Sabre sailboats: a Maine builder's lineage across two design eras
Sabre Yachts was founded in 1970, when Roger Hewson built a 4,000-square-foot shop in Raymond, Maine, on land belonging to his wife Charlie's family. Hewson had been running his family's construction company and designing boats on the side; a couple of years before founding Sabre, he built his first vessel, a 26-foot sailing scow. He unveiled hull #1 of the Sabre 28 at the 1971 Newport Boat Show, and Sabre built and sold 588 of them over the next 15 years — enough that the American Sailboat Hall of Fame inducted the 28 in 2003, crediting its success with paving the way for close to 2,000 larger sail and power boats that followed. From that start, Sabre grew into a two-designer company: Hewson's own boats through the 1970s and 1980s, then a long collaboration with naval architect Jim Taylor beginning in 1992.
Origins and ownership
The Sabre story starts in the 1960s, when Hewson, a Montreal native who owned a construction company, designed a 26-foot sailing scow in his spare time. That side project led to the 1970 launch of Sabre Yachts. The company grew through the 1970s and 1980s, but the boatbuilding industry hit what Hewson called a "perfect economic storm" around 1990 — a new luxury-goods tax on yachts combined with a stock market downturn — just as he was weighing a succession plan for his roughly 195 employees. Ed Miller, a Sabre owner and FedEx executive with a summer home near the yard, became the first outside investor; he brought in his neighbor, Daniel Zilkha, a Geneva investment banker born in Egypt and raised in Paris, to run day-to-day operations. Miller and Zilkha reportedly acquired about two-thirds of the company. Zilkha went on to serve as CEO of Sabre, sister company Back Cove Yachts, and North End Composites for almost 35 years before stepping back in favor of Aaron Crawford, whose background includes Sparkman & Stephens, Carroll Marine, and Outerlimits Offshore Powerboats. In 1995, Sabre acquired North End Marine of Rockland, a maker of marine molds and fiberglass parts, and renamed it North End Composites; that facility also became home to Back Cove Yachts, established in 2003 to build smaller motoryachts. Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors has reported Sabre and Back Cove together as the largest recreational boatbuilder in Maine, employing more than 350 people. Sabre built its last sailboat in 2013 and shifted to motor yachts exclusively, while maintaining that its sailing roots remain part of every hull it lays.
The designers
Hewson designed Sabre's early lineup himself, and in the 1980s Sailing World ranked his 34, 38, and 42 first in class. He first noticed a young Jim Taylor in the early 1980s, crewing aboard the Taylor-designed Taylor 34 Sabra in Maine races; a few years later, Hewson's own turbocharged Sabre 36 lost handily to Taylor's T-37 Spirit at Block Island Race Week, and Taylor began contributing keel and rudder details to existing Sabre models. The collaboration moved into a higher gear in 1992, when Hewson stepped back from day-to-day design work and, at the America's Cup Ball in San Diego, asked Taylor to design a new 36-footer for the company. That design became the Sabre 362, the first of six Taylor models built over the following two decades; Taylor set the performance parameters, hull shape, interior layout, rig geometry, and appendages, while Sabre's own design team, headed by Ken Rusinek, handled interior detailing and structure. Hewson later called his own Sabre 42 design the "apex" of his work.
Construction through the eras
Sabre's earliest boats — the 28, 30, 34, and 38 — were hand-laid with mat and roving in polyester resin, built as solid-fiberglass hulls with balsa-cored decks; plywood replaced balsa at high-load hardware mounts. From 1978, the 34 also gained a balsa-cored hull. That same balsa-coring approach carried into Jim Taylor's first design, the Sabre 362: balsa to the waterline, hand-laminated, with marine mahogany plywood at deck hardware points, resin-infused using the SCRIMP method, and vinylester resin under ISO NPG gelcoat below the waterline to guard against blistering. The 402 and 452, both built later in the 1990s, kept a similar balsa-cored, hand-laminated hull and deck. The shift to foam coring came later still: the 386 and 426, introduced in the early 2000s, moved to vacuum-bagged, Divinycell-cored E-glass hulls and decks, a change Cruising World's review of the 426 attributed to weight savings over the earlier balsa construction.
Lines and generations
Two design eras run through the Sabre sailboat catalog. Hewson designed the company's boats himself from 1970 until 1992, when he stepped back from day-to-day design work. From that point, the Jim Taylor collaboration took over sailboat design, ultimately producing six models — among them the 362, 386, and 426 — before Sabre left sailboat production behind in 2013.
Who Sabre is for
Sabre suits buyers drawn to a builder with a continuous, traceable design lineage rather than a rotating cast of outside naval architects — effectively one founder-designer followed by one long-term outside collaborator across more than 40 years of sailboats. Sailing Magazine has tied the brand's resale strength directly to the quality of its original construction, describing Sabre's building philosophy simply as "The Maine Way."
