Crowther sailboats: a plan-built multihull legacy, not a production yard
A "Crowther" on the used market is a boat built to naval architect Lock Crowther's plans rather than one built by a Crowther-owned factory: more than 2,500 of his designs were constructed worldwide, almost entirely by buyers building the boats themselves in their own yards or backyards. Crowther Designs, the business Lock Crowther formed in 1966, was explicit about that arrangement from the start — a hobby business with design, rather than manufacturing, as its basis. One buyer, Jim Geddes, bought the plans for a Spindrift 45 from Lock and built the boat himself in his back garden, the kind of owner-build history behind much of what carries the Crowther name today.
Origins and ownership
Lachlan "Lock" Crowther was born on September 9, 1940, in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton. He studied electrical engineering at Swinburne Technical College and, after graduating, worked for the State Electricity Commission — a conventional start before boat design became his career. He had already built his first boat, a trimaran named Bunyip, in 1959 while still a teenager, with his family's help. Crowther Designs followed in 1966. Lock Crowther died of a heart attack in 1993 while sailing his own boat, Deguello.
After his death, his son Brett Crowther — who had joined the design office after a Sydney University chemical engineering degree failed to turn up work in that field, and who was one of four staff there when his father died — took over Crowther Designs. Brett and the remaining staff completed the projects already in progress, including On the Edge, a 60-foot sailing catamaran that went on to carry passengers on sightseeing sails around the Whitsundays. The office gradually moved away from sailboats as production catamarans became widely available, and Crowther Pty Ltd was formally shut down and its name deregistered on July 27, 2004. Brett's practice continued under a new name, Incat Crowther, concentrating on commercial vessels rather than the plan-built cruising and racing multihulls his father had designed.
The designers
Lock Crowther's reputation as a multihull designer was built on early racing success: his trimaran Bandersnatch won the Sydney to Hobart multihull race in 1966, and in 1969 a Crowther-designed Kraken 40 won the New York to Bermuda race with Lock himself aboard. Naval architect Robert H. Perry later wrote that Crowther's name had been associated with cruising catamarans even longer than Fountaine Pajot's. That reputation drew Catana's founders, engineers Jean-Pierre Prade and Thierry Goyard, to commission Lock Crowther to design their first boat: the Catana 40, "Pêcheur de Lune," built on a shoestring budget in Cogolin, near Saint-Tropez, in 1984. The tie was brief — by 1989, Catana had moved to naval architect Christophe Barreau, who designed the Catana 42, of which 33 were built.
Construction through the eras
Crowther's early multihulls used GRP-foam sandwich construction well ahead of the field: the trimaran Spirit of America paired that hull technique with innovative composite beams, using uni-directional fibres and turned-down ends. Lock Crowther also developed the use of bulbous bows on his designs, a measure meant to reduce pitching and increase upwind speed in a swell. Because Crowther Designs sold plans rather than finished boats, the actual building fell to individual owners — as Brett Crowther later put it, "people would buy a set of plans off him and build them in their backyard" — so construction quality and hull material varied by builder rather than by a single factory standard. Decades later, the Crowther 45, reviewed in Sailing Magazine in 1997, used rigid PVC foam cores of varying thickness with triaxial, biaxial and unidirectional glass for the hull, deck and structural bulkheads, and was itself designed as a sportfisher, built on a previous Crowther design that had operated as a game-fishing boat off Tahiti.
Lines and generations
The Buccaneer line spanned several sizes across the early 1970s — the 24, 28, 33, 36 and 40 — built as trimarans with demountable aluminum beams and hulls finished in either fiberglass or plywood depending on the builder; only nine examples of the Buccaneer 40 are recorded as built. The Twiggy 31, first built in 1970, was likewise constructed of wood or fiberglass and built from plans rather than in a Crowther-owned yard. The Spindrift series ran larger, from the Spindrift 37 through the 45. The Kraken 25, Crowther's second design after his first trimaran Bunyip, first appeared in 1964, and the Crowther 45 catamaran closes out the lineup among the later, larger designs.
Who Crowther is for
A Crowther suits buyers drawn to a design pedigree — racing wins on Lock Crowther's own boats, an early adoption of GRP-foam sandwich construction and bulbous-bow hull shaping, and a fleeting but genuine connection to Catana's founding boat — more than a guarantee of consistent factory build quality. Because the vast majority of the 2,500-plus Crowther designs built were owner-built from plans rather than produced in a Crowther-run yard, the brand rewards buyers comfortable judging an individual hull on its own construction merits rather than trusting a builder's reputation across the board.
