Com-Pac sailboats: a family firm built pocket cruisers and catboats around trailerable simplicity
Com-Pac Yachts spent decades building small sailboats meant to be towed behind a car, rigged by hand, and sailed off a beach or a driveway. Its identity rests on two threads that trace back to the same design partner: a line of trailerable pocket cruisers that started the business in the 1970s, and a later run of traditional gaff-rigged catboats built from the same instincts. Both were the work of one family-owned yard in Clearwater, Florida, for the whole of its history.
Origins and ownership
The company began as a metal-stamping and fabrication shop in St. Louis, founded in 1957 by W. L. Hutchins Sr. — known as "Hutch" — a tool-and-die maker whose shop subcontracted work from major automobile manufacturers. In 1970, Hutch turned a personal interest in sailing into a corporate one and commissioned master boatwright and designer Clark Mills to fit a big boat into a small package: a 16-footer that could ship in a box. It took two years to properly shape and fair the plug and another eight months to build, and the first boat was finally finished in 1974 — Hutch trailered it behind a Ford Pinto. Buck Thomas, an experienced boatbuilder who had previously built the Southern 21, consulted closely with Hutch through construction and then spent time on the road promoting and selling the new boat.
Hutch's sons eventually took the company over: Gerry, a graduate engineer who began his career at Gulfstar, and Richard ("Rich"), who had run the family's St. Louis metal-stamping shop before joining. The Hutchins Company remained family owned-and-operated for the rest of its history. It closed its doors in May 2025, following the death of longtime co-owner Gerry Hutchins that February.
The designers
Clark Mills stayed Com-Pac's main design partner through its early decades: after the 16 came the Com-Pac 23, essentially a larger version of the same boat. Bob Johnson, founder of Island Packet Yachts, designed the Com-Pac 19 and, in 1985, the Com-Pac 27 — a boat Good Old Boat credits with marking Hutchins' entry into the coastal cruiser market. Charley Morgan drew the Com-Pac 35, the largest boat in the line, which began as a 33-footer with a standard transom before later being lengthened.
The Com-Pac 25 is harder to pin on one name. Practical Sailor lists Bob Johnson and Charley Morgan among the designers of the 25 alongside the 27 and 35; the company's own history instead credits an in-house "Hutchins Group design team"; and Good Old Boat, tracing a different thread, records that when Watkins Yachts wound down its own production, its W25 mold — unlike the rest of its tooling, which was abandoned — was sold and reused to build the Com-Pac 25. The three accounts don't reconcile into one story.
In 1999, Com-Pac introduced a line of catboats, and Gerry Hutchins said the company went back to Clark Mills for the designs. The Sun Cat, commissioned from Mills, was conceived as a trailerable boat that was easy to rig and simple to sail, with a shoal draft suited to gunkholing; the Picnic Cat carried the same design credit.
Construction through the eras
Construction methods across Com-Pac's range stayed fairly standardized: hulls were hand-laid, with woven fiberglass cloth placed by hand into a mold already sprayed with NPG gelcoat, then wetted out with polyester resin using rollers and squeegees. Good Old Boat describes Com-Pac decks generally as cored not with balsa or plywood but with a blend of silicon-dioxide microballoons in polyester resin, said to be impervious to rot — though a Sailing magazine review of the Com-Pac 23 specifically describes that model's deck as balsa-cored, a detail the company-wide account doesn't address. Hull and deck were joined on an outside flange system, coated with marine sealant, pressed together, and fastened with rivets.
The company never brought fiberglass lamination in-house. Hulls for the larger boats were laminated off-site by JMJ Fiberglass, a relationship Practical Sailor pegged at 15 years, with Com-Pac dictating lamination schedules and storing and maintaining the molds itself between production runs. "We're not interested in being in the glass business because it's a specialized business and requires a huge commitment for space," Rich Hutchins told Practical Sailor. Spar work, too, was farmed out to an outside vendor. The Hutchins manufacturing facility itself consisted of three buildings: assembly areas, and metal and wood shops.
Lines and generations
Com-Pac's range split into three loose families over its history. The earliest was the trailerable pocket cruiser — the 16 (later redesignated the 16CB once built with a centerboard assembly), the 19, and the 23 — small boats meant to be towed and hand-rigged. The company also moved into larger coastal cruisers with the 25, 27, and 35 — a push Good Old Boat dates to 1985 with the 27, boats meant to stay in the water rather than ride a trailer. The catboat line, introduced in 1999, returned to Mills' shoal-draft, gunkholing instincts with the Sun Cat and Picnic Cat; Com-Pac grew that line further by buying and reworking an existing design, as it had with the Watkins 25 — the Horizon Cat began life as the Herreshoff America, designed by Halsey Herreshoff and built by Nowak and Williams, before the Hutchins brothers bought the tooling and reworked it to fit their family of shoal-draft cruising yachts.
Who Com-Pac is for
Com-Pac's history points toward a particular kind of sailor: someone who wants a small, trailerable boat, hand-rigged and simply sailed, from a builder that stayed under one family's control for its entire run. That identity holds whether the boat in question is an early pocket cruiser meant to be towed behind a car, a coastal cruiser from after Hutchins moved into bigger boats, or one of the shoal-draft catboats the company built in its later years.
