Condor sailboats: three builders, one shared name
"Condor" on a sailboat's transom names no single builder. The catalog's six Condor models split cleanly into three unrelated lineages, matching three different designers: a family of offshore-racing trimarans built by a small Annapolis, Maryland yard in the mid-to-late 1980s; a much larger run of small cabin cruisers designed and built by one man in Bavaria, Germany, starting in the early 1960s; and a Condor 37 that appears in the catalog attached to neither, with a history no authority source has been able to confirm. A shopper who finds "Condor" in a listing has to work out which of the three they're actually looking at before anything else about the boat matters.
Condor Limited: the Annapolis trimarans
Michael "Mick" Price and Phil Herting founded Condor Limited in Annapolis, with Price serving as principal designer. The marque's name came directly from the boat itself: after the two spent two years studying high-tech multihulls and running computer analysis, Price finished the design's lines and the pair saw that the boat resembled a condor in flight, wings outstretched — the image the company's own business plan later invoked, describing the Condor 40 as projecting "the image of her formidable namesake in full flight." The logo has a similarly hands-on origin: when a hired graphic designer failed to produce one, Herting made it himself, cutting out a photograph of a condor in flight, projecting it onto a wall, and tracing the image.
Hull #1, christened "Endangered Species" on November 16, 1985, led a run that stayed small: twenty-one Condor 40s and four Condor 30s in total. Every one was built to OSTAR racing standards using E-glass and biaxial glass, with vinylester resin throughout — a choice the Condor Owners' Association credits with keeping the boats free of blistering, though that verdict comes from an interested party rather than an independent survey. The boats proved themselves at sea: the first Condor 40 finished the 1986 Great Ocean Race, the first multihull ever to do so; in 1988, Sennet Duttenhofer's Condor became the first production multihull to finish the OSTAR/CSTAR singlehanded transatlantic race; and the Condor 30 won Sailing World's 1989 Multihull of the Year Award. When a Condor 40 named Man-o-War collided with a Russian freighter 400 miles off the English coast in 1988, the owners' association reports she was fully repaired within a week of reaching port.
Condor Limited's run ended abruptly: by late June 1990, the company closed its doors amid a slump in the boating industry, only months after the Chesapeake Catamaran & Multihull Association toured its Annapolis plant that February. A planned Condor 60 catamaran, designed with the Caribbean day-charter trade in mind, was never built — the company shut down before mold tooling could even begin.
Helmuth Stöberl's Condor cabin boats
The other Condor line has nothing to do with Annapolis. According to a profile of the designer by yachting journalist Erdmann Braschos — the only authority-grade account of this branch — Helmuth Stöberl (1930 – March 2, 2023) was a self-taught Bavarian designer and boatbuilder who created the Condor cabin-boat line himself, starting with the Condor 7 in 1962 and following it with the 55, 70, 80, 8, and 9. His research method for that first hull was distinctly hands-on: at 30, he bought smoked whitefish at a weekly market and measured them with calipers to inform the hull shape, then built the prototype under improvised conditions in a Munich underground parking garage.
The line's defining trait was volume rather than novelty at any one size: the 55, 70, and 80 were built almost 1,500 times combined — the 55 alone about 800 times, the 70 roughly 350 — and the smaller 7 (7.40 meters) 240 times. Stöberl kept innovating within that run: a steel centreboard/fin keel went into the Condor 7 starting in 1962, and from 1963 he developed and built polyester masts wound from unidirectional glass-fiber strands over an internal tube, producing about 35 of them for the 7. In 1967-68 he applied the same sandwich-construction thinking at a much larger scale, building the first large, 16-meter foam-sandwich yacht under the project name "Condor 16," later known as "Butera." German solo circumnavigator Rollo Gebhard sailed a Stöberl-designed Condor around the world in the late 1960s.
The Condor 37
The catalog's Condor 37, by contrast, is a boat no authority-grade source could corroborate — its designer, builder, country, and production history all unconfirmed — a designation kept separate here from both the Annapolis trimarans and the German cabin boats.
Who buys a Condor
Because the name spans a scarce, purpose-built offshore trimaran and a common, small home-market cruiser designed by one Bavarian boatbuilder, a "Condor" carries almost no shared meaning across those two branches, let alone the third, unidentified model that shares the name and nothing else. Confirming the model designation, not the builder, is what actually tells a buyer what kind of boat they're looking at.
