Montgomery sailboats: a founder's shop built on one design partnership
Montgomery is Jerry Montgomery's own name, attached to a Southern California shop he ran from 1969 building small trailerable sailboats and dinghies. But the badge covers more than one hand on the drafting table. Montgomery designed some of his own boats outright; for others, he turned to Lyle Hess, the designer who mentored him into the trade in the first place. Reading a Montgomery model right means knowing which of those two designed it, because the answer changes boat to boat.
Origins and ownership
Montgomery's start in boatbuilding was practical, not visionary: he bought dinghy molds from Richard Arthur, developer of the Balboa 20 and 26, after Arthur got too busy building the Balboa 20 to keep the dinghies in production. It was while working nights and weekends tooling that same Balboa 20 - a Hess design - that Montgomery first met Lyle Hess, and the two made the boat's plugs together. Hess put him straight to work studying Skene's book on yacht design and building spline battens, a mentorship that shaped everything Montgomery built afterward.
The dinghy business grew quickly. A 6-foot-8-inch pram, for which Larry Pardey had made the plugs and drawn the design based on one of Richard Arthur's boats, sold well over a thousand units. The Montgomery 10, its hull supposedly based on an old Francis Herreshoff design with Montgomery designing only the sail rig, sold over two thousand. Montgomery also built the Panther, a high-performance planing dinghy designed by Ron Holder. Montgomery Marine Products, based in the Newport Beach area, went on to build the Montgomery 23, 17 and 15 alongside those dinghies; by Montgomery's own account, the shop produced about 20 of the 23s and about 500 each of the 17 and 15, plus several thousand dinghies in all. Montgomery himself left the Newport Beach area in 1978, though the sailboat business continued afterward.
The trailerable-sailboat industry - Montgomery's production included - peaked in 1974, the year of the first gas crisis, with most established builders selling out their season before 1975. Geography shaped where those boats ended up: for the 15, 17 and 23, almost all sales went out of state, since Southern California marina and storage costs were too steep for most trailer-boat owners to keep a boat locally.
Montgomery wound the company down in the early-to-mid 1990s. He has described ceasing production around 1993 or 1994 as the market shrank and his competitors dropped away; his own account of the business puts the closing year at 1995, when he ended a 26-year marriage and decided that running a shop with a workforce of employees was no longer enjoyable, and sold the tooling. The last Jerry Montgomery-built boat left the shop in 1994. After a difficult, unsettled multi-year period, Bob Eeg of Nor'Sea Yachts stepped in and took up production of the 15 and 17 under the Montgomery Boats mark. Separately, in 2009 and 2010, Montgomery designed and built the molds for the Sage 17, built in Golden, Colorado - a boat he has called a real improvement on his earlier 17, but a design of its own rather than a Montgomery model.
The designers
The per-model design credit is the thing to understand about this lineup, and Montgomery himself has laid it out plainly. The Montgomery 15 is entirely his own design, start to finish - not, despite the name, a scaled-down 17; the two hulls differ substantially in bow, sheer and keel shape. The Montgomery 17 runs the other direction: Lyle Hess is the designer of record, credited with roughly 90 percent of what went into production, working from around a year's worth of Montgomery's sketches because Montgomery wasn't yet confident drawing lines himself. Hess conceived it specifically to improve on the Balboa 20 in a smaller package.
The Montgomery 12, a small sloop meant for yacht-club racing, belongs to Hess outright. Montgomery worked its drawings himself for months, sometimes with Hess's help, but with twins recently born and only a year in business behind him, he judged he couldn't afford a mistake and handed the project to Hess to finish. And the Montgomery 23's hull is roughly 80 percent Hess's work: Montgomery has been candid that he listened too much to what his dealers wanted and gave the 23 more freeboard than the interior needed, even as Hess warned him about the tradeoff while drawing it. The boat's aft-bilge hull shape was a compromise between the two men, settled on because Hess disliked the form Montgomery originally wanted.
Construction through the eras
Early Montgomery 17 buyers had more than one keel to choose from. Beyond the shoal keel and centerboard combination that came to define the model, the shop also built a version with a long cast-iron fin keel and a bulb, and a large swing keel raised by a hand crank, similar in concept to a Catalina 22's. A small run of flush-deck 17s, all tall-rigged and fitted with the keel/centerboard setup, came out of the mid-1970s as a daysailer variant of the standard boat.
Who Montgomery is for
A Montgomery buyer is really choosing between two design sensibilities wearing the same builder's name. The 15 is Jerry Montgomery's unfiltered idea of a small trailerable sailboat. The 17 and, to a lesser degree, the 23 carry Lyle Hess's engineering judgment, tempered by what Montgomery asked for and what his dealers wanted to sell. The 12 is Hess's alone, built because Montgomery had too much on the line to risk drawing it himself. Knowing which model is in front of you tells you whose design instincts you're actually trusting.
