Endurance sailboats: a Peter Ibold design line, not a single builder
"Endurance" names a family of sailboat designs by the American naval architect Peter A. Ibold, not a boatbuilding company. Good Old Boat's designer archive calls the series "widely cloned," and its boats reached the water through a scatter of independent yards rather than a single factory, each one working from Ibold's plans rather than for a shared Endurance brand.
Origins and ownership
Ibold (1936-2010) trained as a civil engineer at the University of Maine, took a master's in economic planning at Stanford, and studied urban planning at UC Berkeley, before a run of California engineering jobs that included 1960s freeway bridge design. A round-the-world voyage turned him toward yacht design, and in 1970 he opened a Paris-based design office after his first Endurance design won a design competition — Good Old Boat describes an international amateur boatbuilding contest sponsored by the Amateur Yacht Research Society, while Sailing Magazine's Robert H. Perry credited the win to an English contest for ferrocement boats. Over a career of more than 50 designs spanning sailboats, powerboats, motoryachts, and workboats, Ibold's plans were built by yards including Belliure in Spain, Stratimer in France, and Colvic Craft in Essex, England. He also designed the Triangle 32, later adapted by Grampian as its 34 Ketch, and collaborated on the Albacore motoryacht series; he belonged to the Yacht Club de Monaco and the CSS Alabama Association.
Construction through the eras
The line's roots are in that ferrocement design-contest win, and Perry noted that by 1997 Ibold had comfortably made the transition into fiberglass, having added to the Endurance line for the previous twenty years. Colvic Craft, the Essex yard that hand-laminated the GRP Endurance 38, sold the boats as kits for owner completion as well as finished sail-away models — and Practical Boat Owner found the practice held across the line: some hulls were customized by the yard, others finished at home, so no two boats necessarily share a layout.
Lines and generations
The 35 that started the line carries a long keel; the later 38 — not to be confused with the earlier, ferrocement 37, and only ever built in GRP — carries a more modern, streamlined shape underwater, per Practical Boat Owner.
Who Endurance is for
Buyers drawn to Endurance are buying into Ibold's design work — hulls Good Old Boat calls tank-like, with forgiving handling that still wins the series admirers among voyagers — more than any single yard's build standard. Because the plans were licensed and cloned across builders, materials, and completion methods, evaluating an Endurance means evaluating the individual hull, not a brand.
