Chrysler sailboats: the automaker's marine sideline, told through Herreshoff, Macalpine-Downie, and a Buccaneer that outlived its parent
Chrysler Corporation's sailboat division traces to a small Texas boatbuilder it acquired in the mid-1960s. Lone Star Boats was founded in Grand Prairie, Texas in 1945 by brothers Lamar and William Moody, and moved its plant to Plano, Texas in 1962. Chrysler bought Lone Star in 1965; it also bought West Bend Outboards that January. Chrysler kept building at the Plano facility, and 1966 brochures still carried both the Lone Star and Chrysler names, evidence of a company still finding its footing under new ownership. The purchase fit a pattern reaching back to the company's founding: almost from its inception, the automotive giant had an interest in boating, tracing to founder Walter P. Chrysler's own enthusiasm for boat racing and the storied Gold Cup contested on the Detroit River.
Origins and ownership
From 1966 through 1980, Chrysler built thousands of boats across both its sailboat and powerboat divisions, and several sailboat models borrowed names straight from the car lineup - Fury, Charger, and Valiant among them. That run ended for a reason that had nothing to do with boats: as a condition of the loan guarantees it needed from the U.S. government during its financial crisis, Chrysler had to shed businesses unrelated to building cars. The sailboat division was sold in 1980 to Texas Marine International (TMI); the outboard-motor division followed in 1984, sold to U.S. Marine, which continued making the engines under the FORCE name.
The designers
Chrysler's sailboat credibility rested heavily on two design hires. Halsey Herreshoff was brought on as design engineer for the cruising-boat line, and his reputation helped the company overcome buyers' skepticism toward a car company building sailboats. He drew the Chrysler C-26's sailplan in December 1976 and is listed as consulting designer on its factory specification sheet. Chrysler's smaller boats came from a different pair of hands: design engineers Rod Macalpine-Downie and Dick Gibbs, who drew the Pirateer (also sold as the Privateer), the Dagger, the Mutineer, and the Buccaneer - the last designed in 1966 and sailed to second place, behind a Thistle, at Yachting Magazine's 1967 One-of-a-Kind Regatta. Their design rights outlasted Chrysler's ownership of the company: in 1982, Bayliner tried to build an unauthorized Buccaneer from a mold shrunk off an existing hull, without approval from the class association or from Macalpine-Downie and Gibbs, who owned the molds. The two sued and prevailed, and Bayliner's imitation never reached production.
Construction through the eras
Quality control at the Plano plant, which grew to a final footprint of 488,000 square feet under roof, left a specific mark on the boats. Every inboard/outboard boat went into a dug-out, exhaust-vented test tank for a ten-minute run test before being corrected and shipped; once Chrysler moved seriously into sailboats, C-22 and C-26 hulls went through the same tank to check swing- and fixed-keel joints for leaks. The resin system used in layup was formulated with three different cure times - 45, 30, and 15 minutes - so that the hull layup, secondary structure, and final layer cured out together as one thick laminate rather than as three separate bonds.
Lines and generations
No Chrysler model illustrates the brand's afterlife better than the Buccaneer, which Chrysler built from 1968 through 1980 - hull number 1 through roughly 4050, just over 4,000 boats - before its tooling kept moving for another two decades. TMI built roughly 700 more, into the 4750s, through 1982, then sold its small-boat business, 13 to 18 feet, to Gloucester Yachts, and its cruising-boat business, 20 to 27 feet, to Wellcraft Marine's Starwind division. Starwind built about 250 Buccaneers before discontinuing its own boats in 1985 and selling its sailboat division's materials and rights to Gloucester; Gloucester built 59 more through 1986. In 1987, Harry Sindle left Gloucester to found Cardinal Yachts, which kept building and selling Buccaneers and Mutineers until 2003. Separately, a Chrysler-designed 30-footer prototype shown at the Toronto Dockside Show never reached production under Chrysler; its molds and tooling were bought by the Canadian builder Ticon Yachts and became the Ticon 30.
Who Chrysler is for
A Chrysler is a boat for a buyer curious about an unlikely chapter in American boatbuilding: an automaker's sideline that, however briefly, hired designers with real pedigree and ran a plant serious enough to leak-test every keel before it shipped. The brand's own boats were built for just fourteen years, 1966 through 1980, but for at least one model, the Buccaneer, the design proved durable enough to be rebuilt by four more companies after Chrysler walked away.
