Hughes sailboats: one Canadian hull line, five company names
Hughes sailboats trace to a single Canadian yard that spent nearly three decades changing hands and changing names while a core design lineage carried through underneath. Brothers Howard and Peter Hughes started building small dinghies in Toronto in the early 1960s; by the time the operation closed for good in 1991, it had passed through U.S. Steel ownership as Northstar Yachts, a Hughes family repurchase, a merger with a bankrupt California builder as Hughes-Columbia, a takeover by Aura Yachts, and one final Hughes-family rescue. At its peak the company was Canada's largest sailboat manufacturer, and it built roughly 3,500 boats in all — but the badge on any given hull depends heavily on which of those five eras produced it.
Origins and ownership
Howard Hughes — the Canadian boatbuilder, not the American aviator — was born in Liverpool, England, in 1933 and immigrated to Canada in 1960 with his brother Peter, sailing on the RMS Sylvania. The brothers and their wives settled in Toronto and began building small sailboats together, an operation that grew into Hughes Boat Works, founded in 1963 in Willowdale, Ontario, and formally incorporated on February 23, 1967, as Ontario Corporation #200854. In 1969, U.S. Steel bought the company, and both brothers initially stayed on; U.S. Steel renamed the operation Northstar Yachts in the early 1970s, and Howard and Peter left in 1971. Northstar disappeared from the marketplace in 1975, and in 1977 Howard Hughes bought back the defunct company's assets and renamed it Hughes Boatworks, Inc., selling off the Northstar-era racing tooling to refocus on family cruisers. In 1979, Hughes bought the bankrupt Columbia Yacht Corporation of Costa Mesa, California, and by 1980 had consolidated production at the Huron Park factory in Centralia, Ontario, under the name Hughes-Columbia; by 1981 the combined company was Canada's second-largest boat manufacturer, behind only C&C. Hughes-Columbia went into receivership in 1982, and Aura Yachts took over the Columbia side of the business; in 1986, Howard Hughes and several partners repurchased the assets after Aura's failure and mainly produced custom Hughes 40s at plants in Orangeville. In 1991, a catastrophic factory fire combined with a fraudulent insurer, Firestone Insurance, closed the plant for good, leaving the company without compensation. For several years Hughes had been the largest sailboat manufacturer in Canada, employing 250 to 300 staff at its peak and building an estimated 3,500 boats in total.
The designers
Sparkman & Stephens was Hughes' constant outside design partner across most of its history. The firm was approached in 1966 for what became the Hughes 38, and Howard Hughes later recalled working "very closely with S&S for many years," crediting personal input from both Olin J. Stephens and Rod Stephens; he also recalled that Olin died in 2008 at 100 years old, with Rod having died a few years earlier in his late nineties. Howard designed the Hughes 27 himself in 1965-66. Under U.S. Steel's Northstar ownership, S&S drew most of the line, including a commission for six boats from 25 to 36 feet, one of which — design #2098-6c — was marketed as the Northstar 1000; Bruce Farr separately designed the North Star 727 during that same period. When Howard Hughes reacquired the company in 1977, S&S objected, since it could no longer collect royalties once the prior builder had gone bankrupt. The Hughes-Columbia era brought in new names: William Tripp Sr. designed the Hughes-Columbia 36, and Tripp Sr. and Alan Payne together contributed designs across seven new models and five reworked S&S designs marketed under the Hughes-Columbia name.
Construction through the eras
Hughes built to Lloyd's of London specifications throughout its history. The yard occasionally supplied bare hulls to other builders rather than complete boats: Hughes 38 hulls went to Hinckley Yachts, which finished its own deck and interior and sold the result as the Hinckley 38, and Hughes 40 hulls went to Tartan Yachts on the same arrangement; the Hughes 48 was originally designed for Seafarer, which proved unable to continue production of it. Later in the company's life, the Hughes 35 was also built under license in Great Britain by South Hants Engineering, marketed there as the S.H.E. 36. The Hughes-Columbia 31 — a continuation of the same hull lineage as the Hughes 31 — had both hull and deck laid up as solid, hand-laid fiberglass, and for a time it was widely marketed as a kit boat for amateur completion.
Lines and generations
The company's earliest products were 8-to-16-foot dinghies, including El Toro and 505 classes, before the line grew quickly: by 1968 it spanned auxiliary sailboats from 22 to 48 feet. The Northstar 1000 hull proved unusually durable across the company's name changes — after the 1977 repurchase, Howard Hughes modified it into the Hughes 31 by rolling out the hull sides and stretching the transom, and the yard built upwards of 250 of them, in kit or factory-complete form, before the 1982 receivership; one variant, the SE, grew out of a Port Credit dealer's own custom-outfitted boat, with interior design by Kathie Tait. That same hull continued into the Hughes-Columbia era as the Hughes-Columbia 31, which stayed in production until 1982. The Hughes-Columbia range otherwise comprised seven new models plus five reworked Sparkman & Stephens designs, including the Tripp Sr.-designed Hughes-Columbia 36, while the Hughes 35 outlasted the company itself, continuing under Aura Yachts after the 1982 breakup.
Who Hughes is for
A Hughes buyer is really buying into one Canadian hull-building tradition wearing several different badges, so the era and company name behind a given boat say as much as the model number. The Sparkman & Stephens relationship gives much of the range a pedigreed design lineage, from the Hughes 38 through the Northstar-era boats to the reworked designs of the Hughes-Columbia years, while boats like the Hughes 31 and its Hughes-Columbia 31 descendant show a builder that kept refining and repackaging the same hull across repeated ownership upheavals rather than starting over each time.
