Saga sailboats: two unrelated builders, one contested name
"Saga" has named two entirely separate sailboat builders, an ocean apart, connected only by a naming dispute neither company started. Saga Yachts — later Saga Marine — of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, built the performance cruisers most commonly sold under the name today: Robert Perry's 43, 35, and 48, and Tony Castro's more Euro-styled 409. A second, unrelated boat, a Colin Archer-influenced double-ender designed by British naval architect Alan Pape and built by the Skentelbery Brothers in Plymouth, England, started life under the same name before a rights dispute forced its rename to "Saltram." The two shared no ownership, no design lineage, and no yard.
Origins and ownership
Allan Poole, a Scot who trained in engineering at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, had already spent three decades developing, producing, and selling production sailboats — including a stint owning MG Yachts Ltd. in the UK, producer of several Ton Cup champions, and later roles as Tartan Yachts' director of marketing and then Hinterhoeller's president — before he and three partners founded Saga Yachts in 1995. The new company began production of the Saga 43 that year, with production of the Saga 35 following about five years later. Poole staffed the operation partly with craftsmen from the recently shuttered C&C Yachts and Hinterhoeller shops, and chose St. Catharines, Ontario for what he called the region's unrivaled "Golden Horseshoe" boatbuilding labor pool; Practical Sailor's profile of the Saga 409 put the company by then at a 20,000-plus-square-foot facility there, with more than 70 boats sold.
The company's ownership shifted more than once after that. In 2005, Saga Marine reached an agreement with Pacific Seacraft of Fullerton, California to build Saga's models there, with Poole citing a rising Canadian dollar eroding margins; both brands were to share a new California customer service department. Poole went on to become owner and CEO of Pacific Seacraft itself, which Soundings reported had accumulated substantial debt before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Canadian entrepreneur Terrance Gillespie — who also owned J.J. Taylor, Turner Yachts, and Whitby Boat Works — then bought the Saga molds for the 35, 409, 43, and 48, with plans to return production to St. Catharines or a nearby site. By 2010, J.J. Taylor & Sons Ltd., by then owner of both the SAGA brand and Bruckmann Yachts, struck a strategic alliance to have the SAGA line built by Bruckmann at its yard in Mississauga, Ontario; Cruising World's coverage of that alliance counted nearly 100 Saga vessels in service worldwide.
The British double-ender took a completely separate path into being. In 1976, owner David Walker commissioned Alan Pape to draw the design, which Pape named "Saga," and Walker took the plans to the Skentelbery Brothers' yard in Laira, Plymouth. Before production began, a Scandinavian firm's claim to rights over the name forced the Skentelbery Brothers to rename the class "Saltram," after the Saltram Estate bordering their yard.
The designers
Robert Perry designed the Saga 43, 35, and 48, spanning three related hull designs across the Canadian line; Tony Castro designed the 409, a choice Poole credited in part to their long-standing friendship. Ahead of the 2010 Bruckmann alliance, Perry called the Mississauga yard "near-legendary" and said the Saga designs were "near and dear" to him.
Construction through the eras
By the introduction of the Saga 409, every boat in the Canadian line was being built with a new proprietary hull laminate — double-woven Kevlar E-glass and vinylester resin laid over an aircraft-grade balsa core, developed specifically for ocean cruisers. The British double-ender was built differently and decades earlier: with Pape's input, its original hull went up as foam-sandwich construction on a frame of sacrificial transverse stations, with a laminated keel, stem, and sternpost. That hull, later named Grace Virtue, spent eleven years under construction before entering the water in 1987; the first two boats off the resulting production mould went to a father and son for home completion.
Lines and generations
The Canadian line's four Perry and Castro designs — the 35, 43, and 48 by Perry and the 409 by Castro — make up the great majority of boats built under the Saga name. The British double-ender, by contrast, is effectively a single design: Pape's Colin Archer-influenced hull, produced in small numbers at the Skentelbery yard under the Saltram name rather than Saga.
Who Saga is for
Buyers drawn to the Canadian-built line are shopping performance-oriented cruisers from a small yard with pedigree in its bones — built partly by craftsmen out of the C&C and Hinterhoeller shops, designed by Perry and Castro, and later supported through ownership changes that carried the SAGA brand from St. Catharines to California and eventually to Bruckmann's Mississauga yard. Buyers who instead encounter a Saltram are looking at something else entirely: a hand-built, Colin Archer-inspired double-ender from a small English yard, produced under a name it no longer legally carries.
