Seaward sailboats: shallow water as the design brief, not a compromise
Nick Hake spent his career building sailboats meant to go where deeper-draft cruisers couldn't - skinny bays, thin-water anchorages, and trailer ramps. From wing-keeled classics built by hand in Stuart, Florida, to the later, more radical retracting-keel RK series, Hake designed and, for decades, personally oversaw every boat that carried the Seaward name. The brand's identity was never really about any single model; it was about a designer who kept returning to the same problem - shallow water - and kept finding new mechanical answers to it.
Origins and ownership
Nick Hake founded Seaward Yachts in Stuart, Florida, in 1973. SAILING Magazine's account instead has him starting out, more than 20 years before its 2000 profile, in a warehouse near the Miami airport, before the company grew into the modern Stuart facility that by 2000 was turning out about a boat a week. Hake designed every boat the company built and, for most of its history, personally shepherded each one through construction, a hands-on role he held for more than 40 years.
Trade Only Today reported in February 2009 that Indianapolis businessman Ted Gelov had acquired the assets of Hake Yachts; Hake said at the time that Gelov brought the management and marketing experience to energize the company while he himself focused on improving the Seaward design, and the company planned to hold production to about 40 to 50 boats a year to protect resale value for owners. A later retrospective in Good Old Boat placed the same ownership change in 2010. In April 2015, Seaward Sailboats - by then operating as Hake Yachts, LLC - agreed to build its RK-series boats at the facilities of Traditional Watercraft, Inc., maker of Island Packet and Blue Jacket Yachts, moving from factory-direct sales toward a dealer network; Gelov said Seaward's 35-plus years of quality and innovation would only be enhanced by Island Packet's standards, and Hake stayed on to design future models. By January 2017, Darrell and Leslie Allen - owners of Suncoast Yachts in San Diego and an Island Packet dealer for more than two decades - had become majority shareholders of Hake Marine LLC, by then the builder of both Island Packet and Seaward Yachts; their first move was rolling back Island Packet and Seaward prices toward 2008 levels. Good Old Boat's account of the same period has the investor who bought Seaward also acquiring Island Packet and combining both companies at Island Packet's Largo, Florida facilities, before selling both brands on to a California Island Packet dealer. After stepping back from the company, Hake returned through his own venture, NH Designs, offering repair, reconditioning, and brokerage services for Seaward sailboats built since 2003.
The designer
Hake, who designed every boat built under the Seaward name, said his own preference for shallow-water sailing shaped the brand - a hull SAILING Magazine described as striking "a traditional pose above the waterline" while being "quite innovative below." Hake called his hull shape a "spherical tumblehome," per Practical Sailor, and by his own account was determined to keep wood out of his hulls and decks entirely.
Construction through the eras
Across the earlier, fixed-keel Seawards - the 22, 23, 24, 25, Fox, and Eagle - construction followed a consistent formula: solid fiberglass hulls laid up with triaxial cloth, Coremat (a microballoon-and-resin mix) stringers for stiffening, and PVC foam rather than balsa coring the flat, structural areas of the deck. Hull and deck were joined on an outward-turning, inverted-J flange, chemically bonded and through-bolted on six-inch centers - a detail both SAILING Magazine and Spinsheet singled out on different models decades apart. Keels were molded separately from the hull in heavily laminated biaxial glass, then filled with ballast and sealed with a resin slurry for watertightness.
The 26RK, introduced in 2005, kept that same no-wood, all-fiberglass approach - a blister-resistant vinylester gelcoat, chopped-strand-mat skin coat, and triaxial fabrics, per Good Old Boat's review - but added Hake's patented retracting-keel mechanism: a vertically retracting foil raised and lowered by an electric winch, paired with a manually operated, retractable rudder, a carbon-fiber mast, a cat rig, and a small diesel engine. That same review documented an early design issue: boats built from 2005 to roughly 2009 used an 800-pound lead bulb attached to the keel blade with fiberglass, which could come loose, and their rudders could not retract fully into the hull. By 2010, per an owner quoted in the review, Hake had switched to a bolt-on lead bulb and redesigned the rudder to lift completely into its cassette. The 32RK followed the same retracting-foil philosophy in 2006, and the 46RK - the line's 2012 flagship and the largest boat to come out of the Hake yard - carried that philosophy into a larger hull; SAIL called it a nicely constructed, well-styled boat, and Hake said at the time he hoped to eventually add a cantilevered mast so it could clear low bridges.
Lines and generations
Seaward's roster splits into two distinct eras rather than one continuous line. The earlier, fixed-keel boats included the 22 and 24 (both mid-1980s), the 23 (introduced in the mid-1980s, built until 2002, dropped, one reviewer suggested, for sitting too close in size to the 25), the 25 (on the market from 1984, redesigned in 1997, and by 2000 approaching its 600th hull, per SAILING Magazine), the 19-foot Fox (built 1993-2007, a development of an earlier 1981 Slipper 17 hull), and the 32-foot Eagle centerboarder. Practical Sailor's snapshot of total production, at the time of its review, put the company's output at roughly 2,000 dinghies, 1,000 Foxes, 300 23-footers, and 591 25-footers. The later RK series - the 26RK (2005), 32RK (2006), and 46RK (2012) - replaced fixed keels with Hake's retracting mechanism; Good Old Boat's 2023 review counted about 250 26RKs built to that point, against roughly 2,300 Seaward Yachts built worldwide across the whole range. At the time of the 2015 Traditional Watercraft deal, Hake Yachts also had plans for a 19RK and a 40RK alongside the existing 26RK, 32RK, and 46RK.
Who Seaward is for
Seaward has always built for sailors who want to reach places deep-keel boats can't - protected, shoal cruising grounds, or a boat that can come home on a trailer - without giving up a keelboat's stability underway. The fixed-keel classics suit buyers who want the mechanical simplicity Hake built into his early hulls; the RK series suits those who want that same shallow-draft capability paired with a retracting mechanism engineered, tested, and refined by the same designer across four decades.
