bought the company in 2006 and moved production into the Hatteras yard at New Bern in 2010.Listings
Center Consoles
16 yards.
Center consoles and outboard-powered express boats, from tournament fishing platforms to the day boats that run beside a mothership.
YellowfinWylie Nagler founded Yellowfin in 1998 and it has been a reference point for the big offshore centre console ever since. Warbird Marine Holdings acquired it in 2020, making it a sister company to Invincible.ListingsInvincibleAlex Lipworth founded Invincible in 2006 and went straight to Michael Peters — who had patented a ventilated transverse stepped hull back in 1980 — to develop the Stepped-Vee Ventilated Tunnel bottom the boats are known for.ListingsSeaVeeCaptain Don McGee, a Miami native, started SeaVee in 1974 to build a centre console that would stand up to real offshore fishing. Still South Florida, still outboard-powered, still the same brief.ListingsFreeman BoatworksBilly Freeman is a hard offshore fisherman who wanted a catamaran that fished properly, and started building them in South Carolina in 2007. Freeman cats have since become about the most sought-after boat in that niche.ListingsContenderJoe Neber founded Contender in 1984 and it has stayed a semi-custom builder — high-performance centre consoles aimed squarely at people who fish rather than at people who cruise.ListingsMidnight ExpressHigh-performance centre consoles built in Miami under the Glaser family — the boats that more or less defined what a fast luxury centre console looks like. (Published founding dates for the company vary between sources, so none is stated here.)ListingsCaymas BoatsEarl Bentz has built and sold three boat companies before this one — Stratos in 1983, Javelin in 1987, Triton in 1996 — and founded Caymas in September 2018 with a team the yard puts at over 1,600 years of combined experience. Every saltwater hull uses Michael Peters' patented Stepped-Vee Ventilated Tunnel, which cuts drag for speed and economy; the 44 CT catamaran was its most ambitious application when it debuted at the 2025 Miami International Boat Show.ListingsValhalla BoatworksViking started Valhalla in 2019 to put its own build standard behind a centre console. Four semi-custom models from 33 to 46 feet, built by the people who build the sportfishermen.ListingsIntrepid PowerboatsBuilding semi-custom centre consoles to order since 1983 — Intrepid takes the order first and builds the boat around it, which is why no two come out quite alike.ListingsRegulatorJoan and Owen Maxwell founded Regulator in 1988 and went to naval architect Lou Codega for a hull that could take the Outer Banks inlets on a bad day. That deep-V is still the point of the boat — predictable and confidence-inspiring where lesser hulls send you home — and the centre console line now runs from 23 to 41 feet.ListingsJupiter MarineFounded in 1989 and building from a 45,000-square-foot plant at Palmetto with its own paint booth and mould storage — a Florida centre console with a long reputation for a dry ride.ListingsBahama Boat WorksScott Henley, a veteran mariner and boatbuilder, founded Bahama in 2004 and has deliberately kept the range narrow rather than chasing categories.ListingsCosta CustomsA Florida builder of high-performance offshore catamarans, handcrafted and aimed at serious anglers.ListingsStatement MarineClearwater-built high-performance centre consoles and sport catamarans, with a range that has been expanding at the top end — the 44 GTRS and the 430 Tigress catamaran among the recent boats.ListingsEvergladesBob Dougherty spent a career making boats unsinkable and started Everglades with his son Stephen in 2001 to keep doing it on his own terms. The patented RAMCAP construction behind them won an NMMA Innovation Award; the company is still family-owned and builds everything in-house.ListingsRelease BoatsA New Jersey semi-custom sportfish builder pairing classic lines with modern materials. It acquired the Florida custom builder Gamefisherman, bringing that thirty-year-old line under the same roof.Listings
Superyacht & Motoryacht
18 yards.
The displacement and semi-displacement yards this brokerage deals with above 100 feet, in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Taiwan.
FeadshipFeadship is an acronym — First Export Association of Dutch Shipbuilders — formed in 1949 when a group of yards and De Voogt Naval Architects went to the American market together. It is now Royal Van Lent and De Vries Scheepsbouw, building at Aalsmeer, Makkum, Kaag Island and Amsterdam, and every hull is a one-off: no platforms, no series, drawn from a blank page and built in steel and aluminium.ListingsLürssenFriedrich Lürssen was twenty-four when he opened the yard at Bremen on 27 June 1875, and more than 13,000 vessels have followed. Today it is eight facilities in northern Germany and around 1,800 people, building full-custom motor yachts from roughly 50 to 180 metres — the upper end of that range being the 180.65-metre Azzam, the longest yacht in the world.ListingsBenettiLorenzo Benetti opened a yard at Viareggio in 1873; his sons Gino and Emilio renamed it Fratelli Benetti after his death in 1927. It still works from that historic Viareggio site and from Livorno — at 240,000 square metres, the largest active shipyard in the world.ListingsHeesenFrans Heesen founded the yard in 1978 and it claims to have been the first in Holland to build yacht hulls in aluminium alloy. Custom superyachts in aluminium and steel, roughly 30 to 70 metres.ListingsWestportFounded in 1964 building commercial fishing boats and fast ferries, and now past 160 luxury motor yachts. An early adopter of composite construction — light, strong, and with nothing in the hull for salt water to corrode.ListingsChristensenDave Christensen started the yard in the 1980s out of a personal ambition to build a world-class yacht, and it has built custom composite motor yachts up to 200 feet ever since, from 180,000 square feet of climate-controlled shop.ListingsTrinity YachtsOlympic sailor John Dane III founded Trinity in 1988 to take Halter Marine's shipbuilding into luxury motor yachts. Aluminium and steel superyachts out of New Orleans and Gulfport.ListingsDelta MarineBrothers Jack and Ivor Jones started Delta in 1967 building pleasure yachts alongside heavy fishing boats for the North Pacific — which is where the expedition-yacht instinct comes from. Twenty-five acres and nearly 300,000 square feet of covered shop now.ListingsPalmer JohnsonBegan in 1918 as Johnson and Gmack, repairing boats for the Great Lakes fishing fleet; the founder's son Palmer Johnson built the first wooden yacht in 1928 and the name stuck.ListingsBurger Boat Co.Henry B. Burger Sr. opened his shipyard at Manitowoc in 1863, which makes Burger the second-oldest builder of pleasure craft in the United States and the fifth-oldest in the world. Still building custom yachts on the same water.ListingsOcean AlexanderAlex Chueh founded Ocean Alexander in 1977; the first boat out was Mark I, a 12-metre fibreglass motor yacht drawn by Ed Monk, delivered in 1978.ListingsHorizon YachtsCo-founded in 1987 by John Lu, Gong Shan Chiai and Cheng Shun Hui, and now among the largest custom luxury yacht builders in the world.ListingsAzimutPaolo Vitelli set Azimut up in March 1969 as a boat rental business, funded out of student jobs, and built it into one of the largest motor-yacht groups in the world — Benetti among its yards.ListingsFerretti YachtsBrothers Alessandro and Norberto Ferretti started in 1968 building small boats and launched their first motor sailer in 1971 — the beginning of what is now the Ferretti Group.ListingsPershingFounded in 1981 by Tilli Antonelli, Fausto Filippetti and Giuliano Onori, and part of the Ferretti Group since 1998. Still built at the Mondolfo yard, and still the name people reach for when they mean fast.ListingsSunseekerBrothers Robert and John Braithwaite founded Poole Power Boats in 1969; it became Sunseeker International in 1985. Around 2,000 people in Poole build roughly 150 boats a year from 55 to 131 feet, and 98 per cent of them leave the country.ListingsPrincess YachtsStarted on Newport Street in Plymouth in 1965 as Marine Projects, by ex-Naval officer David King and two friends. Still built in Plymouth, still by a workforce drawn from a city that has been going to sea for centuries.ListingsFairlineJack Newington opened Oundle Marina on the River Nene in 1963; the first Fairline, a 5.8-metre river cruiser, launched in 1967. An early believer in fibreglass, a long way from the sea.Listings
Production & Cruising
64 yards.
Boston WhalerDick Fisher's Unibond hull — closed-cell foam injected between two fibreglass skins and left to bond as they cure — is the whole company in one idea. Life photographed him in May 1961 motoring away in the stern half of a 13-footer that had just been sawn in two, and the brand has been arguing the same point ever since.ListingsGrady-WhiteGlen Grady and Don White started it in 1959 and sold it to Eddie Smith nine years later. The boat everyone knows it for came in the late eighties, when the yard went to naval architect C. Raymond Hunt for the SeaV2 — a continuously variable vee, and the reason a Grady is the reference for a dry ride.ListingsPursuitLeon Slikkers was running S2 Yachts, a Michigan sailing company, when he decided in 1977 that it should build a fishing boat. It sold well enough that the line got its own 72,000-square-foot plant at Fort Pierce in 1983, and it has been built there ever since.ListingsScout BoatsSteve and Diane Potts put their $50,000 of savings into an old brick building in 1989 and started on 14- and 15-footers. Hurricane Hugo flattened it that September; Potts spent what was left on booth space at the 1990 Atlanta Boat Show and came home with 31 prospective dealers.ListingsSportsman BoatsSix people in a leased twenty-thousand-square-foot shed in 2011; the first hull shipped the following year. The line is now two offshore centre-console families and two inshore bay families, and the yard put eight million dollars into expanding its Dorchester County plant in 2022.ListingsRobaloThe first Robalo was a 19-foot centre console and among the first boats anywhere with an unsinkable hull. Brunswick owned the name from 1991 and had all but stopped building by 2001, when Marine Products Corporation bought it; it is made now in the same Nashville, Georgia plant as Chaparral.ListingsCobiaA 1959 name that has moved house more than once — Orlando, then Panama City, then Fort Pierce when Maverick Boat Group bought it from Yamaha in 2005. Centre and dual consoles, and the 26- to 34-foot end of the line is where it sells.ListingsMako MarineBob Schwebke could not find a boat he liked, so he built a 19-foot centre console and showed it at the 1967 Miami Boat Show. It took 400 orders — a number that would be remarkable at a boat show today — and the modern saltwater centre console starts more or less there.ListingsHydra-SportsIt began as a bass boat in 1973 and was credited as the first to use a V-pad hull and Kevlar. The saltwater centre consoles came in the nineties, the first offshore hulls laid up with Kevlar and the first to beat sportfish inboards in offshore tournaments.ListingsEdgewaterBob Dougherty had been Boston Whaler's director of engineering for years before leaving in 1992 to build hulls his own way. The way turned out to be Single-Piece Infusion — the hull infused in one shot, which is what makes it both lighter and stronger than a laid-up equivalent.ListingsPathfinderScott Deal drew it in 1998 for anglers who wanted to fish shallow and still get home across open water without being beaten up. It is the boat generally credited with creating the bay-boat category.ListingsMaverickScott Deal and his brother paid $12,000 for the 18-foot Maverick moulds in 1984. Flats boats, and still the core of a group that went on to take in Hewes, create Pathfinder and buy Cobia.ListingsCape HornBrothers Bob and Charlie Fiegenbaum founded Cape Horn in 1986 to build the toughest offshore boat they could, and the yard has stayed on that one idea since — a deep-V that takes a head sea rather than a boat that is pleasant at rest.ListingsWorld CatOutboard power catamarans, built at Tarboro since 2002 in a 140,000-square-foot yard, and the largest builder of them in the world. The line traces back to Glacier Bay in the Pacific Northwest.ListingsAlbemarleJoseph Scott Harrell wanted a trailerable boat that could still fish offshore, and the Albemarle 24 of 1978 was it. Owners started asking for bigger ones almost immediately. Around 3,600 boats have been built at Edenton since, all of them carrying the same sweeping Carolina flare.ListingsTiara YachtsLeon Slikkers left the family farm at eighteen in 1946 to work at the Chris-Craft plant in Holland and made foreman of the joiner shop. He sold his house to start Slickcraft, sold that to AMF in 1969, and founded Tiara in 1974. It still builds in Holland, now across 800,000 square feet.ListingsChris-CraftChristopher Columbus Smith built his first boat in 1874, aged thirteen, on the St Clair flats. His sons broke from Gar Wood to form Chris Smith & Sons in 1922, and it was son Hamilton who coined the name. Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst bought the results.ListingsSea RayCornelius Ray bought Carr Craft in 1959 and renamed it. He was the first to put automotive styling on a boat — he hired Harley Earl's firm, the man who had shaped General Motors, to do consoles, dashboards and trim. Brunswick bought the company in 1986 for $350 million.ListingsFormulaVic Porter bought Thunderbird/Formula from Fuqua in 1976 and moved every part of it to Decatur. The FAS3Tech hull that designer John Adams drew for the 382 in 1997 runs three surfaces split by two steps that feed air underneath — the S3 stands for speed, stability and structure.ListingsFour WinnsSaf-T-Mate had been building fibreglass at Cadillac since 1962 when the Winn family bought it in 1975. The name is a headcount: the eldest brother joined on the reasoning that four Winns beat three.ListingsRegal MarinePaul and Carol Kuck started with a 17-foot tri-hull, a 14-foot ski boat and a 21-foot cuddy in 1969. The FasTrac hull of 1995 — a deep vee with a sculpted step amidships — won the IMTEC innovation award, and the company is still one of the largest family-owned builders anywhere.ListingsChaparralBuck Pegg had left dentistry for his father's fibreglass shop a year before he and Reggie Rose started Chaparral in 1965. The 15-foot tri-hull at $675 sold in the thousands. The plant it moved to at Nashville, Georgia in 1976 is claimed to be the largest single-site boat works in the world.ListingsCobaltPack St. Clair founded it in 1968 and it builds nearly the entire boat in house — metalwork, upholstery, wiring, canvas. That is the basis of the quality argument and of its lead in sterndrives. Malibu bought it in 2017 and left production where it was.ListingsFountain PowerboatsReggie Fountain raced his first boat at fourteen and won the Formula One world championship in 1976 and 1977 before opening a yard in an abandoned used-car dealership on the Pamlico River. Eight people and $515,000 of sales in the first year; the 10 Meter Executioner of 1980 made the name.ListingsLuhrsA German immigrant called Henry Luhrs was supplying ships in New York in the 1830s and ended up owning a chandlery and a ship of his own. His grandson, another Henry, opened a yard at Morgan, New Jersey about a century later; under sons John and Warren it was turning out more than 1,200 boats a year.ListingsGrand BanksRobert Newton and his sons were running a custom yard in Hong Kong as American Marine when they commissioned a 36-foot diesel cruiser with deliberately workmanlike lines. The first Grand Banks 36 went down the ways at Junk Bay in 1964 and 1,141 followed; the 42 that came a year later is the shape the whole American trawler idea is built on.ListingsNordhavnJim Leishman and Dan Streech met at a Dana Point brokerage in 1973 and were still selling boats fifteen years later when the sailing market fell away and they started drawing a motor yacht instead. It looked like a North Sea trawler, so it took the Norwegian for north harbour. More circumnavigations and ocean crossings than every other motoryacht builder put together.ListingsSeleneHoward Chen founded Jet-Tern Marine in 1998 and delivered the first Selene to the Pacific Northwest a year later. The name came from his teacher — a 1970 memorial to the Apollo 11 landing, named for the Greek goddess of the moon. Over 400 long-range trawlers since.ListingsFlemingTony Fleming spent twenty years at American Marine, which built Grand Banks, before leaving in 1985 with an idea for a pilothouse. He and Anton Emmerton toured Taiwanese yards that summer, picked Tung Hwa near Kaohsiung, and started hull number one of the Fleming 55. Over a hundred delivered by 1997, and the family still runs it.ListingsKadey-KrogenBroker Art Kadey sat down with naval architect Jim Krogen in Miami and Krogen sketched, on notebook paper, the boat Kadey wanted for himself. That was the Krogen 42 — built like a commercial shrimp trawler, 206 of them over twenty-two years, and the shape every Kadey-Krogen since has argued from.ListingsAmerican TugTom Nelson had come up from apprentice to yard president, built 70- to 90-foot custom yachts and run Nordic Tugs before starting his own in 1999. The first boat, the 34, sits on an Alaska fishing hull that Seattle designer Lynn Senour had drawn in the early eighties. Six to ten boats a year, still.ListingsNordic TugThe oil shortages of the seventies are the reason this boat exists: Jerry Husted worked out that a tug is efficient at low speed, and designer Lynn Senour agreed to draw one on condition he had a free hand below the waterline. The 26 launched at the January 1980 Seattle Boat Show and sold thirty-seven boats off the stand.ListingsLeopard CatamaransBuilt by Robertson & Caine, who started in a Cape Town suburb in 1991. The Moorings came to them in 1994 wanting charter catamarans; they delivered a hundred in under four years and sailed every one out of Cape Town to wherever it was going, which settled the question of whether they were blue-water boats. Naval architecture by Simonis Voogd.ListingsLagoonIt started inside Jeanneau's composites arm, which built offshore racing multihulls, and the first boat carried that engineering into a catamaran you could actually live on — a rare combination in 1984. Came to Groupe Beneteau in 1995 and delivered its seven thousandth hull in 2024.ListingsFountaine PajotJean-François Fountaine came back from the Montréal Olympics and started building dinghies near La Rochelle with three partners. Racing multihulls followed in 1981 — an 18-metre trimaran and a 21-metre catamaran, both polyester sandwich — and the Louisiane 37 of 1983 was the first cruising catamaran.ListingsHinckleyIt opened in 1928 as the Manset Boatyard, looking after lobster boats and the summer people's yachts on Mount Desert Island. Henry Hinckley built his first boat in 1933. The Picnic Boat of 1994 is what most people mean by the name now, and the jet drive is why — it goes where a conventional boat cannot.ListingsNautor's SwanPekka Koskenkylä founded it in 1966 and Sparkman & Stephens drew roughly the first thousand hulls. A Swan 48 won the 1972 Bermuda Race — the first non-American boat and the first production boat ever to do it — and a ketch-rigged Swan 65 won the first Whitbread two years later.ListingsOyster YachtsRichard Matthews had started a tea and coffee vending business at nineteen on £2,000 left to him by an aunt, and wanted a cheaper way to run a race boat. The first was the UFO 34; the Oyster 35 of 1978 introduced the deck saloon that every boat since has been built around.ListingsHallberg-RassyHarry Hallberg started building at fourteen and was among the first anywhere to series-build GRP hulls with wooden superstructures. Christoph Rassy, a Bavarian, moved to Sweden in the early sixties and bought Hallberg's old yard — they were competitors, never partners, until Hallberg retired in 1972 and Rassy joined the two. The Rasmus 35 of 1966 is where the sheltered centre cockpit comes from.ListingsBénéteauBenjamin Bénéteau built sail-powered wooden trawlers rugged enough for the North Atlantic and fast enough to be first back to port, which is where the money was. He drew the region's first engine-powered fishing boat in the early 1900s; the local fishermen said the motors would scare the fish. Still headquartered in the same town.ListingsJeanneauHenri Jeanneau built a wooden hull in 1957, entered the Paris six-hour — the biggest race in France at the time — and crossed the line first. The hobby became a trade on the strength of it. Sailboats from 1964, and the Sangria of 1970 sold more than 2,700.ListingsAbsolute YachtsSergio Maggi and Marcello Bé had spent more than forty years between them at Gobbi before starting their own yard near Piacenza in 2002. It builds everything in one 15,000-square-metre plant, across three lines — Coupé, Flybridge and Navetta.ListingsAction CraftFlats and bay boats built at Cape Coral on Florida's south-west coast.ListingsBack Cove YachtsSabre's dealers wanted a smaller downeast cruiser — the look of a Maine lobster boat with the simplicity of one diesel — so Sabre started a second company in 2003 to build it. That was the Back Cove 29. Around a hundred boatbuilders in a 240,000-square-foot yard, and more than 750 boats afloat.ListingsBavariaWinfried Herrmann made PVC windows, and had already timed and optimised that line with a stopwatch, when he decided in 1978 that the era of the handmade boat was over. The yard stands where the window factory was. It became the largest in Germany.ListingsBlackfin BoatsEstablished at Fort Lauderdale in 1973 and known through the eighties and nineties for a hard ride in a seaway and a build that held its value. The owners of Monterey Boats bought the name in 2008 and waited until 2017 to use it; the current line is carbon-reinforced centre and dual consoles from 22 to 33 feet.ListingsHCB YachtsThe line starts with Joe Reese and a bass boat in 1972. It became Hydra-Sports Custom Boats in 2012 and HCB after that, and it now builds the largest centre consoles afloat — the 53-foot Suenos took that title in 2015 and the yard's own 65-foot Estrella took it back in 2018.ListingsHewesOne of the two names that mattered in shallow-water fishing boats when Maverick bought it from Bob Hewes in 1989 — and the reason the group has two flats brands rather than one.ListingsKey West BoatsHutch Holseberg founded the yard in 1986 and it is family-run still — centre and dual consoles, skiffs and walkarounds from 17 to 26 feet, built to a price without the usual consequences of building to a price.ListingsMarlow YachtsDavid Marlow was sketching this boat from 1995 and had it in front of a naval architect by 1998. Long-range explorer and cruising yachts, laid up with Kevlar, carbon and vinylester in a Full Stack Infusion, hulls built in China and finished in Florida.ListingsMonterey BoatsThe Marshall brothers started in 1985 with two 19-foot runabouts and had a first family cruiser out by 1989. Over 2,000 boats a year now, from a plant that also builds Blackfin.ListingsNauticStar BoatsFounded in 2002 on seventeen acres in north-east Mississippi to build bay boats and centre consoles at a sensible price. Two models in the first year became more than thirty, across 200,000 square feet of floor.ListingsNumarineÖmer Malaz came out of performance boating and started Numarine in 2002 because something was always missing from the yachts he had spent time on. Nearly two hundred launched, and the line has since committed entirely to explorer yachts built for long range.ListingsParker BoatsA family who fished the Graveyard of the Atlantic, building the boat that suited it — workboat lines, a protected helm and a cockpit you can work. The Sport Cabin is the one the name is built on. Moved from a shed on Core Creek to the present Beaufort plant in 1986.ListingsPost MarineRussell Post had already co-founded Egg Harbor when he opened his own yard on the Great Egg Harbor River in 1957, building Jersey-style fishing boats. The 42 Sportfish he drew in 1974 is the one the name is remembered for. More than 750 boats in a dozen models were built before production stopped in 2008.ListingsPro-Line BoatsDan Atwood and his father Ray started building for local guides in 1968 and sold the first boat to a charter captain. A 24-foot cuddy followed, then the first deep-V in 1979, then the walkaround cabin series in 1981 — thirty-six of those sold at that year's New York show.ListingsRivieraBill Barry-Cotter and five boatbuilders started a 38-foot flybridge cruiser in a small factory in northern Sydney in 1980 and moved to the Gold Coast the year it launched. Eight boats in the first full year; exports to the United States by 1983. The Coomera yard covers fourteen hectares.ListingsSabre YachtsRoger Hewson set out in 1970 to build the best 28-foot sailing yacht he could using production fibreglass methods, and did it from his wife's family property twenty-five miles from the nearest saltwater. The Sabre 28 launched at the 1971 Newport show; 588 were built.ListingsSailfish BoatsPaul Hoppes started the yard in 1986 at Havana, Florida and it builds at Cairo, Georgia now. The Variable Degree Stepped hull — three stepped surfaces working as one — is the thing the brand is known for and has been from the start.ListingsSea Fox BoatsThe Renken family have been building boats for the better part of seventy years; the sons of Carl Renken started this one in the early nineties and renamed it Sea Fox after a naming conflict. Every operation moved into a 200,000-square-foot plant at Moncks Corner in 2003.ListingsStamas YachtPeter and Nicholas Stamas won first prize at the Florida State Fair with a 22-foot wooden cruiser in 1938 and opened the yard at Tarpon Springs in 1952. They were early to fibreglass and had left wood behind entirely by 1959; the company calls itself the oldest continuously family-owned and family-operated boat manufacturer in the United States.ListingsTidewater BoatsStarted in 2006 by the people who had designed and owned the original Sea Pro, in the stretch of South Carolina where most of the country's centre consoles come from.ListingsVicem YachtsSebahattin Hafızoğlu spent the eighties admiring the schooners of the Bosphorus and decided to rebuild them for a modern owner in cold-moulded wood. Thin veneers laid at opposing angles and saturated in epoxy give a hull lighter and stronger than the moulded fibreglass equivalent. More than 150 delivered.ListingsWellcraftBill Davis and Ed Crafton started on 12-foot skiffs and wooden runabouts in 1955 and were in moulded fibreglass by the early sixties. The Scarab of 1976 is what the name means to most people — helped considerably by a 38 KV appearing weekly on Miami Vice, which put sales up 21 per cent in 1985.Listings
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