Leisure sailboats: a trailer-sailer line built to be towed, not berthed
Leisure is a range of small British cruising sailboats built around the trailer-sailer idea: pocket cruisers light and compact enough to trail behind a car rather than leave in a marina berth. The line ran from a 1967 London Boat Show debut through three successive builders and, after a fire destroyed the original company's paperwork, a licensed continuation built on the European mainland - one of the more tangled corporate histories in British small-boat building.
Origins and ownership
The first Leisure yachts were built at Stansted in Essex by Cobramold Ltd. Managing director and company founder Brian Meerloo introduced the original Leisure 17 at the 1967 London Boat Show, and the range grew through the 1970s with the 22 (1970), 23 (1973), 20 (1975), 27 (1977), and 29 (1980). Meerloo himself judged the 23 the best-sailing boat in the range and sailed his own 23SL, "Last Minette." Cobramold went into liquidation in 1980, only months after launching the 29.
A new builder, Cory Yachts International Ltd, subsequently continued the Leisure brand with new designs for an 18 and 24; very few were produced, and the company withdrew from the market partly because of the cost of meeting the EU Recreational Craft Directive. Cory Yachts International was not a corporate successor to Cobramold or Brinecraft but a previously separate, Sandwich, Kent-based family boatbuilder: founder Brian Cory built himself an Enterprise dinghy in 1957 and turned the hobby into a business in 1966, and his son Simon joined the firm in 1985 and later took the helm. Across every builder and era, the Leisure Owners Association puts total production at roughly 4,900 yachts, and reckons most of them are still sailing.
The designers
No single designer defined Leisure the way some marques were defined by one hand. Arthur Howard drew the original Leisure 17 for the 1967 launch. Graham Caddick designed the 22, produced from 1970. Frank Pryor designed the 23 in 1973 - by the Leisure Owners Association's own account, Cobramold's second-biggest seller - and went on to draw the 27 in 1977 and the 29 in 1980. Horst Glacier, a German designer, drew the hull of the Leisure 20 specifically for the German and Dutch market, where inland waterways imposed a 20-foot limit on "leisure" craft; Brian Meerloo designed its deck. Later, in the Brinecraft years, the Leisure 26 was built from moulds bought from Oyster Yachts and credited to the British design office of Holman & Pye.
Construction through the eras
After Cobramold's 1980 liquidation, Brinecraft Ltd took over the moulds and continued building the 17, 20, and 23 for a decade, until a catastrophic fire in 1990 destroyed the original company's records - the reason exact production figures for the marque are hard to pin down today. Leisure 17 production alone reached several thousand hulls, with the Leisure Owners Association crediting it as probably the longest production run of any UK trailer-sailer yacht: 29 years, from 1967 to 1996. Some 250 Leisure 20s were built between 1975 and 1984. Even the 1990 fire didn't end the story - Leisure 17 moulds were rebuilt and production continued for a time in Germany and Poland, until around 1995.
Across the models researched in depth, the range shared a consistent building approach: solid, hand-laid GRP hulls stiffened with foam ribs and stringers, balsa-sandwich decks for insulation and strength, and cast-iron keels in fin or twin configurations, with moulded GRP rudders and skegs on steel framework.
Lines and generations
In 1975, Meerloo redrew the cabin tops of the 17 and 23 into a more modern, wedge-shaped profile - the "SL" versions, sold alongside the original hulls rather than replacing them outright. The 29, launched in 1980 for a German market wanting a bigger cockpit, was built on an identical hull to the 27 with two feet added and the skeg and rudder redesigned; only about thirty were completed before Cobramold's liquidation. The Leisure 26, built by Brinecraft in very limited numbers from Oyster Yachts' own 26-foot moulds, sits apart from the rest of the family as the one Leisure built on someone else's tooling rather than its own.
Who Leisure is for
Leisure built its reputation on small boats that could do more than their size suggested: in 1967, the same year the 17 launched, John Adam sailed one across the Atlantic from England to Cuba, a crossing that established the model's seaworthiness. The range sold mainly in the UK, though plenty were built for European buyers, particularly in Holland and Germany - unsurprising given that the 20 was designed from the outset around German and Dutch inland-waterway rules. That combination - a genuinely trailerable pocket cruiser proven capable of serious passages, built and sold across two markets with different needs - defines who a Leisure suits: sailors who want a small, towable boat without giving up on real seakeeping ability.
