Haber sailboats: a Polish yard built around shoal draft and self-steering centerboards
Haber Yachts is a small Polish boatbuilder from the Iława lake district, founded in the early 1990s as Yacht Service by Janusz Konkol before taking the Haber name. The company's earliest boats leaned on another builder's design, but Konkol soon began drawing hulls himself, and the marque's identity settled around a distinctive engineering idea: a family of shoal-draft, low-aspect-rig sailboats meant for lakes, canals, and open water alike, several of them fitted with a four-centerboard self-steering system Konkol devised after a near-miss on the water. Alongside its own sailboat line, the yard also built rigging for the passenger sailing ship Royal Clipper — Forsal.pl once called it the world's largest five-masted sailing ship — and, for more than a decade, built powerboats under contract for a Massachusetts company. Practical Boat Owner and Professional BoatBuilder have both examined Haber's construction and handling in detail, giving the yard a documented record beyond its own marketing.
Origins and ownership
Around 1990–91, Konkol founded Yacht Service together with a partner, Tadeusz Świst, according to a profile in the Polish sailing magazine Wiatr; the business was later renamed Haber Yachts, the same company continuing under a new name rather than a new owner. Forsal.pl dates the founding to 1990 and describes the company's earliest work as outfitting the already-popular Haber 555, a design built by another boatbuilder, Henryk Brylski — Yacht Service's own hull designs came after that start. The Konkol–Świst partnership did not last: Wiatr reports the two split, with Świst going on to run the Przystań Skarbek marina on Lake Jeziorak. As the company grew, it relocated to Nowe Miasto Lubawskie, about 24 kilometers from Iława, where it rented larger production halls. The company operates under the legal name HABER YACHTS sp. z o.o., headquartered in Nowe Miasto Lubawskie.
The designers
Henryk Brylski designed the Haber 555, the yacht that started the company, and later collaborated with Konkol on the Haber 580, a version fitted with an outboard-motor well; the yard built 15 of them. Beyond that partnership, Konkol became the yard's own designer and a hands-on builder-craftsman. His first independent design, the nine-meter centerboard ocean yacht Absolwent 900, was — per Forsal.pl — the first boat built under the Yacht Service name: a self-steering wooden yacht built with what the paper called innovative technology, constructed from scratch under the supervision of the Polish Register of Shipping. Konkol later recalled sailing the Absolwent 900 on a broad-reach course for two hours in a force-9 Beaufort gale without touching the helm, a story that speaks to the self-steering ambitions that would define his later designs.
Konkol's design work also extended beyond sailboats. He built aluminum yardarms fitted with an internally furling sail system for the frigate Gwarek, designed by Zygmunt Choreń — a project a Swedish shipowner later bought, rebuilt, and renamed the passenger cruise ship Royal Clipper, for which the yard also built two ten-meter aluminum tenders to ferry passengers ashore. Forsal.pl calls the Royal Clipper rigging work, which came in the late 1990s, a breakthrough moment for the young company; Konkol has said he was the first builder in the world to make yardarms with an internally furling sail system.
Construction through the eras
After the 555 and 580, the line grew through the Haber 660, which Forsal.pl describes as remaining the company's most popular model years later; it is built in several versions — sloop, cutter, motor-displacement launch, and a four-centerboard C4 self-steering variant. The line continued with the Haber 700MSD and 700MPL, then the Haber 800, the first model to use the C4 system. At the upper end, the Haber 34C4 was built using traditional one-off boatbuilding technology rather than the molds used in series production.
Professional BoatBuilder describes Haber's hull construction as polyester resin with hand-laid reinforcements — principally mat and woven roving — built in a computerized, humidity- and temperature-controlled shop; foam core appears in some areas, though the hulls are largely solid laminate. Hulls stay in the mold a minimum of four days at a minimum of 64°F (18°C), and finished boats are tested in a water tank for watertightness and systems function; solid glass stringers are tabbed into the powerboat hulls the yard also builds. That powerboat work included a long-running contract: for more than 14 years, Haber built boats for RothBilt Boats of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, under plant manager Piotr Wilk, and a 2014 profile put the yard's staff at about 50 people.
Lines and generations
Konkol traced the idea behind Haber's signature self-steering system to a tense afternoon on the water: sailing with a companion who had little experience, the wind came up while Konkol went forward to drop the jib, and his companion couldn't hold a course. The result was a four-centerboard concept — C4, for the four centerboards fitted to each model — built into three self-steering designs: the 660C4 (21'7"), the 800C4 (26'/7.93m), and the 34C4 (34'1"/10.4m). On the 800C4, the pilothouse's design keeps the boat from becoming stable upside down, giving it no angle of vanishing stability. The British magazine Practical Boat Owner, in its May 2009 issue, published a detailed analysis of the 800C4's handling with its four boards, finding that a sailor can tack simply by lifting the stern centerboard — moving the center of lateral resistance forward so the boat rounds up and through the wind without further input.
Who Haber is for
Every Haber sailboat model shares a shoal-draft, low-aspect Huari or gunter rig with the mast stepped on a tabernacle, a configuration built around Konkol's stated aim: boats suited to a wide range of service, from open ocean to lakes and canals, and easy enough to trail by road between them. By a 2011 count reported by Forsal.pl, Konkol had sold roughly 700 boats of his own design. That combination — shallow-water reach, road transport, and, on the C4 models, the ability to hold a course without a hand on the helm — points Haber toward sailors who value versatility across different kinds of water over outright speed, and who are drawn to a yard defined by one designer's engineering rather than a large production catalog.