Seafarer sailboats: a Dutch import line that became a Long Island builder
Seafarer built sailboats for a little over a quarter century, starting life as an import operation for a Dutch yard and ending as an American manufacturer with its own factory, its own design partners, and its own brush with bankruptcy. Brian Ackworth, an Englishman who worked as an airline pilot, founded the company in 1959 as the US distributor for the Netherlands-based builder G. de Vries Lentsch, and the line traces its lineage to Amsterdam in the 1950s. When Dutch construction stopped being profitable, Ackworth opened a new manufacturing plant in Huntington, New York, in 1965, and the company built there under a changing cast of naval architects before closing for good in 1985.
Origins and ownership
Seafarer Fiber Glass Yachts, Inc., of Huntington, Long Island, New York, began as the US distributor for de Vries Lentsch's Meridian and Swiftsure lines before Ackworth relocated production to his own Huntington plant in 1965. The company survived a serious financial crisis mid-run: on November 14, 1974, Seafarer filed a petition for arrangement under Chapter XI of the Bankruptcy Act, and five days later a federal bankruptcy judge authorized it to keep operating as a debtor-in-possession. Seafarer Fiber Glass Yachts, Inc. was organized as a New York corporation that made and sold customized fiberglass yachts, and for a period it arranged tax-motivated "sailaway" deliveries, in which a Seafarer employee and the buyer sailed a new boat out of Huntington Harbor and into Connecticut waters for the handoff. Interior build quality and delivery timeliness were recurring problems for the company, and Seafarer ultimately ceased production in 1985, one of many mid-sized builders that didn't survive that decade's industry-wide decline.
The designers
Seafarer's Dutch-built boats came from two naval architects, though later retrospectives on the era don't fully agree on every model and date. Good Old Boat credits Philip Rhodes with the Swiftsure 33, the Meridian 26, and an 8-foot dinghy, all built in Holland, calling the trio well-built boats that sailed well; Bill Tripp Jr. designed the Polaris 26, the Javelin 38, and the Tripp 30 for the same Dutch-built era, and in 1965 he added a 31-footer for Seafarer and, later, a 39-footer. After production shifted to Huntington, Sparkman & Stephens designed the Seafarer 48, which debuted at the 1965 New York Boat Show as the largest boat the company ever built. By the 1970s, McCurdy & Rhodes had become Seafarer's dominant design partner, drawing the majority of that decade's lineup -- the 22, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31, and 37, plus the 34 -- and the firm's own company history lists Seafarer alongside Henry R. Hinckley, Heritage Yachts, and Intrepid Yachts among the builders whose best-known designs it drew.
Construction through the eras
Some Seafarer hulls and decks were sold as kits for amateur completion rather than finished boats. A Seafarer 34 kit, for instance, shipped from the plant with its Volvo MD-2 diesel already mounted on the engine bed, the lead ballast glassed in place, and the fiberglass centerboard and rudder already installed, leaving the buyer to finish the deck and interior. The Seafarer 48's design outlived the company's ability to build it: unable to continue production, Seafarer saw the boat carried forward by the Canadian builder Hughes as the Hughes 48/Northstar 48, a Sparkman & Stephens design jointly developed between the two companies.
Lines and generations
The Seafarer 26 name covers two distinct boats rather than one design carried across the company's history. An earlier 26 was designed by Philip Rhodes; a later 26, built by Seafarer at the Huntington plant, came from McCurdy & Rhodes. The two shouldn't be confused with each other despite sharing a model number -- one generation traces to Seafarer's Rhodes-era design partnership, the other to the McCurdy & Rhodes partnership that dominated the company's 1970s output.
Who Seafarer is for
A Seafarer buyer is buying into a company that changed both its address and its design partners more than once, so the era behind a given hull matters as much as the model number. Boats from the Dutch-built years carry Rhodes' or Tripp Jr.'s hand and Holland construction; boats from the Huntington years, especially the McCurdy & Rhodes-designed 1970s lineup, reflect a firm the naval architects themselves later grouped alongside Hinckley and Heritage. Either way, Seafarer's own documented struggles with interior build quality and its 1974 bankruptcy are part of the same story as its design pedigree, and a buyer who knows which era they're looking at is better placed to weigh the two against each other.
