Aquarius sailboats: one name spans four unrelated builders
"Aquarius" on a sailboat's transom does not point to a single yard. At least four separate lineages have used the name independently: a Minnesota catamaran builder, a California trailer-sailer maker, a Finnish yard that rebadged an unrelated Sparkman & Stephens design, and a handful of catalog entries whose builders were never documented. None of these lines share ownership, a designer, or a shipyard with any of the others.
Origins and ownership
Tom Haberman founded Aquarius Sail Inc. in Wyoming, Minnesota, in the early 1970s as a sail, trampoline, and canvas repair business. The company's move into catamarans began at a 1980 Chicago trade show, where its owners met Bill Roberts, there representing Formulae Racing Sailboats and promoting its new SuperCat 20 design. Formulae Racing -- which Roberts and a partner had started in 1978 -- sold the SuperCat line to Boston Whaler in 1981; after a year, Boston Whaler moved production to Erickson Yachts in California. Aquarius Sail's owners bought the SuperCat company outright in the fall of 1984 and moved production and sales to Minnesota. The line already included the SuperCat 17, 19, and 15, introduced in the early 1980s.
Independently, on the other coast, Coastal Recreation, Inc. of Costa Mesa, California operated from about 1969 to 1983, building the Aquarius 21 and 23 trailer-sailers. The company also acquired the Balboa line of trailer-sailers and, for a time, built the LaPaz 25 motorsailer.
The designers
Roberts partnered with Aquarius Sail through the 1980s and beyond, developing the RC-27 on his own in the mid-1980s before teaming with the company to continue it; the 2000 renaming of the SC-22 to ARC-22 reflected a commitment to a strict one-design fleet program. His own résumé ran well beyond catamarans: twice US Snipe Class National Junior Champion by age 17, a Vanderbilt-trained mechanical engineer who went to work for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft after graduating in 1960, and an Olympic Flying Dutchman campaigner who placed third in the 1968 US trials, followed by six straight Contender national titles. He also took line honors and set the lowest elapsed-time record sailing a SuperCat 20 in the 1980 Round Texel Island Race in Holland, and died in April 2019.
The Aquarius 21 and 23 were designed by Peter Barrett, a Webb Institute graduate and a national champion in the Finn and 470 dinghy classes.
Construction through the eras
A third, wholly unrelated Aquarius traces to Finland. Sparkman & Stephens's Design 1767 was based on the firm's earlier Design 1738, the S&S 40 Class built for Far East Yacht Builders, and was built by eight different yards, mostly in wood. The Finnish yard Teksoglass built ten examples of Design 1767 in GRP between 1966 and 1968, marketed as the S&S 40. After 1977, another Finnish yard, Turun Teräskaluste, took over the same molds and built about six more, renaming them the Aquarius 40 -- a rebadge with no tie to either US Aquarius company.
Who Aquarius is for
A buyer chasing an Aquarius catamaran wants the Minnesota-built RC- and ARC-series boats; one after a small trailerable cruiser wants the California-built 21 or 23; and one who turns up an Aquarius 40 is looking at a Finnish-built S&S design that has nothing to do with either. A handful of other Aquarius-badged boats surface in catalogs and dealer records without a documented builder behind them, so confirming the actual yard matters more than the model number on any Aquarius listing.
