Hanseat sailboats: one Elbe shipyard's line, not a company
Hanseat is not itself a boatbuilder's name -- it's the brand under which Asmus KG Yachtbau, a small shipyard in Glückstadt on the Elbe, built sailboats from the early 1960s through the yard's wind-down roughly two decades later. Master carpenter Willy Asmus put the first Hanseat together himself, launching a line that would run to sixteen types before the yard that built them closed for good.
Origins and ownership
Willy Asmus completed the first Hanseat in 1963, after three years of construction; it drew on his own self-built 30-foot dinghy cruiser, a boat he had already raced successfully on the Elbe. Of the first five Hanseats built, two went to Asmus's brothers and two to friends who had helped him build them -- an early run that would eventually be followed by hundreds more boats. Series production began, according to the shipyard's own account, after Max Wilckens persuaded Asmus to build boats commercially and promised to buy the first one; that boat, named Odilia, went to the Wilckens family. Asmus formally founded Asmus KG Yachtbau in 1965, and the yard went on to become one of the first in Germany to build in series-produced GRP. At its peak, the yard employed nearly 100 people and was, at times, one of the largest training centers in the region. YACHT's retrospective on the marque credits Asmus with leading the way in German GRP boatbuilding, noting that yards such as Dehler, Bavaria, and Esslinger and Abt only came to market with yachts of this size after him.
The yard's end is harder to pin down than its beginning. YACHT's account describes an insolvency in 1985, but in the same article former master boat builder Hans Hinrich Westphal recalled switching off the lights himself in 1989, after which some negative molds went to Denmark; the shipyard's own private archive instead dates the bankruptcy to 1990 -- so the yard closed sometime in the late 1980s, without a single agreed year. A little over a decade later, Willy Asmus's son Heiner Asmus -- joined by Westphal and a team of former Asmus-Werft employees -- founded a service-only successor, formalized in 1999 as HANSEAT Yacht-Service GmbH, to maintain existing boats rather than build new ones. Westphal retired in 2009, and Heiner Asmus died in 2013, thirteen years after his father's death -- an event YACHT called the end of the Hanseatic era. The Glückstadt yacht shipyard took over the old Asmus site in 1992. In 2004, the small Danish yard ABC-Selbstbauboote, run by two German owners, acquired the original hull molds and began offering them under the name Hangard; only the old Hanseat keel dinghy reached series production there, as the Hangard-Classik 20. That same keel dinghy design was separately picked up by Deger Germany Yachtbau GmbH of Fahrdorf on the Schlei, completed there under the name Scangaard 20 Classic -- so the Hanseat lineage survives under names that have nothing to do with Hanseat itself.
The designers
Most Hanseat designs came from Willy Asmus's own hand; his daughter, Margit Ziegler, has described him as constantly designing new things. A handful of models came from outside designers instead: American Doug Peterson drew the Hanseat 40, and the "Pinguin," launched in 1977 and built until 1985, came from Carsten Wagner. The Hanseat 33 (1979-1981, only six built) is a further exception worth noting on its own: it was designed not by Asmus but by Danish naval architect Kristian Rode, while Rode was working at Søholm bådebyggeri in Broager, Denmark -- confirmed by Danish public archive records, which also credit Rode with two Granada-brand designs from the same yard, the Granada 375 and Granada 35.
Construction through the eras
Asmus built his earliest GRP boats by hand in a workshop just a few hundred meters from the water in Glückstadt. Former master boat builder Hans Hinrich Westphal said that while other yards worked with simple fiberglass mats or sprayed resin, Asmus's yard used roving fabric instead -- parallel bundles of fiber that carry loads especially well -- rolled, compacted, and annealed entirely by hand, which Westphal credited with making the laminate unusually strong for its thickness. The Hanseat 70 series shows how the line evolved over time: built and refined from 1970 to 1981 across four variants -- the base 70, recognizable by its wooden foot rail, plus the 70B, 70 MKIII, and 70BII -- the clearest change across the series was the skeg, cast in solid iron on the earliest boats and dropped entirely by the later types. The one-off Hanseat 33 Racing variant took a different approach altogether, built with a 7/8 rig instead of the standard top rig and an aluminum tube frame in the salon rather than a normal interior, both to save weight for competition.
Lines and generations
The Hanseat range ran to sixteen types, from the ten-foot Junior up to the slip-rigged 35 MS and the 42-footer, totaling 378 units built. Nearly 200 of those were 70-series boats, the line's clear standout. Six Type 70B boats went on to serve the German Navy, reported Frigate Captain Michael Hufnagel, head of seamanship at the Mürwik Naval School -- cadets trained their first seamanship skills aboard them for almost 40 years, and Hufnagel said the boats still held up well after four decades of intensive use. Individual 70s built reputations of their own: in 1978, Günter Milowsky sailed his Hanseat 70 "Pommern" singlehanded across the North Atlantic in 22 days, and another 70, "Gegenwind," survived a collision with a reef during a ten-year circumnavigation -- losing ten centimeters off its keel heel and picking up hull scratches, but never taking on water. The rare Hanseat 33 forms its own small line apart from the rest, its lone racing sibling built only once; the first 33, named "Da sind wir," carried its owners Ulla and Joachim Michels around the world from 1989 to 1993.
Who Hanseat is for
Hanseat suits buyers drawn to an early, hand-built chapter of German fiberglass boatbuilding rather than an active, ongoing marque -- everything from the smallest Junior dinghy to the durable 70 series and the rare, Danish-designed 33 came out of one Elbe shipyard that closed decades ago. The line's molds live on only under other names, at other yards, which makes any Hanseat on the water a piece of a specific, closed chapter rather than part of an ongoing model range.