Cornish Crabbers sailboats: traditional gaff rigs, built in modern GRP
Cornish Crabbers builds gaff-rigged boats that look like they belong to an earlier century but are laid up in fibreglass rather than planked in wood. The identity traces to a single amateur's boat, built for its designer's own sailing on Cornwall's Camel Estuary, and the range that grew from it — the Crabber gaff cutters and the Shrimper trailer-sailers above all — has kept that traditional silhouette in production even as the company behind it has changed hands and names more than once.
Origins and ownership
Roger Dongray designed the first Crabber as a 22ft gaff cutter, meaning to build it in plywood for himself. Peter Keeling of Westerly Boats, who raced Lasers against Dongray on the Camel Estuary, proposed making it two feet longer and building it through his own firm; four 24ft plywood boats followed before a mould was made for fibreglass production, and the boat was first shown at the London Boat Show in January 1975. The business — earlier known as Select Yachts — took the trading name Cornish Crabbers Ltd in 1977, reportedly to avoid confusion with the similarly named Westerly Marine Construction.
Dongray's next amateur project became the company's biggest seller. In 1978 he drew a 19ft gaff sloop, again intending to build only one for himself; builder Mike Hughes helped finish it, then built six more under licence for other local sailors. Cornish Crabbers only took notice after Keeling saw seven of the boats sailing together and asked to be taken out in one, along with fellow director Ken Robertson. The company put the design into GRP production as the Shrimper — its first boat, Shrimper No. 11, launched in May 1980 — and it became far and away the most popular boat Cornish Crabbers ever built.
Ownership proved less steady than the boats. The business went into voluntary liquidation in November 2008; entrepreneur Philip Langsdale bought its assets the following year, rebranded it Cornish Crabbers, and ran it until leaving in December 2012. Peter and Samantha Thomas owned the company through to March 2024, when it again appointed liquidators. A new ownership group involving Blue Lagoon Marine's Ben Walker and backer Richard Yonwin — himself a Shrimper 19 owner — then re-established a firm, also named Cornish Crabbers Ltd, to oversee production, which now continues at the Cornwall yard under contract to David Thomas Yachts Ltd, managed by Peter Thomas, the company's former owner.
The designers
Roger Dongray designed most of the range himself, working up from the amateur one-offs that became the Crabber and the Shrimper. The late naval architect David Thomas contributed the Crabber 12, the Crabber 26 and the Mystery 30; his son Peter Thomas later ran Cornish Crabbers as managing director. Stephen Jones designed the Mystery 35, the one model outside the Dongray and Thomas lines.
Construction through the eras
Construction moved from wood to glass in stages. The earliest Crabbers were built entirely in marine plywood; once the fibreglass mould existed, the Crabber 24 Mk I kept an almost flush deck with a plywood cockpit and decks laid over an otherwise GRP hull, a combination it shared with the Mk II. Later models went further into glass: the Crabber 22 uses a solid GRP hull with encapsulated steel ballast around the keel and a balsa-sandwich deck. The Crabber 26, introduced in 2010 to a David Thomas design, substitutes lead ballast for iron, allowing a lower saloon sole, and pairs it with a shallow, long keel and bilge runners.
The Pilot Cutter 30 had its own path into the range: it began life as a yawl-rigged boat called the Trader, six of which were built, before the hull was fitted with a new interior and gaff cutter rig and relaunched as the Pilot Cutter 30 in 1985. Yachting Monthly called it the flagship of the Crabber range.
Lines and generations
The Classic Series gaff cutters — Crabber 22, Crabber 24, Crabber 26 and Pilot Cutter 30 — share the traditional silhouette, though the Crabber 24 is the only one built with a fixed keel and no centreplate. The Crabber 24 alone has run through several marks: the original 1970s boat, a Mk III built 1991 to 2014, and a Mk V introduced in 2017. The Shrimper trailer-sailers form a separate line descended from Dongray's 1978 one-off: by 2015 the range had grown enough that Cornish Crabbers renamed the Crabber 17 as the Shrimper 17, redesignated the original Cornish Shrimper as the Shrimper 19, and added a new Shrimper 21 with more accommodation and cockpit space while keeping the original trailer-sailer ethos. A third, smaller line carries the Mystery name — the Mystery 30 by David Thomas and the Mystery 35 by Stephen Jones — apart from the gaff-rigged Crabbers and Shrimpers.
Who Cornish Crabbers is for
Cornish Crabbers suits sailors drawn to a traditional gaff-rigged look without the upkeep of a planked wooden boat — a range built from the outset by people sailing it themselves on a tidal Cornish estuary, from Dongray's original one-offs to the Shrimper Owners Association, active since 1981. Buyers who want that character paired with straightforward GRP construction, from a compact trailer-sailer up to the flagship Pilot Cutter 30, are the natural audience; those who need the largest possible interior or the lowest-maintenance modern rig should look elsewhere.
