Achilles sailboats: a single designer's first-person account of a cruiser born from dinghies
Most builder histories arrive secondhand. Achilles is different: the fullest account of how the range came to be is Chris Butler's own, written in 2008 for the Achilles Yacht Owners Association. It traces a path from racing dinghies to a small run of offshore cruisers, one designer's name carried on every hull built after the first.
Origins and ownership
Butler was born in Bethnal Green, London's East End, in 1932. He learned of glass-fibre reinforced plastics in 1954 and built a business around the new material, growing it enough by 1957 to move from Cheshunt back to Hackney, then later to Haverhill and, in 1970, to Swansea for more factory space to build the Achilles 24. He'd already retired from motorcycle racing in 1968 to build racing dinghies - the Olympic Finn, the 505, the Cadet - before that shift into yachts. Once established in Swansea, the company built more than 1,500 boats, a catalog that ran well past the Achilles yachts to include the Sparta, oil-rig rescue craft, fishing boats, and dinghies. In 1989 it pivoted again, into submersible fire-resistant craft for North Sea oil rigs, before semi-retiring and closing; Butler surveyed yachts for a while afterward. He died in 2019.
The designers
The Achilles 24 began with somebody else's boat: Butler read of Oliver Lee's Ajax, a 23-foot day-boat/racer, and already knew Lee as the I.Y.A. measurer of the 505 dinghies - and later Finns - Butler's company built. In 1966 he asked Lee whether the Ajax could be developed into a cruiser-racer; Lee liked the idea, and the two evolved the design together into the Achilles 24, a prototype that won its class at Burnham Week in 1968. Lee then fell seriously ill and, on recovering, turned instead to the Squib, which he was already helping build. Butler pressed on alone, adding four inches to the freeboard to raise the headroom before production - a change Lee disliked enough that he bowed out of the project for a nominal sum. Every Achilles after the 24 was Butler's alone: he designed the Achilles 9 Metre, begun on his 40th birthday around 1972, and the 840 "without recourse to any other designer," working from a clean sheet of paper and personally sailing both prototypes across the ocean.
Construction through the eras
The 24 carried the marks of Butler's late change: extra freeboard for headroom, sold mostly without engines - an optional petrol inboard was usually swapped early for a small diesel - and available in a triple-keel, shoal-draught variant alongside the standard bulbed fin keel. The 840, launched last in 1979, was beamier, with more headroom, a better galley, and a generous chart table, and led genoa sheets back to a single, centrally mounted winch to ease singlehanding; it raced respectably in AZAB, the Fastnet, and OSTAR, though Yachting Monthly judged it hard to compete commercially against newer designs with better accommodation and sharper handling.
Who Achilles is for
The racing pedigree is the brand. Butler didn't just design boats for offshore racing - he sailed them himself, winning the 1979 Azores and Back Race and the 1984 OSTAR at 52, the fastest crossing yet recorded under the race's 30-foot rules. Family size is modest, and disputed even in its own telling: Butler's 2008 count put the Achilles 24 family at around 600 boats, Yachting Monthly's review at more than 350. Either way, an Achilles buyer is buying a boat one man raced across an ocean, then went home and refined.
