CT sailboats: a Taiwan-built badge carrying two designers' names
CT was never an independent boatbuilder in its own right. It's the model-line badge under which Ta Chiao (Big Bridge) Bros. Yacht Building Co., a Taiwanese yard, sold cruising sailboats designed almost entirely by outside naval architects -- chiefly Robert Perry, with one flagship credited to a different designer entirely.
Origins and the designers
The yard, officially Ta Chiao (Big Bridge) Bros. Yacht Building Co., adopted fiberglass construction techniques in 1965, according to a 1981 profile in Taiwan Panorama. Robert Perry has told the CT line's origin story on his own site: a client came to him around 1973 with the idea of building cheaply in Taiwan, was let go by the Ta Chiao yard partway through, and the project evolved into the CT 54 -- a design Perry calls the very first professionally built boat constructed to his plans. Ta Chiao went on to build roughly 100 of them. Perry has said the arrangement wasn't really a choice: early in his career, it was work with a Taiwan builder like Ta Chiao "or starve," since most American designers of the era wouldn't trust boatbuilders there. He had the CT 54 underway around the same time he left Dick Carter's office to open his own design practice, and he still calls the Ta Chiao yard in Pali, Taiwan, his "second home" there. Perry's own production list credits Ta Chiao with building the CT 48, CT 54, CT 56, CT 65, and the Scorpio 72 to his designs. One more CT model carries a different name on the drawing: the CT 44, credited to Yves-Marie Tanton on his own design-office blog, was likewise built in Taiwan by Ta Chiao.
Who CT is for
A buyer drawn to a CT is really buying a Ta Chiao-built hull off a specific outside designer's board rather than a single house style -- Perry's larger cruisers at one end, Tanton's 44 at the other -- so knowing which name is on the drawing, not just the CT badge on the transom, is the more useful pedigree to chase.
