Heard sailboats: a Cornish working-boat lineage passed hand to hand
Heard sailboats come out of Gaffers & Luggers, a small boatyard on Mylor Creek near Falmouth, Cornwall, where three generations of one family have built hand-laid GRP versions of the traditional Falmouth working boat — chiefly the Heard 28 — since the early-to-mid 1960s. The Heard name has never belonged to a company in the ordinary sense so much as to a family: founder Terry Heard, his son Martin, and grandson Sam have each, in turn, kept the same working-boat form in production on the same stretch of creek, even as the yard itself split apart and had to be rebuilt around them.
Origins and ownership
Terry Heard established the company on the shores of Mylor Creek in the early-to-mid 1960s, initially building oyster-dredging boats in timber — the traditional Falmouth working boat, a sail-and-oar-only design whose restriction on engine power traces back to an 1868 Truro Corporation byelaw protecting the Fal estuary's oyster beds. The first GRP working boat Terry produced was built for himself and named Melorus. His son Martin took her over after leaving school and used her for oyster dredging before selling her to put a deposit down on a house; renamed Rita, she stayed on the water under new owners. Martin later took over running the yard from his father, and together the two of them went on to build hundreds of traditional GRP boats. In 2009 Martin died suddenly while negotiating the handover of the yard's main, leased site to Dave Cockwell, whose company Cockwells took over that ground; well over 1,000 people attended a gathering in Mylor that August, and his ashes were scattered by his mother Thelma into the creek overlooking the yard and the road where he was born. Martin's son Sam — then a professional rugby player with the Cornish Pirates, having earlier apprenticed as a boatbuilder at C Toms & Son in Fowey — took responsibility for his father's former employees once the Cockwells negotiations concluded, and set up his own operation on the smaller parcel of land the family had kept. He has since built a new shed and slipway, reclaimed land, bought a boat hoist, and added further ground nearby.
The designers
The Heard 28's hull form did not originate with the family: Cornish designer Percy Dalton drew the lines for the Falmouth working boat class itself, part of a mid-20th-century effort by designers and builders — Dalton among them, working alongside Terry Heard at Mylor Bridge — to render the traditional working-boat form in modern materials without abandoning its shape. Terry Heard's yard took its GRP mould directly off St Melorus, a timber-built working boat to Dalton's design, and used it to produce the 28-footer that carried the family's name forward.
Construction through the eras
The Heard 28's construction changed across its production run. Early hulls carried a 2-tonne iron keel bolted to the outside of the hull; the mould was later modified so the keel could be encapsulated within the GRP moulding instead. Subsequent revisions added a water tank in the bilges and self-draining cockpits on the cruising versions, along with more freeboard on later boats. Beyond the 28, Terry and Martin built hundreds of traditional GRP boats in other Cornish working types, including Toshers and Picarooners, alongside roughly 200 of the Falmouth working boats themselves.
Lines and generations
Heard's range centers on the 28 — in production from 1968 to 2008 — alongside the smaller Tosher 20, introduced in 1988 and named for the Cornish tosher type the family also built in GRP. Sam kept all of Gaffers & Luggers' original moulds after 2009, and by 2015 had returned to lay-ups, refits, and new builds, including two 25-foot working boats. Building continued afterward: by 2025, the year Classic Boat marked Sam's completion of the 100th Heard 28 — built in memory of his father — his crew included two boatbuilders who had trained under Martin, and the yard had taken on an order for a 40-foot Cygnus fishing boat for a Mevagissey fisherman.
Who Heard is for
A Heard suits a buyer drawn to a genuinely traditional Cornish hull with a living class community behind it, not a static production yacht. The Falmouth Working Boat Association, formed by the class's owners in the late winter or early spring of 1978/79 to act as the type's governing body, gave the class an organized community, and Rita — the former Melorus, sold decades earlier by Martin Heard — was noted still racing competitively in Classic Boat's 2025 feature. That continuity runs through the builder as much as the boats: the family that founded the yard in Cornwall in the early-to-mid 1960s was still hand-building working boats there when Sam completed the 100th Heard 28 in 2025.