Cambria sailboats: one Rhode Island builder's sister-hull family, defined by a shoal centerboard keel
Cambria was never a company of its own — it was the exclusive sailing-yacht line of David Walters Yachts, a small New England yard that built a short run of semi-custom cruisers before closing around 1990. The line's real story is in how few distinct designs it actually contains: what looks in a listing catalog like five separate models is mostly one hull family, sized up and down, distinguished chiefly by whether a given boat got the yard's standard shoal centerboard keel or one of a handful of deeper fixed keels instead.
Origins and ownership
David Walters founded David Walters Yachts, and its exclusive Cambria line, in 1982, after seven years running Shannon Yachts, which he had co-founded in 1975. He and his wife, Betsy Walters, assembled a team of craftsmen and boat builders in New England to build the boats at a dedicated facility in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where the hull and deck molds were made. Walters himself designed the Cambria's shear line — a process that reportedly took months to get right — and worked alongside those craftsmen to design and loft the hulls. The first Cambria launched in late 1983 and was introduced at the 1984 Annapolis Boat Show, where hulls two, three and four sold.
The yard closed after falling victim to the U.S. luxury tax on boats, an event both David and Betsy Walters described as devastating to the boatbuilding industry; Scuttlebutt Sailing News's account implies the closure came around 1990. The couple then moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to restart as yacht brokers, opening a sales office there in 1998 that represented Nautor's Swan among other builders. Sources disagree on when that office formally took the David Walters Yachts name — Scuttlebutt Sailing News says 2001, Trade Only Today says 2011. David Walters died January 17, 2018, in Fort Lauderdale, at age 75; both publications' obituaries credited him as the designer and builder of the Cambria series and a co-founder of Shannon Yachts.
Construction through the eras
Before building began, Walters used the Hazen stern speed prediction program to confirm the design's performance and stability objectives. Hulls were cored with Airex and decks with Divinycell, chosen for strength at the same weight along with thermal and sound insulation, and the boats were engineered to exceed Lloyd's and ABS standards; most carried varnished teak interiors below. Sailboat-Cruising.com's review of the Cambria 44 states separately that it "was built in the USA by Cabo Rico Custom Yachts Inc." — an account no other source corroborates or explains, and no relationship between that builder and David Walters Yachts, which set up its own Portsmouth facility to mold the hulls and decks, has been established.
Lines and generations
The boat that became the Cambria line was introduced as the "44" for its on-deck length, even though its overall length to the tip of the reverse stern ran to 46 feet — a measurement convention, not a size class. The larger models that followed — the 44, 46, 48 and 50 — all shared that same 37-foot waterline, two sleeping cabins, and owner and guest heads: sister hulls built off shared tooling rather than independent designs. The 46 came about because a customer, Chris Reeve, having a Cambria built, didn't want the standard double-entry 44 layout; a new single-entry deck mold was built for his boat and designated the 46. Four Cambrias came from that mold — three with the standard centerboard keel, one with a deep custom fin keel and spade rudder. Eight Cambrias in total were built from the smaller, 40-foot hull molds, separate from the twenty built from the larger sister-hull molds.
Across the whole line, most Cambrias carried a shoal-draft keel with a centerboard and a skeg-protected rudder, drawing only 6 feet with the board raised — access to harbors and anchorages a deeper, fixed-keel design couldn't reach. Only four Cambrias in total left the yard with deeper fixed keels instead. "CB," as it appears on catalog listings for the 40 CB and 44 CB, is shorthand for that centerboard configuration rather than a name David Walters Yachts itself used.
In 1989, the yard built a Cambria 44 named Sea Angel for the actor Christopher Reeve — a similarly named but unconnected customer from the Chris Reeve whose deck-layout request had prompted the 46 mold years earlier — and David Walters counted it among his own favorite boats he'd built. Katahdin, a centerboard Cambria 44, was the last of that model built. Author Ferenc Mate, writing in The World's Best Sailboats, praised Walters-built boats, the Cambria included, as showing "excellent design, engineering, and, dare I say it, good taste."
Who Cambria is for
Cambria suits a buyer looking for hand-built, small-yard New England construction from a single designer-builder rather than a mass-production pedigree — someone who values the shoal-draft flexibility the centerboard keel was built to deliver over the extra performance a fixed keel might offer. Because the larger sizes are sister hulls off the same tooling, the real choice in the lineup is less about which model number and more about size and keel configuration: the standard centerboard boat that defined the line, or one of the rare fixed-keel exceptions.
