Friendship sailboats: three boats share one name, and one Dutch yard carries most of the story
Three unrelated boats have carried the name Friendship. The main story is a Dutch production-cruiser line that began in Friesland in the late 1960s and passed through a chain of owners and builders, marked by two bankruptcies and one quiet, informal restart, before settling with its current custodian in 2002. A far older, separate craft, the classic Maine sloop, lends its name to a later fiberglass reproduction built by an American yard. A modern American daysailer with joystick-controlled sail handling uses the name too, with no connection to either. This page follows the Dutch yard's history in full, with two short call-outs at the end for the other two.
Origins and ownership
The Dutch line traces to an early production hall in Woudsend that outgrew its space; in 1968, Anton and Hetty Meijer continued building the Friendship 23 in Balk, Friesland, which anchored the yard for the next two decades. Demand for a bigger boat than the 23 led to the Friendship 28, whose first example sold for 39,900 guilders — a very low price for the time — and which became the yard's flagship model.
Mr. and Mrs. Langbroek took over the yard in 1989 and made substantial changes to the boats' appearance; the business was formally renamed Friendship Jachtbouw B.V. the following year, and that company was declared bankrupt on December 19, 1991. Wavefront Invest B.V. acquired the yard in 1992, installing Peter Jongejans and Peter Brakenhoff as directors. The operation, trading as Waterhorst International Yachtbuilders (also known as Friendship B.V.), opened a modern facility on the Stienplaat in Makkum in June 1995, with capacity for roughly 52 boats a year — but it too eventually went bankrupt a second time. In early 1997, Jachtwerf de Slinke, founded by Mr. Visserman together with Mr. and Mrs. Heyden, bought the Friendship name and a number of its molds; under the new ownership the first "Friendship 28 Classic" was built in Slovenia. That restart ended abruptly at the end of 1998 with Heyden's death. Some time later, Van IJzendoorn Jachtbouw of Elahuizen was found to have quietly picked production back up, completing at least one Friendship 34 Comfort. In 2002, Marieholmwerf, a Lemmer-based company directed by Simon Hoekstra, bought the molds and rights to the full former range of Friendship sailboats, from 22 to 38 feet, and resumed production with the Friendship 26 — pitching the new "26 FREE," in Hoekstra's words, at a broad public on the strength of its value for money.
The designers
Design credit across the line is more varied than a single-yard story suggests. A. H. Meijer designed the original Friendship 23 in the early 1970s, of which a few hundred were built. Dick Koopmans Sr. drew the larger 28 that followed it. When the 23 began to show its age, Koos de Ridder designed its replacement, the Friendship 22; a strongly positive review in the German magazine Die Yacht helped drive 80 Friendship 22s built in a single year, and from 1978 the Meijers commissioned de Ridder for new designs of both the 22 and the 26. The Friendship 33, which came later in the model progression, was designed in 1985 by Cees van Tongeren of van der Stadt and partners. When the 33 fell short commercially, the yard turned again to de Ridder, who designed a 38-footer of which only two examples were built by the original yard, one in a stripped-down racing version.
Construction through the eras
Construction stayed close to a hand-built, solid-laminate tradition for most of the Dutch line's run: hulls were hand-laid in solid glass, with balsa-sandwich decks, on models like the 22 and 28. More recent Meijer-era hulls switched to isophthalic acid resin in the outer laminate layers to improve osmosis resistance. In the 1980s the yard also built a Friendship 25 trailer-sailer and began offering the 28 with a lengthened hull, gluing a "scoop" extension onto the existing stern rather than reworking the tooling. At the height of the original yard's growth, a total of 55 people worked in a newly built hall. Materials shifted again once production moved to Makkum: the 38-footer built there used Twaron, an aramid fiber prized for being strong and light — a different construction era from the original two-boat run built at the old yard.
Lines and generations
After the 22 and 26, the yard released new designs in a steady sequence: the 35, the 25, the 27, the 21, and the 33, spanning its core cruising sizes through the 1980s. Under Wavefront's ownership the 25 and 27 were dropped, with the 25 brought back in 1993. The Friendship 34 has a different origin: it emerged during the Makkum era from a modification of the 33's molds rather than as a clean-sheet design, built there from 1996 to 2001. The line as a whole spans the 21-foot pocket cruiser introduced in 1982 up to the 38-footer built at Makkum in 1991.
Two more boats share the name
The classic Friendship sloop is a much older and entirely separate craft: originally developed on the coast of Maine in the late 1800s as a working boat and fishing platform, it survived as a type and became recognized as an American sailing classic, according to the Friendship Sloop Society. The 30-foot boat on this page is not part of the Dutch yard's numbering at all — it is a later fiberglass reproduction of that Maine type, built by Bruno & Stillman of Newington, New Hampshire.
The Friendship 40 is a third, unrelated boat: an American daysailer designed by Ted Fontaine, intended to provide easy handling with the aesthetics of an earlier era. Its signature feature is the "Sail Stick," a joystick that raises the mainsail with a push up and retracts it into the furling boom with a push down; the same control also runs the boat's self-tacking jib on a hydraulic furling unit — a rig naval architect Robert H. Perry, reviewing the boat for SAILING magazine, singled out as its real innovation.
Who Friendship is for
Who Friendship is for depends on which boat carries the name. The Dutch line suits buyers drawn to small, solidly built European cruisers with an unusually well-documented, eventful ownership history, useful for tracing a hull to its era and builder. The Maine-type reproduction suits sailors after classic, gaff-rigged looks in a modern fiberglass hull. And the Fontaine-designed 40 suits a buyer who wants big-boat ease of handling with shorthanded, joystick-controlled sail control.
