Comet sailboats: one name, three unrelated builders
Three different companies, in three different countries, have built boats called "Comet," with nothing tying them together but the word itself. By far the largest thread is Comar Yachts, an Italian yard that has built the Comet cruiser-racer and catamaran line continuously since the early 1960s. Separately, a classic American one-design dinghy class has carried the Comet name since the 1930s, and Britain's Comet Dinghies builds an unrelated Duo and Trio. Because Comar accounts for the great majority of boats carrying the name, its history occupies most of this page; the American and British Comets are addressed on their own terms below.
Origins and ownership
Accounts differ on exactly when and by whom the Italian yard was founded. Comar's own history dates its start, under the name Sipla, to 1961 in Forlì, where it began producing fiberglass Flying Junior dinghies — reportedly winning type approval for its first fiberglass hull by painting it brown, adding fake wood grain, and bringing it to a shipyard known for classic wooden lines. A 1985 profile in Giornale della Vela instead places Sipla's founding in 1958, specializing in reinforced-polyester containers, and names its founders as Renzo Zavatta and Eolo Mambelli, later joined in the company's leadership by Pier Luigi Motteucci. Either way, that disguised prototype's type approval gave rise to a company that went on to build more than 4,500 boats. Its defining early moment came in 1971 with the Comet 910, co-designed by Van de Stadt and a very young Finot — a boat so radical that, by Comar's own account, both designers called ahead of her launch in the Middle Sea Race to disown authorship. Almost 1,000 units were built over the following 15 years, and the Comet 333 was later chosen as the boat for the first Giro d'Italia a Vela. After roughly a decade, Sipla changed its name to Comar and cemented its collaboration with Finot; by 1989 the yard covered 43,000 square meters, of which 16,000 were covered space, employed 160 people, and produced 145 boats a year.
Ownership changed hands again in the 1990s, though sources again disagree on exactly when. Comar's own history dates the change to 1998, when Massimo Guardigli bought the name and technology outright. Guardigli's own account instead places the takeover in the mid-to-late 1990s: he and his wife, Flavia Guardigli, had run a boat brokerage called Media Ship since 1989; he then bought the mold of the Vallicelli-designed Genesis 43, gathered craftsmen who had worked at Comar, and built ten boats in the first year, before taking over Comar in full — brand, molds, and everything else — the following year. The company continued building in Forlì for five years before opening a new yard in Fiumicino, in the former Chris Craft facilities, and it continued growing until the global financial crisis set off by Lehman Brothers' September 2008 bankruptcy.
The designers
Van de Stadt designed the Meteor, a small, easily managed boat commissioned by Zavatta and Mambelli, of which nearly a thousand were built; the Comet 910 (later produced as the 910 Plus) and the Comet 770 both descended from that design. Finot, Doug Peterson, and Andrea Vallicelli formed Comar's core design team through the 1980s, joined per the 1985 profile by designer Fauroux; Vallicelli also drew the one-off racer Stradivario, which won four consecutive editions of the Centomiglia del Garda. Under Guardigli ownership, Bruce Farr designed the Comet 38, 50, and 65 — Comar's first Maxi — alongside the Vallicelli-designed Genesis 43. The Neapolitan designer Sergio Lupoli drew the Comet 33 and 36, and later the Smart line. Vallicelli continued as Comar's primary partner into the 2000s, working since the 1980s as Studio Vallicelli with Alessandro Nazareth; together they designed the Comet 51 S — revealed at the 2002 Genoa Boat Show as, in Comar's words, "an aggressive cruiser-racer" — followed by the Comet 52 and 62. Marc Lombard designed the 2015 C-Cat 37, Comar's move into catamarans.
Construction through the eras
Comar's early Finot-designed range set the pattern for decades: the 801, launched in 1972, and the 850, launched in 1977 with more than 400 eventually built, were fiberglass-hulled boats on fin keels, as were the Finot-designed 1050 and the 1988-built 275 that followed. The 375, which debuted in 1987 and remained in production until 1993 with 112 units built, was noted at the time for more wood belowdecks and more attention to finishing than the yard's prior generation, and it proved especially popular with charter operators. The Genesis 43 and Phoenix generation of the 1990s brought what Comar's own history calls ultramodern techniques for the era: termanto or balsa sandwich coring and vacuum lamination. Later still, Comar's own materials describe the 41 S as an attempt to pack the appeal of the larger 51 S and 45 S into 12 meters, a process that involved numerous 1:10 scale models.
Lines and generations
Through the 1980s, the Comet range ran from the small 700 up through the 800, 860, 910 Plus, 1050, 11 Plus, 12, 13, and 15, per the 1985 profile. Under Guardigli ownership the range was reorganized around named lines: the Sport series, begun with the 51 S and continued with the 45 S, eventually grew to as many as 11 models between 21 and 100 feet across the Sport, Raised Saloon, and Smart lines, the last designed by Lupoli. After the acclaim of the 51 Sport, Comar also began specializing in "deck saloon" boats and, from 2015, C-Cat catamarans.
Who Comet is for
Comar's Comet line suits a buyer drawn to a long-running Italian yard with continuous, well-credentialed design pedigree — from Van de Stadt and Finot's radical 1970s beginnings through Vallicelli, Peterson, and Lupoli's 1980s work to Farr's Maxi-era boats and Vallicelli-Nazareth's 2000s Sport series — spanning compact cruiser-racers to 50-foot-plus performance boats and, more recently, catamarans. The American Comet is a different proposition entirely: a 16-foot one-design dinghy class dating to a 1932 C. Lowndes Johnson design commissioned as a trainer, renamed from "Crab" to "Star Junior" before becoming the Comet by 1938, and later picked up by a new builder, Whitecap Composites of Bristol, Rhode Island. Britain's Comet Dinghies is a third, unrelated builder of the small Duo and Trio. A buyer should keep all three straight — the shared name is a coincidence, not a lineage.
