Ocean sailboats: one name, at least five unrelated builders
"Ocean" on a used-sailboat listing does not identify a single manufacturer. It names at least five or six unrelated companies across three countries, sharing nothing but a common word for the sea. Most of the range — models 44, 60, 62, 71, and 75 — comes from Southern Ocean Shipyard, a builder in Poole, Dorset, England. A smaller family of cruisers, the Cruising 40, 42, and 48, was built in Maine by an entirely different company. A single trimaran, the Ocean Bird 30, came from a Devon dinghy works; a rare Dutch sloop, the Ocean Racer 52, adds a fourth lineage; and two modern dinghies, the Play Bahia and Play Bug, belong to an unconnected current UK brand.
Origins and ownership
Van de Stadt's design archive credits the Ocean 71 as design number 194 and calls it the world's largest GRP production sailing yacht, with more than 20 built by Southern Ocean Shipyard between 1970 and 1982. Richard Rascoe designed the smaller Ocean 60 in the early 1980s; the Ocean 62 followed as a more private, opulent version of the 60's charter-boat hull, built between 1980 and 1987. In Maine, the Cruising 40 was designed by Hank Hinckley and built by Ocean Cruising Yachts — a distinct marque from his father Henry R. Hinckley's famous yard — as a 1979 New York Times report on its debut named it. Le Comte, in the Netherlands, built the Ocean Racer 52 to a William Tripp Jr. design starting in 1968, with only three built. In early 2025, Performance Sailcraft Europe acquired the Ocean Play brand — including the Jo Richards-designed Play Bahia and Play Bug — from RS Marine Group; production has continued in the UK with Rototek.
Construction through the eras
Southern Ocean Shipyard's ketches were heavy, offshore-built boats: the Ocean 71 paired a balsa-cored fiberglass hull with a teak-laid deck and a lead-bulbed fin keel bolted from inside the hull; the Ocean 62 continued the approach with heavy-duty fiberglass and, on most original boats, thick teak decks. Devon's Honnor Marine built the Ocean Bird 30 as a "swing-wing" trimaran, its outer hulls folding in toward the main hull to narrow the boat for marina access — designed by John Westell, best known for the 505 dinghy, as the yard's technical director of production. Westell retired from Honnor Marine and died in January 1989 at 68.
Who Ocean is for
Because the name spans so many unrelated builders, a buyer must first establish which "Ocean" is in front of them. Southern Ocean Shipyard's big ketches suit long-range offshore cruising; the Maine-built Cruising 40, 42, and 48 suit a buyer drawn to a smaller New England yard rather than the famous Hinckley name it sometimes gets mistaken for; and the scarce Ocean Racer 52, the Ocean Bird 30, and the modern Play dinghies each suit a buyer chasing a specific, distinct boat rather than a common class.
