Caliber sailboats: hulls hand-built around their own fuel and water
Caliber Yachts built cruising sailboats the way its founders had learned boatbuilding: by hand, one boat at a time, without a molded liner standing between the deck and the bilge. Every bulkhead, berth, and cabinet was laminated directly to a solid fiberglass hull under what the company trademarked as its Multi-Bulkhead Bonding System, and on later models the fuel and water tanks themselves were built integral to that same hull rather than dropped in afterward. That construction philosophy, set on Caliber's first boats in the early 1980s, became the foundation for the company's defining product: the Long Range Cruiser, or LRC, series that carried expanded tankage and the Caliber name into the 1990s and 2000s.
Origins and ownership
Brothers George and Michael McCreary, together with Marshall Jones, formed Caliber Yachts Inc. in 1979 as a backyard boatbuilding company in Clearwater, Florida. All three had grown up racing and cruising in Florida and the Caribbean, and in 1984 the St. Petersburg Times profiled the young company as one of ten thriving Tampa Bay businesses run by owners under 30. Without bank financing, Caliber built boats one at a time, launching its first model — a 28-footer, built in a backyard garage — in 1981. By 1985 the company was solvent enough to build its own factory in Clearwater and introduce a 33-footer; the 30, 35, 40, and 47 followed. A cruising-boat dealer later told Blue Water Sailing that in the mid-to-late 1980s Caliber "knocked our socks off and grabbed a huge market share," and the magazine wrote that Caliber's designs presented formidable competition to similar-era boats from Moody, Pearson, Bristol, and Endeavour.
At its peak in the 1990s, Caliber employed as many as 30 people and had as many as seven boats under construction at once. Co-founder Michael McCreary credited the company's conservative financial policy — it never borrowed money — with letting it ride out downturns; during the 2008-09 financial crisis he described the yacht-building business as being "in survival mode." Caliber stopped producing boats in 2010. George McCreary went on to run the brand's continuation as Caliber Brokers, Inc., a full brokerage service specializing in pre-owned Calibers, according to the company's site. Florida corporate records list the manufacturing entity, Caliber Yachts, Inc., as inactive, with its last recorded event a voluntary dissolution effective June 20, 2014.
The designers
Michael McCreary earned an engineering degree specializing in naval architecture from the University of Michigan, then apprenticed on the production line at Gulfstar Yachts and worked as a designer for Endeavour Yachts before co-founding Caliber; he is credited as the designer on Caliber models spanning the 33, the 45, and the flagship 40 LRC. George McCreary, who managed the business side, held a University of Florida degree in business administration and marketing and had spent three years at Morgan Yachts. Marshall Jones learned the production side of boatbuilding at Com-Pac Yachts immediately after high school. Blue Water Sailing later observed that George, the business head, and Michael, the naval architect, carefully applied many of the best attributes of existing designs to their own boats.
Construction through the eras
Caliber's hand lay-up began with molds sprayed with isophthalic-neopentyl gelcoat, followed by a skin layer of split-strand fiberglass set in vinylester resin to guard against blistering. Rather than a one-piece molded pan, the company glassed bulkheads, furniture, and structural components directly to that solid hull. Decks across the range were commonly cored with plywood squares rather than balsa. The deck-to-hull joint — trademarked the Quad-Seal Deck to Hull System — was sealed with a polyurethane adhesive and through-bolted every six inches with square-headed carriage bolts designed not to twist and break the caulking seal as they were tightened, while chainplates were secured through-bolted under what Caliber trademarked as its Double-Lock Chainplate System. On the LRC models, fuel, water, and waste tanks were molded integral with the hull below the waterline, strengthening the hull and forming a double bottom, and boats carried a watertight bulkhead forward along with reinforced rudder support.
Lines and generations
Caliber's early lineup grew out from the 33: the 38 followed in 1987, and the 40 — a stretched, transom-modified evolution of the 38 with an extended stern and swim platform — entered production in 1992, while the 33 itself later gave way to a 35 built on a reverse transom. After the compact 30 pocket cruiser, Caliber launched its Long Range Cruising line in 1994, carrying the same construction and design as the earlier boats but with expanded fuel and water tankage — according to co-founder George McCreary, that tankage was the primary difference between an LRC and its predecessor. The 40 LRC, introduced in 1995 as the tankage-expanded version of the standard 40, became the line's most-reviewed model: reviewers documented a hand-laid hull of alternating 24-ounce woven roving and chopped-strand fiberglass, a long, low-aspect fin keel with a skeg-supported rudder, a watertight crash bulkhead, and reinforcement at the bow and along the keel's leading edge. The 47 LRC extended that same tankage philosophy furthest, with all tanks bonded below the waterline and viewing ports built into each one.
Who Caliber is for
Good Old Boat describes Caliber as a family-owned American manufacturer of blue-water-capable fiberglass cruising sailboats, "renowned for their robust construction, seaworthiness, and spacious interiors optimized for long-range voyages." Estimates of the company's total output vary: a 2009 newspaper profile put the McCrearys' lifetime total at roughly 400 boats since the company's founding, while Good Old Boat's retrospective count of the full 1979-2010 run runs higher, in the range of 500 to 600 hulls. Either way, Caliber built for buyers headed offshore rather than around the buoys — sailors who wanted a hand-laminated, no-liner hull and enough integral tankage to keep going once the coastline dropped away.
