Little Harbor sailboats: a sailmaker's own semi-custom cruising line
Little Harbor began as an address, not a boat: the section of Marblehead, Massachusetts, where Ted Hood moved the sailmaking loft he had started in 1955, and the name he later put on his own line of cruising yachts. Hood was already the founder of Hood Sailmakers, the world's largest sailmaker by the 1960s and '70s, when Little Harbor Yachts began building custom and semi-custom vessels in 1959; by the early 1980s that work had grown into a full line of sailboats, 38 to 78 feet, in which Hood was personally involved in both design and construction. The result was a yard built around one designer-sailor's own ideas about what a cruising boat should do, carried out largely by hand rather than on a production line.
Origins and ownership
Hood founded Hood Sailmakers in 1955 in the back of Maddie's Bar in Marblehead before moving the operation to the town's Little Harbor section — the name that later attached itself to his boatbuilding brand. Little Harbor's early design direction took its cue from Carleton Mitchell's Finisterre, the 1954 Olin Stephens-designed yawl that won the Newport Bermuda Race three times, in 1956, 1958 and 1960; Hood's own line expanded into larger racing and cruising models as the 1970s and '80s went on. In 1986 Hood moved his businesses to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, converting a former WWII navy fuel depot into one of the largest yacht service, design, brokerage and building operations on the East Coast.
Hood also built briefly outside sailboats: his purchase of the Black Watch line, a builder of Ray Hunt-designed sportfishing boats, launched a Little Harbor powerboat series, and in 1990 the yard introduced Down East-styled 34- and 36-foot powerboats fitted with waterjet propulsion — the basis for the later WhisperJet name. Those powerboats were a separate branch of the business from the Little Harbor sailboats this page covers.
Accounts differ on exactly how ownership changed hands. Soundings reports that Hood sold Little Harbor in 1999 to an investor group that had bought the Hinckley Co. two years earlier; Fontaine Design Group instead dates the Hood Companies' purchase by Hinckley to 2001. What's consistent across both accounts is that Hood, after the sale, went on to found Ted Hood Yachts — a separate brand building expedition motoryachts, motorsailers, power catamarans and a "Fast Explorer" series — while Little Harbor Yachts itself continued until it ceased operations in 2008. Ted Hood's son, Ted Hood Jr., stayed close to the business afterward as a broker at Wellington Yacht Partners.
The designers
Ted Hood served as Little Harbor's principal naval architect, and by his own account the company's design work grew out of what he wanted as a sailor rather than convention: he redesigned his own deck hardware, mast and sailing systems around what he decided the boat, and the person sailing it, actually needed. Ted Fontaine joined Hood's operation as a drafting intern two weeks after finishing his design education, beginning a partnership that, through the 1980s, produced the Little Harbor line's most successful years — 38- to 75-footers built at a rate of 12 to 15 boats a year. Fontaine was named Chief Designer of the Ted Hood Design Group in 1985, and after Hinckley's 2001 purchase of the Hood Companies, he acquired the design rights and assets of Ted Hood Design to found the independent Fontaine Design Group. Across Hood's whole career, not just at Little Harbor, various builders worldwide constructed more than 1,500 yachts to his designs, including the 133-foot Anakena.
Construction through the eras
Little Harbor's hulls followed a consistent design logic: beamy, shallow-draft, high-aspect-ratio, centerboard, heavy-displacement boats meant to deliver good reaching speed, seakindly motion and cruising volume rather than the narrower, deeper shapes common elsewhere. That approach was tested rather than assumed — the design process relied on tank-testing data across a wide range of hull forms, including Delta-shape pure-centerboard models — and Little Harbor's racing results were used to argue the case, since shallow draft, wide beam and a deep centerboard gave the boats strong load-carrying ability and an easy motion in heavy seas. Cockpit coamings with walk-throughs on both sides became a recognizable deck feature of the range.
Hood had already built boats in Japan and Holland before starting construction in Taiwan in 1979, a relationship that continued for 14 years before production later moved to Singapore, Turkey, Poland and China; Bruce Livingston ran Little Harbor's sailboat production across Taiwan, Singapore and the United States over that same span. Reviews of the 46 and the 53 describe Airex-cored hulls and Divinycell-cored decks; SpinSheet's review of the 46 attributed that coring choice to sound and thermal insulation rather than weight savings, and called the boat's joiner work comparable to any custom boatbuilder or cabinetmaker.
Lines and generations
Little Harbor's range grew from small beginnings into a full semi-custom fleet spanning three decades. The 37, designed in the mid-1960s, was among Hood's earliest boats under the Little Harbor name; the 38 followed in the early 1980s, built in Taiwan by Lien Hwa or a similar yard under Hood's oversight, in a limited run. The 44 (1983-1987) and the 46 (1986-1991, only 21 hulls built) anchored the Hood-Fontaine partnership's peak years, and the 54, introduced in 1989, was a later addition to the range. The lineup also grew to include larger flagships such as the 63, launched in 1988, and the 60, launched in 1995.
Who Little Harbor is for
Little Harbor was built around Hood's own instincts as a sailor and sailmaker as much as around any single hull design — a semi-custom yard willing to put its founder's name on boats he was personally involved in designing and building, from 38 feet up to 78. Buyers drawn to that lineage, to centerboard cruisers built for shoal water and reaching speed rather than deep-keel racing, and to a range shaped by one designer's continuous hand across decades, are the ones the Little Harbor name still speaks to.
