Nimble sailboats: a small Florida yard built almost entirely to one designer's brief
Nimble occupies a narrow, particular niche in production sailing: shoal-draft, trailerable cruisers and pilothouse motorsailers, built by a small Clearwater, Florida operation that worked almost exclusively with a single naval architect. Founded in 1985 by Jerry Koch, the company grew from a pair of pocket cruisers into a full line of pilothouse boats before Koch's death in 2003 effectively closed the chapter. Understanding Nimble means understanding the partnership between Koch and designer Ted Brewer, and the short window in which it produced boats.
Origins and ownership
Jerry Koch founded Nimble Boat Works in 1985 in Clearwater, Florida, according to RiverEarth's Bernie Harberts. Koch, a former CNN photographer, brought an outsider's eye to trailerable sailboats; SAILING Magazine's John Kretschmer called him an innovator in the category. His first boat under the Nimble name was the Nimble 20; a second design, a 30-footer, followed and was raced successfully across the Atlantic. Koch died in 2003. RiverEarth reports that a few of Nimble's suppliers took over the business afterward, and SAILING Magazine names one of them: Ken McCleave, a former supplier who took over the company. Few Nimbles were built after the early 2000s.
The designers
Koch didn't design the boats himself. From the outset he partnered with yacht designer Ted Brewer, and together the two created the company's first models, the Nimble 20 and the Nimble 30 - a pairing SAILING Magazine described as "a good team, creating rugged boats that blended purity of function with a dash of salty character." Brewer himself later described the Nimble 30 as "a fancy little yawl," one credit among the roughly 260 boats Good Old Boat's Fiona McGlynn counts across his career, a catalog that also includes yachts built by Aloha, Morgan, Union, and Whitby. For Nimble, though, Brewer wasn't a guest designer brought in for one project - he was the design spine running through the entire lineup.
Construction through the eras
The one detailed build description on record comes from SAILING Magazine's review of the Nimble Kodiak: a foam-cored hull, hand laid and vacuum bagged, with vinylester resins in the outer skin layers specifically to guard against blisters, and a similarly foam-cored deck the magazine credited with leaving no core to rot. Buyers of the Kodiak could choose between two keels - a 22-inch shoal-draft version with a centerboard, the more popular option, or a 34-inch fixed keel carrying a bolted lead shoe.
Lines and generations
Every later Nimble traces back to the original 20: RiverEarth describes its design as the template that was lengthened, shortened, or otherwise modified into the Nimble 24, the Arctic and Kodiak in their pilothouse form, and the 32-foot Wanderer. SAILING Magazine's account of the same lineage adds the Nomad to the models that followed the 20 and the 30. The Kodiak, introduced in 1993, evolved directly from the Arctic rather than from the 20 itself, giving the lineup two branches: open-cockpit pocket cruisers descended straight from the 20, and pilothouse motorsailers that ran through the Arctic to the Kodiak.
Who Nimble is for
Nimble built for a narrow, specific buyer: someone who wanted to reach shallow-water places a deep-keeled cruiser couldn't, in a boat trailerable enough to move between them. It was a small yard's work, essentially one long partnership between Koch and Brewer, that ran less than two decades before Koch's 2003 death and the falloff in building that followed. The company's own motto - "a vote against boredom and mediocrity" - sums up the pitch: purpose-built, shoal-draft boats from a builder that never scaled beyond a small operation, and never tried to.
