Cascade sailboats: a Portland co-op that tested its own fiberglass with a gun
Cascade is the boat line of Yacht Constructors, Inc., a small Portland, Oregon company that started as a fall-1954 gathering of Columbia River sailors at the Rose City Yacht Club and grew into the West Coast's premier supplier of kit-built fiberglass sailboats. Two designers define the badge: Philadelphia's Frederick Geiger, whose Chinook 34 was the company's first hull, and local architect Robert Smith, who drew the Cascade series proper - the 29, 42, 36, and 27 - that gave the make its name. What tied the boats together was Yacht Constructors' own standard for the still-new material: with no established thickness standard to work from, the partners fired .45-caliber rounds at their own test samples to prove the laminate would hold.
Origins and ownership
Yacht Constructors traces to a work party at the Rose City Yacht Club that brought together a group of Columbia River sailors - in the fall of 1954, according to marine journalist Peter Marsh's contemporaneous, granular account, which has the five partners spending April through November 1955 building the plug and completing hull no. 1 in April 1956; a 2013 Sailing Scuttlebutt retrospective instead dates the founding gathering itself to 1956. Merle Starr and Tom Green, both taken with fiberglass's potential, picked out Frederick Geiger's design and recruited Wade Cornwell, Henry Morton, and Jarvis Gould to round out the five founders. When sailors outside the group began asking for boats off the molds, three of the five - Starr, Green, and Cornwell - incorporated the business as Yacht Constructors. All three kept day jobs for years: Starr taught physics at the University of Portland until 1976, Green worked as a fabrication foreman at the Hyster Corporation until 1972, and Cornwell stayed at Union Carbide until 1963, when he lost that job and became the new company's full-time manager; Tom Green, per a later letter from his daughter, served as company president. The company never employed more than 12 people, and a later Good Old Boat reader letter named Cornwell as the last survivor of the original builders. In February 1989 the company was sold to Hans Geerling, a Tektronix engineer, who acquired four additional molds - all Jay Benford designs - from the defunct Heritage Boat Works of Hood River and set out to pivot the line toward full-keel designs for the 1990s.
The designers
The first hull off the line, the Chinook 34, came from a design by Frederick Geiger, a naval architect in Philadelphia; Sailing Scuttlebutt would later call it "the first production sailboat ever constructed in fiberglass." Seventy Chinooks were built in all, the last shipped to Maryland in 1968; once the Cascade line took over, demand for the Chinook dried up and its mold was eventually destroyed. An early customer, Donald Laird, had already bought the first production Chinook when he also bought the first Cascade 42, paying up front to help fund that new mold. From there, Yacht Constructors turned to local naval architect Robert Smith for the Cascade series that gave the company its lasting name. Smith had been working at Sparkman & Stephens when World War II broke out and was recruited by Henry Kaiser to Portland's wartime shipyards; his own yacht, Mischief, was among the first fin-keel racers in the Pacific Northwest and won the 1956 Swiftsure. Smith drew the Cascade 29 in 1961, the 42 in 1964, and the 36 in 1967, then closed out the line with the 27 in 1978 - a boat he himself sailed to an overall win in the 1984 Swiftsure.
Construction through the eras
Cascade hulls were hand-laid, with eight layers of 24-ounce woven roving below the waterline on the 29 and twelve on the 42 - construction reputed to be tough enough that .45-caliber slugs bounced off it, and that survived groundings and collisions that would have sunk a lighter boat. On the 36 and 44, an extruded-aluminum rail sturdy enough to double as a bowsprit and horizontal chainplate became one of the marque's signatures - strong enough that every stay and shroud on those boats shackles straight to it, with no separate chainplates fitted at all. Much of that construction happened outside the factory: a growing economy and the do-it-yourself spirit of the 1960s pushed Yacht Constructors into becoming the West Coast's premier kit-boat supplier, selling unfinished hulls to complete amateurs that bigger, more ambitious yards wouldn't take on.
Lines and generations
A handful of specialty variants branched off the main Cascade line. In 1967, a Portland Yacht Club syndicate built a stripped-down Cascade 42 specifically to race the Transpacific Yacht Race, campaigning it in seven consecutive Trans-Pacs from 1967 to 1979 before Bill Nickerson bought out the syndicate's shares and cruised the boat through the 1980s. At scout leader Bud Beggs' request, Bob Smith modified a Cascade 29 hull into the "Sea Scout 29," nicknamed the Beaver - a lowered sheer and an iron shoe in place of the fin keel made it suitable for rowing; six sister ships were launched starting in 1969. The 29 itself was the volume leader of the whole line: more than 360 had sold by around 1990, most of them in the model's first two decades. Across every line and variant, Yacht Constructors and its Cascade boats totaled more than 600 hulls built.
Who Cascade is for
Cascade appeals to buyers who value a hull built heavier and simpler than most of its 1960s-and-70s peers, from a company that stayed a small, part-time operation for most of its life rather than scaling into a conventional boatbuilder. Whether a given hull came off the factory floor finished or was completed by its original owner from a kit is part of that same story - worth knowing before judging any individual boat by the badge alone.
