Gozzard sailboats: a family workshop built around leaving the production line behind
Ted Gozzard spent the first decade of his boatbuilding career running a production yard, then spent the rest of it building the opposite: a small, semi-custom shop where he, and later his son, could work directly with each buyer. Gozzard Yachts, based in Goderich, Ontario, describes itself today as one of the industry's few remaining family-owned yards, with the company's executives still working alongside craftsmen on the shop floor and personally involved in every boat built. That closeness between designer, builder, and owner - inherited from Ted, carried forward by his son Michael - runs through a range that never grew very large.
Origins and ownership
Ted and Haydn Gozzard, brothers, founded Bayfield Boat Yard in Ontario, Canada, in 1970. The yard's production line could turn out about one boat a week, and by the time Ted moved on - the company's own account and outside coverage differ on the exact year, placing his departure anywhere from the late 1970s to 1981 - Bayfield had delivered more than 1,500 full-keel cruisers from 25 to 40 feet. Ted then founded his own yard, North Castle Marine Ltd. and Gozzard Yachts, in Goderich, Ontario, in the early 1980s (again, sources differ on the precise year), to build semi-custom boats and, in the company's words, design and build for individual customers rather than on a production line. Ted Gozzard died at home on May 15, 2014, at age 80; Gozzard Yachts describes itself as now on its third generation of the family, continuing to build custom and semi-custom boats.
The designers
Born in England, Ted Gozzard arrived in Canada in the 1960s and found work as a carpenter's apprentice before turning to boat design - his first design was, unexpectedly, a trimaran, before he settled into the traditional-looking monohulls the Gozzard name became known for. He designed his last standard V-berth in 1973, favoring flexible spaces that could double as sitting areas and sleeping quarters instead. By the mid-1980s Ted had adopted the "Brewer Bit," a modified keel and rudder concept originated by naval architect Ted Brewer, in place of the yard's earlier full keels. His son Michael eventually took over at the helm of Gozzard Yachts, updating the company's flagship and creating the Gozzard 44 Mk2 bluewater passagemaker.
Construction through the eras
Nearly all Gozzard boats carried traditional full keels before 1980; the design then shifted to the modified fin keel with the Brewer Bit and a skeg-hung rudder. In 1985, per Michael Gozzard, the yard introduced its hard windshield, designed to let the helmsman see straight over the top of the boat. Core material varied by design rather than following one formula across the range: the Gozzard 36, built between 1984 and 1998, used a balsa-cored hull except around through-hull fittings, while the Gozzard 31, introduced in 1990, used a foam core inside a vacuum-bagged sandwich of knitted double-bias E-glass. Hull and deck have been joined with 3M 5200 adhesive and 5/16-inch stainless-steel bolts on 6-inch centers. When the flagship 44 was redesigned into the Mk2 in 2001, draft grew from 5 feet 3 inches to 5 feet 6 inches and four feet were added to the mast height; Michael Gozzard said the update also brought in Corecell and more composites in place of wood, improving pointing ability, righting moment, and directional stability.
Lines and generations
Before founding Gozzard Yachts, Ted had already designed Bayfield's own full-keel line, the 23, 25, 29, and 32. The Gozzard 36 was the first sailboat built under the new Gozzard Yachts name, launched in 1984 and produced for fourteen years; the 31, 37, 41, and 44 followed as the semi-custom range grew, with the 44 later split into Mk1 and Mk2 generations. Gozzard built just 20 examples of the 31.
Who Gozzard is for
Gozzard's story is one of scale kept deliberately small: a builder that traded a production line delivering more than 1,500 boats for a family workshop turning out a fraction of that number, one owner at a time. Buyers drawn to traditional full-keel or Brewer Bit-keeled cruising lines, semi-custom interiors, and a yard where the people who design the boats still work alongside the people building them are the ones Gozzard has built for since Ted left Bayfield.
