Hans Christian sailboats: teak-heavy double-enders born from a Taiwan design dispute
Hans Christian is the name John Edwards put on a line of traditional, double-ended bluewater cruisers built at contract yards in Taiwan and, later, Thailand -- thick, hand-laid fiberglass hulls under heavy exterior teak, aimed at offshore passagemaking rather than performance sailing. That identity survived a founding dispute contentious enough to produce a rival design, the Tayana 37, and to leave the same hull selling under four different names.
Origins and ownership
Hans Christian Yachts got its start in the 1970s when Edwards, a former Long Beach, California high school teacher, approached naval architect Robert Perry about building quality yachts economically in Taiwan; the two had already worked together on an earlier Taiwan-built boat, the CT 54. Under Edwards' arrangement he owned the designs and controlled distributorship, while an outfit called Union oversaw construction and effectively owned the tooling -- a split that proved combustible. After a mid-1970s falling-out with the Union Ship Co. sent Edwards to another Taiwan yard, Union kept the molds and kept building and selling the boat on its own. Edwards eventually sued after Union lightened the hull's scantlings and reverted to using the Hans Christian name outright, a lawsuit that ended the dispute. Hans Christian later parted ways with the Hansa yard, which had taken over the production line, and presumably dropped "German-built" claims from its advertising afterward; SpinSheet's review of the 33 similarly found that some early advertising falsely credited construction to a "master German craftsman" named Herbert Ernst Guttler. Production continued at several more Taiwan yards, including Horng Bin, Shing Fa, and King Dragon, before the company relocated to Thailand in 1989. Edwards left the business, and new ownership took over in early 1993 from his former partner, Geoffrey White. By the mid-2010s the company had settled into two distributorships -- one led by Jerry Finefrock in Annapolis, one in Europe -- feeding a single plant in Bangsaray, Thailand, with roughly 1,100 Hans Christians estimated to be sailing the world's oceans by that point; the brand persists through a preservation site and an active owners' association.
The designers
Robert Perry drew the hull, keel, and rig for what became the Hans Christian 34. Before the first one reached the water, he learned the company had enlarged his design into a 36-footer without paying him royalties -- a decision he says he retaliated against by designing the Tayana 37, which became a rival flagship in its own right. Union later asked Perry to lend his name to the 36-footer in exchange for royalties, and the two sides settled on crediting the boat as "based on a hull by Bob Perry," true only to the extent it was a knockoff of his 34; Perry still calls the Union 36 "a bastard child of mine." The house designer credited for subsequent models such as the 33 and the 41 was listed as Harwood S. Ives of Cruising Design in Winterport, Maine, generally credited with shaping the brand's heavy-displacement bluewater cutters -- though Ives himself is something of a mystery. Perry has said he tried and failed to track the man down and doubts his existence, and Hans Christian's own president, Jerry Finefrock, said he understood Ives to be English but couldn't locate him either. Later designs carried other names: the Christina 43 is credited to Scott Sprague, who also provided design assistance on a reworked keel for the 38 Traditional.
Construction through the eras
Early boats were built with thick, solid hand-laid fiberglass hulls and decks assembled as a sandwich of 5/8-inch teak planks over 3/8-inch fiberglass, 3/4-inch plywood, and another 3/8-inch fiberglass layer -- heavy, labor-intensive construction the company at one point planned to move away from in favor of lighter Divinycell foam-cored hulls. Later production, once centered on the Bangsaray, Thailand plant, added air-conditioned lay-up facilities, a quality-control program directed by Michael Kaufman of Annapolis, and certification to ABS standards.
Lines and generations
The 36-foot hull that emerged from the Perry dispute did not stay under one name. Union, and the brokers who sold on its behalf, applied the Hans Christian 36, Mariner Polaris 36, Union 36, and EO 36 labels to what Perry says is the same boat, and a related Mao Ta 36, built by yet another yard, stands as a variation on that hull. That traditional, double-ended line ran from the 33 -- roughly 165 to 168 built before production stopped in 1988 -- through the 34, 36, 38 Traditional, 41, and up to the 48. Alongside it, Hans Christian also built the more modern Christina series, where the Christina 43 moved away from the full keel toward a fin-keel-with-skeg configuration. Production of the traditional range ended for good in February 2017, when Thai builder Pantawee Marine, which had taken over Hans Christian construction, discontinued it to make way for catamarans.
Who Hans Christian is for
Hans Christian suits buyers set on a traditional, double-ended bluewater cutter and prepared to live with the teak that defines it -- decks, cockpit, and cabin trunk roof all finished in the wood that gives the brand its look and its upkeep reputation. Despite its tangled corporate history, Edwards had, in Perry's own words, "a good eye for a boat," and went on to create a number of commercially successful models built around that same traditional, passagemaking identity.
