Freedom sailboats: cat-ketches built around a single radical idea — no stays at all
Freedom's identity was never a hull shape or a size range. It was a rig: a freestanding, unstayed carbon-fiber mast that needed no shrouds, no forestay, no backstay — an idea Garry Hoyt pushed through decades of ownership changes without ever letting it go. Innovation was the constant thread beyond the mast itself, too. Freedom's lineup introduced a self-tacking jib boom, an offset rig, a gun-mount spinnaker, and a single-line reefing system, all built around the same premise: sailing should ask less of the person doing it.
Origins and ownership
Garry Hoyt founded Freedom Yachts soon after the 1976 Olympic Games. The company's first boat was a 40-foot cruising yacht with a free-standing spar and no shrouds, rigged as a cat ketch with two freestanding masts of almost equal height. Four years later, in 1980, Hoyt left his career as an advertising executive at Young & Rubicam and moved to Newport, Rhode Island, to work on Freedom full time, spending the next twenty-five years as its designer and driving entrepreneur. SAIL Magazine later honored him with its 1999 Innovation Award and its Industry Leadership Award soon after — accounts differ on whether that second award came in 2001 or 2002. Hoyt eventually sold Freedom Yachts and, with designer Carl Schumacher, went on to launch the Alerion line of sloops; the self-tacking jib boom he had developed at Freedom found new life there on the Alerion Express 28 in the early 1990s, an early forerunner of the self-tacking jib.
The company itself kept building cat-ketch and sloop-rigged Freedoms until 1996, when it merged with Legacy Yachts to become Freedom-Legacy Yachts. That venture ceased operations in 2008, amid the global financial crisis. The brand later passed through Seattle Yachts before, in August 2025, Michael Reardon — founder of Daedalus Yachts and owner of Catalina Yachts and True North motoryachts — acquired Freedom together with Tartan Yachts and AMP Carbon Spars from Seattle Yachts. Freedom joined Catalina Yachts and True North at Catalina's manufacturing facility in Largo, Florida; under the new ownership, each brand retained its own leadership, workforce, and dealer network, with back-office functions centralized across the group.
The designers
Hoyt developed the unstayed, wishbone rig for that first Freedom 40 specifically to make sailing as simple and easy as possible, and he worked with Halsey Herreshoff when he first started out as a designer. The engineering that made the rig durable, though, came from Tillotson-Pearson. Naval architect Eric Sponberg joined TPI, the Warren, Rhode Island builder of Freedom's hulls and masts, right as the company began building those masts out of carbon fiber on its flagpole and lightpole assembly line instead of the tapered aluminum tubes it had used before. After TPI's chief engineer left, Sponberg rose to the position and designed the masts for the Freedom 44, 25, 39, and 21, as well as the triple-masted Freedom 70 — a contender in the 1981 Whitbread Round the World Race that carried the largest and strongest unstayed masts built to that date. He left TPI at the end of 1981.
Construction through the eras
The rig itself evolved twice. First came the material: aluminum tube masts gave way to carbon fiber, a change that on the Freedom 40 alone produced a roughly 30 percent weight saving and a stiffer spar. Second came the sail-handling hardware. Early boats mated the sail to the mast with a wraparound sail rather than conventional sail tracks, paired with a wishbone boom straddling the sail and spar in place of a conventional boom and vang; a few early models also briefly experimented with rotating masts. Freedom eventually abandoned both the wraparound sail and the wishbone boom in favor of fully battened sails on tracks with conventional booms.
Hulls changed alongside the rig. Freedom's shapes evolved from shoal-draft, full-keel configurations with centerboards toward the separate keel-and-rudder configurations of their IOR-influenced sisters. Across much of the range, hulls and decks were laid up as a fiberglass sandwich over an end-grain balsa core, with vinylester barrier resin in the outer laminate below the waterline to guard against blistering.
Lines and generations
The range spanned from compact daysailers like the Freedom 21 up to the flagship Freedom 70, the triple-masted Whitbread contender that carried the largest unstayed masts built at the time. In between, cat ketches gave way over the years to sloop rigs even in the largest models. Reviewing that whole arc, Good Old Boat's Rob Mazza concluded that across Freedom's long history under various owners, the one real constant was never a hull or a size — it was the commitment to the freestanding rig itself.
Who Freedom is for
Freedom suits a sailor drawn to the freestanding rig on its own terms: someone who wants a boat engineered, from Hoyt's first wishbone Freedom 40 onward, to make sail handling as simple as possible, and who is comfortable with a mast, boom, and sail-handling system that works differently from a conventional stayed sloop. It also suits a buyer at ease with a brand that changed hands repeatedly — from Hoyt's original company, through the Freedom-Legacy years, to the Reardon-owned Catalina group that acquired it in 2025 — while the engineering idea underneath stayed the same.
