Shearwater sailboats: one name, three unrelated boats
"Shearwater" does not identify a single manufacturer. It names three entirely unrelated boats that happen to share a name across different decades and continents: the Shearwater III, a 16.5-foot racing catamaran built by the Prout family on Canvey Island, Essex, beginning in the 1950s and credited as the boat that launched Prout Catamarans; the Shearwater 28, a Phil Bolger-designed shoal-draft cat-yawl built in small numbers by Edey & Duff of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, from 1985 to 1997; and the Shearwater 39 and 45, South African offshore cruisers designed by Dudley Dix and built in Cape Town from the early 1990s. None of the three companies ever worked together, and a buyer should establish which Shearwater is which before anything else.
Origins and ownership
The Prout lineage began with G. Prout and Sons — called Prout Folding Boats in some records, likely the same business under different names — formed in 1935 by Geoffrey Prout and his sons Roland and Francis, originally to build canoes and folding dinghies as yacht tenders. After the Second World War the family opened a small factory on Canvey Island, in Essex. Roland and Francis Prout were champion kayak racers picked to represent Britain at the 1952 Olympics; lashing racing kayaks to a bamboo platform under a lugsail and dinghy jib, their early catamaran experiments led them to design and build Shearwater I, which won every local race it entered and then took a "D" class handicap outright at the 1954 Burnham-on-Crouch regatta. Collaboration with other designers produced the smaller, more easily trailed Shearwater III, which Roland and Francis entered in the first Cross-Channel Dinghy Race from Folkestone to Boulogne in 1956, beating every leading racing-dinghy helmsman of the day — Uffa Fox included — by more than an hour; the class, since credited as the world's first production catamaran with sail numbers past 2,000, won Royal Yachting Association recognition by 1959. Roland and Francis went on to found Prout Catamarans, which built the first multihull to circumnavigate the globe in 1964 and won a Queen's Award for Industry; Roland died in 1997, Francis at 89.
On the American side, Peter Duff and Mait Edey started Edey & Duff in 1968, building the Sam Crocker-designed Stone Horse out of Duff's Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, backyard and living room; the partnership went on to build 150 Stone Horses and nearly 1,200 boats in all, a range that later included the Fatty Knees dinghy, the Herreshoff-designed Doughdish, and the Stuart Knockabout. Duff and Edey sold the company to Tony Andersen, already an owner of three E&D boats, in 1987; in 2007 Harding Boat Works bought the yard from Andersen's estate and took up building under the Edey & Duff name at its Aucoot Cove facility.
In South Africa, the Shearwater 39 was commissioned by Gerfried Nebe of Nebe Boats from designer Dudley Dix, and hulls were built primarily by Jacobs Brothers and, later, Shearwater Marine, in Cape Town.
The designers
Phil Bolger designed the Shearwater 28 as what Edey & Duff called a "big sister" to their earlier Dovekie, a 1978 Bolger design the partnership had already put into production; Bolger found in Edey & Duff a willing partner for both boats. Dudley Dix worked from a starting point shaped by Bruce King's designs and the Cherubini range in producing the Shearwater 39; its larger sibling, the Shearwater 45, can be built with either a cutter or a staysail schooner rig, and one 39 owner has credited both Nebe and Dix for the design's success.
Construction through the eras
The Shearwater III has stayed a restricted class rather than a strict one-design since its debut, letting it evolve and take on new ideas over the decades. The Shearwater 28's hull and deck are built as a sandwich of 1/8-inch unidirectional E-glass and polyester skins around a 3/4-inch Airex foam core. The Shearwater 39 was offered in GRP, aluminum, or timber, with detailing worked out for cold-molded timber construction as well, and carries a NACA-foil keel with external bolt-on lead ballast; one longtime owner, writing on the designer's own site, said he found it hard to believe only about 25 of each size — the 39 and the 45 — had been built.
Who Shearwater is for
A buyer chasing the roots of modern cruising catamarans should look to the Prout-built Shearwater III, the class that helped establish Roland and Francis Prout before they founded Prout Catamarans. A buyer drawn to a small, shoal-draft, Bolger-designed cat-yawl should look to the rare Shearwater 28, of which Edey & Duff built only 11. A buyer wanting a South African-built bluewater cruiser from Dudley Dix should look to the Shearwater 39 or its larger sibling, the 45 — and confirm, in every case, which of the three unrelated Shearwaters is actually behind the listing.
