Rustler sailboats: hand-built Falmouth cruisers with a Golden Globe pedigree
By its own account, Rustler Yachts has been building yachts in Falmouth since the early 1980s, when the first Rustler 36 came off the line; hundreds of owners since have had boats designed and built there by British craftsmen using traditional methods. The yard manufactures everything itself — every piece of engineering, moulding and joinery is carried out on its own premises rather than outsourced — an approach that runs across a sailing range spanning a 24ft dayboat to the 57ft flagship. That combination of small-yard construction and offshore-capable design has given Rustler an outsized presence in long-distance sailing: its 1980-designed Rustler 36 took the top three places in the 2018 Golden Globe Race.
Origins and ownership
Rustler Yachts is run by company directors Adrian Jones and Nick Offord — distinct from in-house designer Stephen Jones, despite the shared surname. The yard's range expanded significantly when Rival Bowman, a fellow British builder, went into receivership in November and was subsequently bought by Rustler. Under that deal Rustler took ownership of the tooling and manufacturing rights to the Rival Bowman and Starlight ranges, moved most manufacturing to Falmouth, and planned to form a parent company running Rustler, Rival Bowman and Starlight as three separate brands. Only the Starlight 46 kept being built where it always had been, at the former Rival Bowman yard on Southampton's Ocean Quay.
What Rustler acquired had its own long history. Rival Bowman traced back to 1965, founded on the banks of the River Itchen in Southampton, where it originally built the Peter Brett-designed Rival range — more than 500 boats over the years. Rival's tie-up with Bowman came in the early 1980s and expanded the range up to the Bowman 84; roughly a decade later Sadler International joined the group, alongside the Stephen Jones-designed Starlight 35 and 29. By the time the company went into administrative receivership on 6 November, its range spanned the Chuck Paine-designed Bowman 42, 45 and 48 and the Stephen Jones-designed Starlight 35, 39 and 46. PricewaterhouseCoopers, acting as joint administrative receiver, sold the assets the following month, on a Thursday, 6 December.
The designers
Holman & Pye drew the Rustler 36, the boat that opened the Falmouth yard's account. Since then, Stephen Jones has been the in-house naval architect behind most of the range, crediting himself with the 33, 37, 42, 44 and 57, plus the 46. He did the structural design for the 37 personally — laminate weights and the rest — the last time he handled that kind of structural work for Rustler himself. Jones has been willing to use proprietary hardware where it suits a boat rather than insisting on bespoke parts everywhere: the 33 carries Jefa's off-the-shelf spade rudders, which he calls "perfectly symmetrical and ideal for the boat." He has also developed a hull feature of his own, which he calls a "nacelle" — a wide fairing running into the rudder skeg — used on designs including the 42.
For the one departure from sail, the Rustler 41 motor yacht, the directors first weighed a 45ft design from naval architects Ed Burnett and Nigel Irens before eventually approaching Tony Castro, an architect better known for superyachts and modern sailing yachts than classic motor launches. Castro's design was built to strict weight limits to aid performance, getting onto the plane at 18 knots.
Construction through the eras
The company describes its yachts as manufactured on the premises rather than merely assembled, and that shows in how much of the range is finished to order: most Rustler 36s, for instance, are built largely to their owner's own specification rather than off a fixed standard. On the 42, the hull and deck are built as a hand laid up system in glass fibre reinforced polyester, to Stephen Jones's own construction drawings and using Lloyds-approved materials; Rustler's own product page for the boat describes it as carrying an encapsulated keel. According to Yacht.de, the Rustler 36 alone has produced more than a hundred hulls since 1980, and the yard has continued building them since, at customer request.
Lines and generations
A distinctive coachroof-led style runs through Rustler's modern offshore boats, beginning with the 1999 Rustler 42 and continuing through the 2016 Rustler 37 and the 2019 Rustler 57 — three designs Stephen Jones considers closely related, and of which he rates the 57 the best-looking. The 42 was, in Jones's own telling, the boat that defined Rustler's modern era and set the elegant look the rest of the offshore range followed; the 37 is essentially a scaled-down 42, with proportionally more freeboard but a similar coachroof and cockpit. Alongside that family sits the 33, a lighter weekender that director Adrian Jones sketched out as a one-page list of essential features before commissioning Stephen Jones to draw the lines, trading the bigger boats' encapsulated keel for a lead fin keel and fully balanced rudder. The 2007 Rustler 44 and the 2010 Rustler 24 round out the sailing range in between and below; one owner of note, HRH The Princess Royal, moved to a new Rustler 44 after twenty years aboard a Rustler 36.
Who Rustler is for
Rustler suits sailors who want a small UK yard building largely to individual order rather than off a production line — the company builds everything in-house and treats much of the range as bespoke to some degree, down to details as specific as an owner's preferred rudder hardware. It fits buyers headed offshore in a traditionally proportioned, encapsulated-keel hull, the kind of boat that has repeatedly proven itself in the Golden Globe Race, as much as those after a lighter weekender in the 33 or, for a change of pace entirely, the yard's one foray into power in the Rustler 41.
