Corby sailboats: a designer-builder who built about as many boats himself as he handed to other yards
John Corby is a Cowes-based naval architect who has also built boats with his own hands, an unusual combination among yacht designers of his generation. Over the life of the business, Corby Yachts completed 20 custom new builds in house, while 19 other boatyards — from a cedar-strip specialist on the Isle of Wight to production yards in Poland and Turkey — built boats to his designs instead. That split between in-house and outside construction runs through the whole history of the marque, from one-off IRC/CHS racers commissioned by individual owners to the small-series production models in Listingsport's own database.
Origins and ownership
Before turning to yacht design, Corby served as a Royal Marines officer and troop commander in 42 Commando, specializing in mountain and arctic warfare. From 1986 to 1988 he taught himself computer-aided design and took a job with established designer Julian Everitt, whose credits from that period included the varnished CHS 32ft Wavetrain. Corby set up his own business in 1988 after a chance meeting in Cowes's Pier View pub led to a commission to design and build a 27ft light-displacement CHS yacht. Frenzy, built in Dublin, became the first Irish-owned Corby in 1994, and more than 45 Irishmen have bought Corbys since; unusually for a Cowes-based designer, roughly half of all his boats have gone to Irish owners. Across the business's life, Corby Yachts counts more than 86 boats built, plus numerous dinghies.
Construction through the eras
Corby's in-house work has run alongside a shifting roster of outside builders. In 1992-93, Corby Yachts built three custom yachts over one winter in what is now the Cowes Yacht Haven Events Centre. The Corby 25 began as a cedar-strip custom build for Dublin owner Mike Guinan in 2000; boatbuilder Harley Racboats then took moulds off that hull and deck, building three fibreglass boats before sending the moulds on to Latvia, and Partington Marine in Wales later acquired them and built the most recent of the roughly 20 Corby 25s produced. On the custom side, Mark Downer, who had previously built Cracklin' Rosie, built a new Corby 36 in Newport, Isle of Wight, laying a cedar-strip hull under a foam-sandwich deck — a method used on roughly six of Corby's boats, which Downer said came out pretty light once the cedar was properly dried — while Vision Yachts, builder of the Corby 38 Gloves Off and the Ker 11.3 fleet, built a Corby 41 named Wahoo on the outskirts of Cowes. The Daily Sail noted that, unusually, Corby himself was not involved in the build of either boat under construction in 2004, focusing solely on design. In 2005, a yard in Gdansk, Poland started a production range covering the 29, 33, and 26; more recently, since around 2022, Corby has worked alongside finishing specialist Dettaglio.
Lines and generations
Corby's racing reputation rests on two one-off IRC/CHS designs built a decade apart. In 1993, his design Converting Machine — later renamed Njos — was considered too radical for its bulb keel, non-overlapping jibs, asymmetric spinnakers flown from a retractable sprit, sweptback spreaders, and lack of running backstays. Two years later, the 1995 Mustang Sally, built from scratch for owner Peter Wilson in just eleven weeks, marked a total change in design direction for Corby and introduced the Corby Transom; she recorded 33 firsts from 53 starts in her first season. That same 36ft hull went on to change hands and names repeatedly — Stiletto, Kylla, Yes!, and finally Oystercatcher 36 — with Adam Gosling buying and refitting her with a new Axxon carbon rig in Easter 2013, and Richard Matthews, on his third Corby design, buying and refitting her again at Foxes in 2024.
Corby's most celebrated one-off was the 41ft Independent Bear, built in 1997 of glassfibre and Kevlar over a lightweight foam core with a carbon deck, a narrow beam, and stability drawn from a very large keel bulb. Yachting World later included her among 50 yachts that changed sailing, writing that she "demolished all opposition" in her first season under the CHS/IRC rule; officials raised her rating by 28 points the following year, and the CHS rule itself was subsequently adjusted, feeding a broader trend toward wider IRC designs in the years that followed. Corby's other milestones followed a similar rhythm of racing success and yard expansion: 2000 brought the start of Production 25 the same year his Barlo Plastics design, later renamed Hummingbird, and Gloves Off won just about every major regatta in the UK and Ireland; 2002 brought the 50ft Flirt, his largest yacht to that point; and 2008 brought Turkish production of his designs alongside Quokka's overall class win at the Commodores Cup. Corby Yachts marked its own history with an inaugural Corby Cup regatta celebrating 20 years in business.
Who Corby is for
Corby suits sailors chasing IRC and CHS rating-rule success in a one-off or small-series racer-cruiser, commissioned directly from a designer who has often built the boat himself rather than handed it to a production line. Whether a given Corby came from his own shed or from one of the yards working off his drawings, it remains fundamentally a bespoke design rather than an off-the-shelf production boat.