Santa Cruz sailboats: Bill Lee's ultra-light racing sleds, rebuilt once around a new design
Santa Cruz Yachts began with a bet Bill Lee made on himself. He crewed aboard a Cal 40 in the 1971 TransPac alongside an owner who wanted something faster for 1973; taking the commission to build it, Lee walked away from a corporate engineering career. His first two designs — Panache, a 40-footer, and Chutzpah, a 35-footer — won corrected-time TransPac honors in 1973 and 1975, and by 1975 the project had become Bill Lee Custom Racing Yachts, working out of a 200-foot chicken coop on a hillside in Soquel, California. Concurrent with the Santa Cruz 27 rolling out of that coop, Lee was designing and building Merlin, an ultra-light sled of roughly 67 feet displacing only 23,000 pounds. Launched in 1976, Merlin broke the TransPac record along with records in virtually every ocean race she entered, and Lee's habit of donning a wizard hat, red socks, and a jumper to promote her earned him his lasting nickname, the Wizard of Santa Cruz. Seahorse Magazine credited Lee's yard as the largest and most stable production builder of the broader Santa Cruz boatbuilding culture from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.
Origins and ownership
Hull number one of the Santa Cruz 27 was finished in 1974, built for a paying client. By the time SC27 production was discontinued in 1977, more than 150 had been built, and Lee had moved on to the Santa Cruz 50 — a race-winner that preceded a series of 70-footers. Aside from the Santa Cruz 70, none of the line was designed to a racing handicap rule. Lee sold the company in 1995, and it continued operating as Santa Cruz Yachts, but the yard changed hands more than once in the years that followed rather than passing to a single clean successor. That interim ended in January 2008, when an Australian-led team took over, bringing new ownership, management, production facilities, designs, and materials. Darren "Baz" Williams, an experienced Australian boat builder who had raced worldwide, served as VP and Director of Operations under the new ownership, and the production facility relocated to Jacksonville Beach, Florida.
The designers
Bill Lee drew the classic Santa Cruz line — the 27, 33, 40, 50, 52, and 70 — across his two decades running the yard. His design influence reached beyond the brand itself: he authored the first TP52 box rule in the early 2000s and later the HPR rule. After the 2008 ownership change, U.S. West Coast designer Tim Kernan drew the Santa Cruz 37, described at the time as the first new model for Santa Cruz Yachts in several years and the first in a new series of performance yachts from the brand.
Construction through the eras
The founding-era boats were built in fiberglass: the Santa Cruz 50, for one, had a hand-laminated fiberglass hull and deck over a vacuum-bagged balsa core, with a solid lead keel casting bolted to the hull. The Santa Cruz 70 offered a similar bi-directional E-glass and balsa-core standard, with exotic materials such as Kevlar, graphite, and Spectra available to owners who wanted them. Under the 2008 ownership, the yard moved to building carbon-fiber production boats instead of fiberglass. The Santa Cruz 37 carried that shift furthest: a vacuum-bagged E-glass hull and deck with foam coring, a resin-infused primary frame carrying keel and rig loads and reinforced with carbon fiber for a high strength-to-weight ratio, and a cast-iron keel fin coated in E-glass cloth and epoxy.
Lines and generations
The classic line ran from the Santa Cruz 27 in 1974 through the 33, 40, 50, 52, and 70, with the 52 — introduced in 1992 — named Sailing World's 1996 Boat of the Year. The Santa Cruz 37 arrived in 2008 as Kernan's new-generation design, debuting at the Annapolis Boat Show with a second boat sent to San Francisco's Big Boat Series; the same year, the company said it planned to follow the 37 with a Santa Cruz 43 in early 2009 and a new Santa Cruz 52 shortly after.
Who Santa Cruz is for
Santa Cruz suits buyers drawn to the ultra-light-displacement racing pedigree Bill Lee built the brand on — boats designed for speed over handicap-rule optimization, with Merlin's TransPac record as the line's founding legend. That pedigree spans two distinct chapters: the Lee-designed sleds built through 1995, and the carbon-fiber Kernan-designed generation the 2008 ownership introduced with the Santa Cruz 37.
