Martin sailboats: one surname, two unrelated builders
"Martin" on a sailboat's stern can mean either of two things that have nothing to do with each other. One is Martin Yachts Ltd. of British Columbia, the real builder behind the Martin 16, 242, and 243, all drawn by Vancouver designer Don Martin. The other is naval architect Rodger Martin, whose Presto 30 and Quest 30, 33, and 40 carry the name only because it was his surname -- Ryder Boats and Holby Marine Co. built those boats, and no company called Martin was involved. Nothing connects the two men beyond the coincidence of a shared last name.
Origins and ownership
The Martin 16 began with a specific brief: Don Martin was engaged by Sam Sullivan, founder of the Disabled Sailing Association of BC, to design a keelboat built specifically for sailors with disabilities. Martin Yachts Ltd. produced the first boat in 1995 and continued manufacturing and distributing it through 2001, building 58 boats that went on to accessible-sailing programs across Canada, the United States, and as far away as Japan.
What followed was a long chain of custody. In January 2003 the Disabled Sailing Association of BC, which held the boat's marketing and manufacturing rights, struck a marketing agreement with Steve Alvey of Calgary, owner of Inventure Management Ltd., and manufacturing passed to Abbott Boats Ltd. of Sarnia, Ontario. That ended abruptly on June 17, 2006, when fire destroyed Abbott's plant and the Martin 16 moulds along with it. New moulds followed in 2009 from Platinum Yachts Ltd. of Vancouver, which built two more boats before Campion Boats of Kelowna took over. The line settled with its current builder in early 2013, when Ontario's KAPE Boatworks Inc. took over manufacturing and sales from the Adaptive Sailing Association of British Columbia -- the renamed Disabled Sailing Association -- partnered with Québec's Voile Sansoucy, formerly Mystère Composites.
The Martin 242 came from the same designer but a separate commercial track: built by Martin Yachts of Richmond, B.C., and marketed in Ontario by Jeff Parker of Martin Yachts Ontario, its prototype was already winning races in 1980. Don Martin drew its lines without regard to any handicap rating, conceiving it as a strict one-design rather than a handicap racer -- a choice that set the class's character from the start. boats.com puts total production at about 350; an earlier Canadian Boating figure of roughly 150 suggests the total is better described as several hundred, most of them built and sailed out west. The Martin 243, a Canadian lifting-keel fiberglass boat also built by Martin Yachts Ltd. and designed by Don Martin, followed in 1998 as a smaller, later addition to the same builder's catalog.
Two more models round out the lineup with far less behind them: the Martin 29's catalog record credits Cooper Enterprises of Port Coquitlam, B.C. with building it from 1972, an attribution no independent source corroborates, and the Martin 32 appears in the lineup with no corroborating history at all.
The designers
Rodger Martin -- formally John Rodger Martin, not "Roger" -- was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on March 4, 1948, with scant formal training, learning the trade on the job at the Derecktor yard and later at Pedrick Yacht Design before founding his own firm, Rodger Martin Design, in 1984. He died on May 14, 2021, survived by his wife and business partner, Patty. Ross Weene, a structural-analysis specialist Martin hired, eventually became a partner in the firm.
Rodger Martin Design's Presto 30 traces back to a 2007 commission from Outward Bound, which asked the firm to replace its aging wooden 30-foot school boats, producing the Hurricane Island 30. Popular interest in that boat led Ryder Boats to commission a new trailerable sharpie for the company to build and market: the Presto 30, a shallow-draft cat-ketch that debuted in 2009 and that Martin and Patty cruised themselves in the Bahamas and Florida. Its freestanding rig was designed by Phil Garland, a friend of Martin's, the boat's co-owner, and a co-founder of Hall Spars; the name alludes to Commodore Ralph Munroe's fast 1885 sharpie of the same name.
The Quest line came from the same drafting table but a different builder, Holby Marine Co. of Bristol, Rhode Island, under Barrett Holby. The Quest 33 developed the earlier Quest 30 with an extended transom, new bow, new deckhouse, and a single spade rudder, and won the Bermuda One-Two and the Figawi Race overall; every Quest 33 was built using a licensed vinyl-ester resin infusion system. Holby introduced the Quest 40 in 2002 as, in the builder's words, the "big sister" to the 33 and 33S. Rodger Martin Design's other production work included the VX One, VX Evo, Johnson 18, Outward Bound 30, and the Aerodyne 38, 43, and 47. Martin's partnership with solo sailor Mike Plant on three round-the-world racing boats led to triumph but ended in tragedy; his cold-molded Open Class Gray Wolf, built at Lyman-Morse with water ballast, a planing hull, and an unstayed carbon rig, stands among his most distinctive designs.
Construction through the eras
The two threads built very differently. The Martin 16's molded, cored hull and deck use a fully bonded hull/deck joint and a composite rudder blade of foam, fibreglass, and vinyl-ester resin, with foam flotation filling the inner hull so the boat won't sink even when swamped; KAPE Boatworks' era added a reinforced deck, stern, and bow with a 24:1 purchase keel-lift system. The Martin 242's cored, fully lined hull and deck, joined at an outboard rolled flange, were built deliberately light, paired with a high-aspect keel and deep inboard rudder. On the Rodger Martin side, the Quest 33's laminate was built entirely through a licensed vinyl-ester resin infusion process the Quest 30 it developed from did not share.
Who Martin is for
A buyer drawn to the Martin 16 is buying into a specific mission: a small keelboat built from the outset for sailors with disabilities, with a well-documented, if winding, manufacturing history behind it. A buyer looking at a Martin 242 or 243 wants a strict one-design or lifting-keel cruiser from the same British Columbia designer, built to his own rules rather than a handicap formula. And a buyer who finds a Presto 30 or a Quest 30, 33, or 40 isn't buying a Martin at all in the builder sense -- it's a Rodger Martin design built by Ryder Boats or Holby Marine, and worth evaluating on those companies' own terms rather than assuming any tie to the Canadian yard.
