Cherubini sailboats: one family's 44-foot ketch, carried across four generations
Cherubini began as a family boatbuilding habit before it was ever a company. Brothers Frit and John Cherubini, together with brothers Richard, Joe, and Tom, had already launched the Sea Scamp line of plywood and clinker-built runabouts in the 1950s. In the early 1970s, Frit and John set out to build two 44-foot yachts for their own retirement in Frit's home workshop in Burlington, New Jersey — a Philadelphia-area project that, by 1975, had turned into the Cherubini boatbuilding business almost by accident, when the brothers completed a 44-foot ketch named Diana for themselves. Diana's lines, reminiscent of a Chesapeake bugeye and L. Francis Herreshoff's Ticonderoga, turned heads, and the two-man project became the Cherubini Boat Company, on the shores of the Delaware River in Delran, New Jersey — a yard that flourished from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, training the next generation of Cherubini cousins, and became well known for the Cherubini 44 and 48, ketch and schooner. The 44 was tentatively advertised in a late-1974 issue of National Fisherman, and the company introduced its 48-foot staysail schooner in 1983. Over time the extended family — brothers, cousins, kids, and nephews — built the 48 in a run of nine and the 44 in a run remembered at around three dozen. Author Ferenc Mate, writing in his book The World's Best Sailboats, called the boats "drop-dead gorgeous," "the greatest crowd-pleaser in any harbor," and possessed of "timeless beauty that stirs the soul."
Origins and ownership
The founding generation did not last as an independent company. In 1990, with Frit retired and John dead seven years earlier, the original Cherubini Boat Company foundered, a casualty of the federal luxury tax that hurt American boatbuilding broadly. Frit's son Lee Cherubini took over leadership of the family's boatbuilding effort, and from the mid-1990s he and a partner built trawlers and the occasional sailboat as the Independence Cherubini Company — a venture that included a partnership with former Hans Christian Yachts owner Geoffrey White, whose Independence 45 trawler design the Cherubini yard built, launching a first hull in 1995. Family members later recalled as many as four generations of Cherubinis working the yard at once during that period, with Lee, the third generation, managing the company. In 2000, with Lee as president, investors were brought in to keep the business afloat under a renamed Independence-Cherubini Corp.; after completing just one more schooner, the reorganized company turned instead to luxury ocean trawlers and jet-drive runabouts. Within three years nearly all the Cherubinis, including Lee and his cousin Dave, had left, and late in 2003 Independence-Cherubini Corp. filed for reorganization bankruptcy protection, retained only its trawler line, and relocated from Delran to Annapolis, Maryland.
Dave Cherubini — Richard's son, who had started working at the Cherubini Boat Company his uncles John and Frit founded back in 1979, at age 13 — found his reason to revive the family name late in 2003, when he came across old boatbuilding templates and jigs in a dumpster at the former Independence Cherubini yard. Five family members and former employees joined him, including his uncle Joe Cherubini, a longtime boatbuilder and cabinet maker. Dave negotiated a long-term lease on the former Cherubini offices, shop, and yard, and his new company bought the hull molds and exclusive rights to build the family's ketches and schooners; it also acquired rights to the Cherubini CC-20 runabout and began building and marketing it under the family name. He formally filed the new company's business name, Cherubini Yachts LLC, with the New Jersey secretary of state in January 2004.
The designers
John Cherubini drew the lines for the Cherubini 44, finishing the design in 1971 after carrying the boat's concept in mind since the late 1940s and working through dozens of drawings over the years — a history he confirmed himself in a 1978 Cruising World interview. Before turning his design talents to boats, John spent the 1960s designing aircraft for Boeing. His design credits beyond the family yard included the early Hunter sailboats from 25 to 54 feet and the ultra-light-displacement Hunter's Child, aboard which Warren Luhrs won the monohull class in the 1984 OSTAR, as well as the Mainship 34 trawler.
Construction through the eras
Cherubini 44s have always been built with deck beams, carlins, and through-bolted cabin sides — a detail Frit insisted on because he wanted the boat to withstand 30 tons of water pressure. The earliest hulls paired a fiberglass hull and molded cockpit with a cold-molded marine plywood deck and cabin top and solid mahogany cabin sides: the plywood built up from two layers of three-eighths-inch stock, the cabin top from three layers of quarter-inch stock, with the wood components either cold-molded or sealed in epoxy resin, according to Spinsheet's account of the boat. Dave — John and Frit's nephew — introduced the Mark II in 2007 as a 30th-anniversary evolution of the 1977 original, replacing that plywood deck and cabin top with a single molded fiberglass composite deck and deckhouse structure over a foam core; Cruising World's account of hull number 34, named Elysium, describes that generation's construction as hand-laid fiberglass in Derakane vinyl-epoxy resin.
Lines and generations
The 44 ketch and 48 staysail schooner carried the founding generation's sailboat story, but the family's later chapters ran through other kinds of boats as often as through sail: the Independence 45 trawler under Lee's Independence Cherubini partnership in the 1990s, and the CC-20 runabout that Dave's revived company took up rights to build after 2004 — a thread that traces back to the Sea Scamp runabouts the Cherubini brothers built before the boatbuilding company existed at all.
Who Cherubini is for
A Cherubini sailboat is, first, a family-built boat: hull and construction choices trace to specific decisions Frit and John made rather than to a corporate design brief, and the succession from Lee's generation to Dave's kept the same molds, the same yard, and much of the same crew across a company reorganization and a bankruptcy. Buyers drawn to that continuity — and to a heavily built ketch or schooner engineered to a specific structural spec rather than a styling exercise — are the audience Cherubini has built for since the 1970s.
