Hobie sailboats: from a Laguna Beach surfboard shop to a beach-catamaran empire
Hobie's sailboat business grew directly out of surfing. Hobie Alter began shaping wooden surfboards in his parents' garage in Laguna Beach in 1950, opened Southern California's first surf shop in Dana Point, and in 1958 worked with Gordon "Grubby" Clark to invent the polyurethane foam surfboard. By the late 1960s Alter had turned that same restless experimentation toward the water in a different way, developing a prototype for a lightweight, easy-to-sail catamaran based on the twin-hulled Polynesian design — the boat that would eventually carry his name across an entire category of sailing.
Origins and ownership
Alter and Art Hendrickson each staked a modest sum to start the catamaran venture, working out of a Quonset hut near Capistrano Beach, with Hendrickson running the business side and Alter running manufacturing. The venture traded first as Coast Catamaran, formed in 1967, and Alter started the Hobie Cat Company itself in 1968. The company began trading on the National over-the-counter market in 1971, with Alter and Hendrickson each retaining a 26 percent stake — a move Alter later called one of his biggest mistakes. In December 1975 the Coleman Company agreed to buy the worldwide company, and the deal, Coleman's third attempt, closed in 1976. Coleman expanded the operation to Oceanside, California in 1979; the San Juan Capistrano mold facility closed in 1987, consolidating production wholly in Oceanside. Coleman also bought Vagabond Sailboats in 1982, folding it in as a Coast Catamaran division under former Vagabond president Ron Holder. In January 1989, Tony Wilson purchased the company from Coleman and renamed it back to Hobie Cat Company, and the business split into separately owned U.S. and European entities. The private ownership group that bought Hobie Cat Company in 1995 still owned it when, effective September 2012, Hobie Cat Company acquired Hobie Cat's business in Europe outright, gaining worldwide trademark rights; Hobie Cat Australasia had already been a company subsidiary for the preceding twelve years. A private equity group led by Taso Sofikitis, drawing on executives from the Detroit industrial auction company Maynards Industries, bought Hobie Cat Co. on January 25, 2021. Most recently, Bass Pro Shops and White River Marine Group acquired Hobie on September 24, 2025, with plans to return production and jobs from Mexico to Lebanon, Missouri.
The designers
Hobie Alter designed the boats that built the brand, and Bass Pro Shops later credited him with more than 20 patents covering watercraft-design innovations. By 1969, sailors were asking Alter for something bigger than the 14, and Phil Edwards — recently returned from Hawaii — joined the project; the result was the Hobie 16. More than a decade later, in 1980, Alter turned to monohulls himself, spearheading the design of the Hobie 33 during the final months of his boatbuilding career. Away from the beach-cat lineup, brothers Dan and Greg Ketterman spent more than a decade developing the hydrofoil TriFoiler, building five prototypes and four production prototypes before Hobie put the design into series production.
Construction through the eras
The earliest beach cats, the 14 and 16, were built with fiberglass/foam-sandwich hulls, a method Hobie carried into the Hobie 33's monohull construction as well, where Alter recalled hulls laid up with alternating layers of fiberglass around three-quarter-inch urethane foam coring. Hobie later shifted much of its recreational-cat range to rotomolded polyethylene construction, which the company describes as nearly indestructible on models like the Wave and Getaway.
Lines and generations
The 14 and 16 anchor the brand's identity as a beach-catamaran maker: the 14, created in 1968, is credited as the first sports catamaran ever invented, and the 16 that followed became one of the most-produced sailboats in the category's history, with Hobie itself citing more than 100,000 built and the American Sailing Association putting the count past 135,000. The 18 extended the lineup in 1977 with symmetrical hulls and daggerboards, gaining an ISAF international class designation in 1990 before Hobie ended its production in any configuration in 2004. Rotomolded models like the Wave and Getaway, along with smaller entries such as the Bravo, later broadened the range with impact-resistant, single-piece polyethylene hulls aimed at family sailing. Outside the beach-cat family, Hobie built the 33 as a trailerable monohull racer through the 1980s and, separately, pursued sailing speed itself through the TriFoiler hydrofoil trimaran.
Who Hobie is for
Hobie built its name on boats meant to be trailered, rigged on a beach, and sailed without a marina slip or a large crew — a formula that made the 14 and 16 fixtures of casual and club sailing alike. That same restlessness produced outliers along the way: a road-legal trailerable monohull racer in the Hobie 33, and a hydrofoil trimaran built to chase a sailing speed record. Buyers drawn to simple, durable, easily transported boats, rather than marina-based cruising, sit at the center of what Hobie has built.
