Gulfstar sailboats: from budget motorsailer hulls to a self-made yard's Golden Era
Gulfstar traces to one man's second act in fiberglass: Vince Lazzara, who had already helped build Columbia Yachts into the world's biggest sailboat builder of its day, opened his own Tampa yard in 1970. The early boats leaned hard on low price and interior space over build quality, a start Practical Sailor describes bluntly; a mid-1970s push toward better materials and outside design talent changed that trajectory, producing a flagship in the Gulfstar 50 and, by many accounts, a 1980s Golden Era before the company folded into the powerboat builder Viking Yachts.
Origins and ownership
Lazzara's path into boatbuilding ran through fiberglass long before Gulfstar existed. In the early 1950s he helped make a success of Aeromarine, one of the very first fiberglass boatbuilders. Before turning to shipbuilding full time, he launched the Chicago-based Casting Engineers, supplying the aircraft industry and boat manufacturers; one customer was Fred Coleman, a California manufacturer said to have produced the first fiberglass auxiliary sailboat, and Lazzara bought stock in Coleman's company, joining, by his own account, after it had already completed 80 percent of the engineering and development but before the first boat was finished, despite friends telling him fiberglass wouldn't last. He was also involved in constructing the Rhodes-designed Bounty II, one of the first fiberglass yachts.
Accounts differ on exactly how Columbia Yachts began: Professional BoatBuilder credits brothers Dick and Rob Valdes's company, Glas Laminates, with becoming Columbia when the Valdeses brought in Lazzara as a partner and investor, while Practical Sailor credits Lazzara as the company's founder and part owner starting in 1962. Either way, Lazzara served primarily as Columbia's designer and marketer, and with Rob Valdes he helped grow it into the world's largest sailboat builder — the Columbia 26, a Bill Tripp design, sold 950 copies. Columbia was sold to the Whittaker Corp. in 1967, after which Lazzara satisfied a three-year non-compete building fiberglass houseboats under the name Sea Rover; once it expired, he sold Sea Rover and established Gulfstar Yachts in Tampa in 1970, joining a wave of builders — including Morgan, Irwin, Hunter, and Endeavor — that made Florida a center of American sailboat building that decade. Rob Valdes briefly worked at the new Gulfstar facility before leaving to co-found Endeavour Yachts.
Gulfstar's end as an independent sailboat builder unfolded in stages that sources date differently. Good Old Boat places the close of sailboat production and a Viking Yachts merger around 1987, the year Lazzara retired. The Tampa Bay Times instead dates Viking's move to 1988, when the New Jersey company acquired a controlling interest and formed a joint venture, Viking Gulfstar, with facilities in St. Petersburg and New Jersey. Practical Sailor describes years of merger talks before Gulfstar was finally sold to Viking in 1990. Lazzara's sons Richard and Brad went on from there to found Lazzara Yachts, a mega-yacht builder still based in the Tampa Bay area.
The designers
Much of Gulfstar's range came out of the yard's own design work, but the mid-1970s push upmarket pulled in outside talent: Lazzara contracted Ted Hood, the noted sailmaker and designer, for the Gulfstar 40 and 48 performance sailboats — a pairing credited with dramatically improving quality and expanding the line into motorsailers. In-house design passed partly to the next generation in the mid-1980s, when sons Richard and Brad Lazzara joined the company; though both tended toward powerboats, Richard taught himself yacht design, drew the lines of the Gulfstar 39 Sailmaster himself, and took on some of the broader design work besides.
Construction through the eras
Practical Sailor's account of Gulfstar's earliest years is blunt. Lazzara's first boats, 36- and 53-footers on identical hulls sold either as motorsailers or, with a different deck mold and larger engine, as trawlers, were assembled to save money wherever possible — Formica interiors, iron ballast in a concrete slurry, unsealed balsa-cored deck edges, and no backing plates behind deck hardware. A former yard hand told the magazine that workers cut holes in decks and left unfinished hulls out in the rain, and one contemporary critic called the workmanship close to criminal, a reputation Practical Sailor says has followed the marque since.
From the mid-1970s, Lazzara began upgrading materials: lead ballast replaced iron, teak replaced Formica, and within a few years Gulfstar's interiors matched the best production sailboats built in the country, per Practical Sailor. The change coincided with the mid-1970s oil embargo, when resin was expensive and scarce; Lazzara pushed the glass-to-resin ratio to 50 percent, a practice Practical Sailor says was unheard of and criticized at the time but is now standard. Even so, the magazine reports many Gulfstars from this era still suffered fiberglassing problems, particularly blistering, into the early 1980s, after which workmanship matched any other production builder in the country. Layup methods evolved too: early hulls used a chopper gun, later abandoned for standard hand-laid roving and mat, and the company held a patent for a process that cambered the corners of its interior woodwork.
Lines and generations
The Sailmaster name marked the shoal-draft, beamy descendants of Gulfstar's original motorsailer-and-trawler concept, a line that continued even after the mid-1970s shift upmarket. The Gulfstar 50, introduced in 1975, became the most notable expression of that shift — Wave Train calls it the best boat Gulfstar ever built and also its most popular, with 172 hulls launched over a six-year run that ended in 1980. The 39 Sailmaster, drawn in-house by Richard Lazzara and built in 60 hulls from 1981 to 1984, carried the family's own design work into the 1980s. By many accounts the high point of the range was the 54 Sail Cruiser, whose joinery, design, and construction Practical Sailor describes as the opposite of Gulfstar's early days; the magazine regards the early and mid-1980s as the company's Golden Era. In its final years the yard built mostly larger motor yachts, though it still produced some sailboats — including boats for the CSY charter fleet under the 50, 45 Hirsch, and 42 designations — before the Viking merger closed out sailboat production.
Who Gulfstar is for
Gulfstar suits buyers drawn to older American production cruisers built for interior volume over outright performance — the shoal-draft, beamy DNA of the Sailmaster line runs through much of the range. It's less suited to buyers wanting one consistent quality standard across the badge: an early-1970s hull and a Golden Era 1980s hull came off very different production lines, and Practical Sailor's blunt account of that early workmanship is worth weighing against whichever era a given boat was built in.
