Fast Passage sailboats: two builders, one William Garden design
"Fast Passage" on a listing does not name a boatbuilding company. It names a single sailboat design, the 39-foot Fast Passage drawn by William Garden, and the yard most associated with it is explicit about that distinction: Philbrook's Shipyard's own history describes the tooling for "the 39' Garden-designed Fast Passage" as a project its new owners took on, not a brand of their own making. The design passed through exactly two builders, with a known handoff point between them, and that handoff -- not a founding story -- is the fact worth knowing.
Origins and ownership
In 1971, Eric Philbrook and Ernie Butler sold their Sidney, British Columbia yard to two entrepreneurs, Donald Dobie and Bill Fryer. One of the new owners' first projects was tooling up to build a production sailboat: the 39-foot, Garden-designed Fast Passage. The design itself had been drawn a little earlier, at the request of Denny Coverdale, an employee of Philbrooks Shipyards, who had cruised his Taiwan-built ketch alongside a 1960s sloop named Bolero for most of a summer, liked her characteristics, and asked Garden -- who had drawn Bolero as a one-off some ten years before -- for a modern version suitable for production.
Philbrook's own account puts the yard's output at about 36 boats before it sold the mold to Tollycraft, in Kelso, Washington, in the late 1970s. Cruising World's figures corroborate that count and round it out: 36 hulls, decks and/or complete packages from Philbrook's, four more from Tollycraft -- including Francis Stokes' Moonshine -- against a total of about forty built between 1976 and 1985. Tollycraft was no novice with fiberglass by the time it took over: its owners' club history records the yard converting its wooden-hull designs to glass beginning in 1967 and building its last wooden boat in 1970.
Construction through the eras
Cruising World describes the Fast Passage 39's underbody as showing less wetted surface than its lines suggest, with a moderately long and shallow fin keel, a skeg-hung rudder, and a cutaway forefoot; above the waterline, a reasonably fine, raked bow and a canoe-like bustle stern give the boat what the magazine calls a unique, pleasing, functional appearance. Finish quality, though, depended on how a given hull left the yard: a buyer could order the Fast Passage 39 as a kit, with hull and deck supplied by Philbrooks for an owner to complete, or as a full yacht commissioned from the shipyard outright. Cruising World notes that shipyard-finished boats were done to a very high standard -- consistent with what Philbrook's own material names as the yard's greatest strength, fine woodworking, and its description of itself as a reliable wood-working operation even as fiberglass construction became the industry norm elsewhere. That split build path is also why individual boats vary: rig, engine, and interior fit-out differ from hull to hull in ways the model name alone won't predict.
Who Fast Passage sailboats are for
The design earned its offshore reputation in a specific race rather than in marketing copy. Francis Stokes sailed his Tollycraft-built Fast Passage 39, Moonshine, in the inaugural 1982-83 BOC Challenge -- a 27,000-mile singlehanded round-the-world race that Cruising World reports only 10 of 16 starters finished -- and brought her home second in Class 2, per boats.com's review of the design. That is the record a buyer researching this design is actually buying into: not a company history, since there isn't one, but a single William Garden hull built twice over, eight-odd years apart, by a yard known for its woodworking and then by one already proven in fiberglass.
