Pacific sailboats: one badge, at least three unrelated builders
"Pacific" has been used as a model or builder name by boatbuilders on at least three continents across five decades, and beyond the shared word, they have nothing to do with one another. Anyone searching "Pacific sailboats" will turn up hulls from a New Zealand cruiser-racer yard, a Hong Kong shipyard's take on a Scandinavian pocket cruiser, and a licensed California builder of a Sparkman & Stephens daysailer - alongside a scatter of other, less documented nameplates. None of them is Pacific Seacraft, a separate marque with its own distinct history and its own page on this site.
The Pacific 38 and the Compass 38
New Zealand designer Claude Allen Smith built the Pacific 38 at his own Smith's Boatyard on the Whangarei River, launching the first hull, "Perception," as design number 60 of his career. Smith's yard completed 45 hulls, the last around 1982. A mould was then exported to Australia, where another 50 hulls were built and marketed under a different name entirely - the Compass 38, the same boat wearing two badges depending on which side of the Tasman Sea it came from. The Australian-built version's fibreglass lay-up was engineered by a composite specialist from Compass Yachts, the Australian company whose name the export version borrowed. Within the run, seven hulls built with increased topside height came to be informally called a "Mark II," though Smith himself has called the label something of a misnomer.
The Pacific Clipper and the Frisco Flyer
Hong Kong's Cheoy Lee Shipyard built its own take on Tord Sunden's 1942 Folkboat, shortening the Scandinavian design from 25 feet 3 inches to an even 25 feet. A wooden prototype went together around 1956 and was sailed singlehanded across the Atlantic twice that same year, and Cheoy Lee put the design into production the following year as an all-teak model, the Type I. A fiberglass version, the Type II, followed in 1963 while the teak model stayed in the lineup, and around 1966 a doghouse-cabin Type III arrived with its mast stepped on deck. Cheoy Lee's own name for the boat was the Pacific Clipper, but a San Francisco dealer, the R. Reed brokerage, took to calling its stock "Frisco Flyers," and the nickname outlasted the company's official one.
Pacific Dolphin and the Dolphin 24
Pacific Dolphin Inc. of Anaheim, California, was one of three licensed builders of the Sparkman & Stephens Dolphin 24, a design that traces to a December 8, 1958 conversation between George O'Day and Olin Stephens, formalized in an internal Stephens memo later nicknamed the boat's "birth certificate." The other two builders were O'Day's own subsidiary, Marscot Plastics of Fall River, Massachusetts, and Yankee Yachts of Inglewood, California, which took over Dolphin 24 sales in 1967 after O'Day's own sales had stumbled. Pacific Dolphin outlasted both: the last known production Dolphin 24, a boat named "Grand Finale," was Pacific Dolphin hull number 300, built in 1978. A fixed-keel cousin of the design, the S&S 24 (also called the Falcon 24), was built separately in New Zealand.
Who a Pacific sailboat is for
A buyer drawn to a "Pacific" listing is really choosing among several small, distinct lineages - a New Zealand offshore cruiser-racer, a Hong Kong-built Folkboat derivative, or a licensed run of an American S&S daysailer - and the badge alone won't say which. Several other boats carry the Pacific name in listings, credited to still other designers, without enough documented history to tell their stories here. Whichever thread a given hull belongs to, that lineage - not the word "Pacific" - is what determines its design pedigree, its era, and its builder.
