Roberts sailboats: a plans-business kit boat, not a single yard's product
A boat listed as a "Roberts" is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a hull built by an amateur owner or a small independent yard from stock plans and kits sold by yacht designer Bruce Roberts-Goodson's design business -- not a boat that came off one company's production line. Buyers ordered study plans and full-size frame patterns, and sometimes a bare hull and deck, then finished the boat themselves or hired a local yard to do it. One owner's account, published on the design office's own site, describes buying his Roberts 25 plans in about 1975, then buying a hull and deck from a builder in Port Moody, Canada, and finishing the boat entirely in Mesa, Arizona -- three parties in two countries producing a single "Roberts."
Origins and ownership
Bruce Roberts-Goodson was born in Victoria, Australia, attended Eltham High School, and studied yacht design through the US-based Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology; before starting his own business he completed a five-year informal boatbuilding apprenticeship at a Brisbane boat yard. In 1966 he founded Bruce Roberts Custom Yachts in Brisbane with Andrew Slorach. Slorach ran the plans-and-kits side of the operation, known as Marine Park, which mass-produced bare hull-and-deck kits for owner completion -- most notably the Longboat 21 and 27, the Adventurer 25, and the Spray 22. In 1972 Roberts left Australia for a series of Northern Hemisphere countries, opened a US design office, and formed Bruce Roberts Designs to concentrate on the North American market, while Slorach kept the sales agents already established across the rest of the world. According to Fine Line Boat Plans -- the successor company to the plans-sales side of Slorach's business -- Slorach retired in 1995, selling Marine Park to catamaran designer Shawn Arbor. Naval architect Bill Ingram held that side of the business through the 1990s until Phil Hogg bought the plans portfolio in 1997; the two resulting companies, Bruce Roberts International and Bruce Roberts Designs, formally separated in 2000, and Bruce Roberts International took the Fine Line Boat Plans name in 2007.
Construction through the eras
Roberts's design catalog was sold as buildable in a wide range of structural materials -- fiberglass, steel, aluminum, and wood epoxy -- leaving the choice to the individual builder's skill and budget rather than fixing it at a factory. The Roberts 25, the model most commonly represented among Roberts-badged listings, shows that flexibility directly: Bruce Roberts-Goodson drew the design in 1974, according to WoodenBoat's plans-and-kits listing, and it could be built in either moulded plywood/wood epoxy or fiberglass, in single-skin or foam-sandwich form. It's a trailerable boat, and the design office's own description states that both the shoal-draft and regular-keel versions perform well and are included in the same study-plan package. WoodenBoat classifies it as a coastal cruiser, though it notes many examples have crossed oceans and been used for serious voyaging. Both the design office and WoodenBoat report more than 1,000 examples have been built and sailed in nearly every part of the world. The lineup also includes a 1976 South Coast 25.
Who Roberts is for
Roberts suits buyers looking for an inexpensive, amateur-buildable cruising design in whichever material a builder had on hand -- fiberglass, steel, aluminum, or wood epoxy -- and willing to accept that the boat in front of them reflects one builder's individual skill and choices rather than a factory standard. It is a poor fit for buyers who want the consistency of a single yard's output: two hulls carrying the same model name can be built years apart, in different materials, by builders with very different levels of experience.
