Cabo Rico sailboats: full-keel cutters hand-built in Costa Rica from a workshop corner
Cabo Rico's line of full-keel offshore cutters and later pilothouse cruisers traces back not to a planned yacht-building venture but to one Englishman's hobby in a corner of a Costa Rican car plant. Bill Crealock's hull lines, first drawn for the ketch that opened the line, carried through decades of ownership change and grew into a range running from 34-foot cutters to a 56-foot flagship, most offered with a pilothouse option.
Origins and ownership
Cabo Rico began as the hobby of John Schofield, manager of a British automotive plant in San Jose, Costa Rica, who started building boats in a corner of Leyland's Range Rover assembly facility. His first boats came out the door in 1965. By 1971 Schofield had introduced the Tiburon 36 ketch, designed by Californian Bill Crealock; six years later, in 1977, came the Cabo Rico 38. Practical Sailor has described Hong Kong's Cheoy Lee Shipyards -- one of the first offshore builders to sell into the U.S. -- as an ancestral forebearer of the yard.
Edi and Fraser Smith bought the company in 1987 and expanded operations, growing the line to include models from 34 to 56 feet, most offered with a pilothouse option. In 1992 the Smiths bought David Walters Custom Yachts; Walters, the broker behind that firm, had co-founded Shannon Yachts with Walter Schulz in 1975. The acquisition brought Cabo Rico the Cambria line -- 40, 44/46, 48, and 52-footers Walters had envisioned as an elegant competitor to Nautor Swan and Baltic -- a separate lineage from Cabo Rico's own Crealock- and Paine-designed boats.
The designers
Bill Crealock is generally credited with the Cabo Rico 38, and Cabo Rico's own literature lists him as designer; he later said the 38's hull "is the one in which everything came together best," crediting its low profile with reducing leeway in heavy wind. Good Old Boat reports a different account: that builder Fibro Technica's production manager, Dennis Garrett, created the 38 by stretching and modifying the unpopular Tiburon, and an early-1980s spec sheet lists Garrett alone as designer, with no mention of Crealock. Crealock's hand in the range continued well past the 38 -- for the Cabo Rico 45 he sought permission from Henry Scheel's estate to draw his own version of the Scheel keel.
Chuck Paine joined the roster later. After collaborating with the Smiths on the Cabo Rico 42, he returned for a second project that became the 56, launched in 2003; hull #1, named Madrina, was built for Dick and Dianne Simon of Dick Simon Yacht Sales in Dana Point, California. Dick Simon, a former Indy 500 driver, had taken up sailing after single-handing a Cabo Rico 40 down the California coast in a big blow. Despite Paine's larger designs, Practical Sailor found that the full keel with cutaway forefoot remained a trait of every Cabo Rico -- the rest of the line stayed Crealock's.
Construction through the eras
The Cabo Rico 38 set the yard's construction template: hand-laid mat and roving, a hull and deck cored in end-grain balsa above the waterline for insulation rather than strength -- a distinction Fraser Smith made explicitly -- and a hull-to-deck joint at the bulwark, bedded in 3M 5200 and through-bolted on 6-inch centers. Ballast on early 38s was iron, cast in sections set into the keel cavity and glassed over; Cabo Rico switched to lead for roughly the last 60 boats of that nearly two-hundred-hull run, and later hulls also picked up vinylester resin in the outer laminate layers to guard against blistering. Good Old Boat noted that Cabo Rico published its laminate schedule, calling it "a rare practice in the boat-building business."
As the range grew larger, the yard moved away from balsa: Airex and Corecell foam coring stiffened the bigger hulls instead, and the 56 added carbon-fiber-capped stringers for extra strength. No wood was used below the cabin sole on any Cabo Rico, and the builder backed its blister resistance with a 10-year limited hull warranty. Teak ran throughout the boats -- solid plantation decking harvested in Costa Rica's highlands, real teak trailboards on the 38's bow rather than molded fiberglass, and a teak caprail along the hull-deck seam.
Lines and generations
The 38 was, in Practical Sailor's words, "the backbone of the company" for years, its 24-year production run drawing comparison to "long-lived hall of famers like the Hinckley Bermuda 40." Under the Smiths, the range widened well beyond it: the 34, introduced in 1988 and built, Sailing Breezes wrote, "overbuilt by production boat standards from the keel up," with a fully encased keel and structural bulkheads glassed and clad in teak; a 40/42 that Paine later reworked into the 42PH, introduced by 2005, letting SAIL report that "offshore sailors can now order a 42 with a pilothouse"; the 45, introduced in 1995 with its Scheel-derived keel option; and the 56 flagship. The acquired Cambria line -- 40, 44/46, 48, and 52-footers -- ran alongside as a distinct, more Swan-like lineage rather than a Cabo Rico design in its own right.
Who Cabo Rico is for
Cabo Rico suits buyers drawn to a small yard's hand-built, semi-custom full-keel cutters and pilothouse cruisers -- boats built for offshore passages rather than coastal daysailing, with heavy teak joinery and a construction philosophy that favored solid fiberglass and glassed-over ballast over molded liners and pans.
