Mason sailboats: a designer's name carried by one Taiwan yard and one importer
Mason sailboats sit at the intersection of three separate parties: a naval architect who drew the lines, a Taiwan yard that built the hulls, and a California company that commissioned and sold them. Naval architect Al Mason, who had worked earlier in his career for John Alden, was chosen as the designer for Pacific Asian Enterprises' first sailboat project. That first design, a 43-footer, became the Mason 43 and gave the line its name, even though Mason himself neither built nor sold the boats that carried it.
Origins and ownership
Pacific Asian Enterprises (PAE) grew out of a Dana Point, California yacht dealership. Dan Streech, who had started his career as a yacht salesman in 1972, met Jim Leishman there in 1973; when the dealership closed in 1974, Streech, Leishman, and Joe Meglen formed a small brokerage together, a partnership that predated PAE's official incorporation in 1979 by five years. Jim's younger brother Jeff Leishman joined the company as a part-time employee in 1978. Present-day PAE is owned by Streech together with the Leishman brothers — Jim as vice president, Jeff as chief designer.
The Taiwan yard that built every Mason, Ta Shing Yacht Building, was founded in the mid-1970s: PAE's own company histories credit first president C.M. Juan with founding the yard in 1976 under a name meaning "Big New" in Chinese, while other published accounts date it to 1977 under brothers Tim and George Huang. PAE contracted Ta Shing to build the Mason 43 and every design that followed it.
The designers
Al Mason's link to PAE traced in part to his earlier career: he had worked for John Alden, and boats.com's review of the Mason 43 traced his design roots further back still, through John Alden, Philip Rhodes, and Olin Stevens. The Mason 43 was an immediate success, and PAE followed it with the Mason 63, 53, 53cc, and 33 — all Mason designs, all built at Ta Shing. Mason's involvement did not run through the whole line: with his withdrawal and retirement from design work for PAE, Jeff Leishman's role became more and more integral, and by 1982 he was working full time for the company. Jeff Leishman then redesigned each of the original '3' series hulls into the Leishman/Mason '4' series on his own; Al Mason was not part of that second generation.
Construction through the eras
Construction on Mason sailboats differs by model rather than following one make-wide specification. The Mason 33's ballast is iron, set in the hull molding in two pieces, taped and sealed against rust or leakage, with a hand-laid solid-fiberglass hull in isophthalic resin reinforced by four full-length longitudinal stringers; its deck is balsa-cored, with plywood backing in the cabin trunk and other load points, and the hull-to-deck joint is a standard inward-turning flange backed by matching stainless flat bars. The Mason 43, the model that launched the line, uses lead ballast encapsulated in the keel and a solid hand-laid GRP hull built without a sandwich core, more than an inch thick at the top of the keel and tapering to a half-inch at the gunwale; its older hulls were laid up in polyester resin, with vinylester used in later boats, and its older decks used marine plywood cores with a hull-to-deck joint built from a bedded fiberglass flange and full-length stainless-steel straps.
Lines and generations
Al Mason's original '3' series — the 33, 43, 53, and 63 — accounted for 132 boats produced between 1978 and 1985. Between 1984 and 1988, PAE redesigned each of those hulls into the '4' series (the 34, 44, 54, and 64), keeping the same hulls but giving them new deck designs and interior layouts; about 80 of the '4' series boats followed, including 68 Mason 44s according to the Mason Owners Group. Production of the Mason 53 ran through 1989, with some estimates putting total output around 30 to 40 boats. Across both series, PAE ultimately sold 212 Mason sailboats.
Who Mason is for
Mason's appeal is tied to a specific full-keel, offshore-cruiser design language carried across two generations by one yard and one importer. Buyers drawn to Mason are typically drawn to that continuity: a single design lineage, redesigned only once, built by one Taiwan yard, and sold under one company's name from the Mason 43's debut through the tooling's destruction in 2002 to make room for more Nordhavn production.
