Sirius sailboats: two unrelated builders sharing one name
Anyone researching a used Sirius sailboat needs to sort out which builder made it before anything else about the boat matters. The name belongs to two separate companies with no ownership or design connection: Sirius-Werft, a German yard in Plön that has built deck-saloon cruisers continuously since the early 1970s, and Vandestadt and McGruer, a Canadian builder in Owen Sound, Ontario that produced a handful of smaller keelboats in the 1970s and 1980s before going out of business. One has stayed a Schmidt family business across three generations; the other went bankrupt in 1988. Each is covered separately below.
Origins and ownership
The German yard's history begins one step before its own name. A predecessor design called the Waran-Cruiser, with deck and rig plans by Dr. Jüs Segger, sold 17 boats at the Hamburg boat show — a result strong enough that it led directly to Sirius-Werft's founding. Klaus Peter Schmidt, born in 1940, was the founder. In 1971 the first boat actually named Sirius, designed by Heribert Streuer, replaced the Waran in the yard's lineup, followed shortly by the 23 and then the 24. As demand grew beyond what Sirius-Werft could build itself, production of the 26 and the first 31s and 33s was handed to the Grell shipyard in Lübeck; the foundation for the yard's own current production site in Plön was laid in 1977. Ownership has stayed in the Schmidt family: Klaus Peter handed production management to his son Torsten in the mid-1990s, and Torsten took full control in late 2000. Across more than 55 years, the yard had built around 900 yachts. Klaus Peter Schmidt died in 2025 at 84, having spent eight years of retirement cruising aboard his own Sirius 38 DS.
The Canadian side began separately, in Owen Sound, Ontario. Hubert Vandestadt trained as a naval architect and was working for an engineering firm in Oakville when he was sent to Russel Brothers in Owen Sound, where he met Fraser McGruer. The two put Owen Sound on the boatbuilding map from the 1960s, starting with the plywood Spindrift 13 dinghy in 1963, then the company's first fibreglass boat, the 11-foot Skunk, in 1968 — about 1,200 of which were built. A production plant opened in Balmy Beach that same year and was expanded repeatedly to keep up with orders. The Sirius 21 followed in 1976, restyled into the Sirius 22, and the larger Sirius 28 launched in August 1982 — the biggest boat Vandestadt and McGruer ever built; up to that point, every boat the company had made carried positive flotation. Orders were booked through hull 90 by March 1986. But a 1984 plant fire, compounded by the high interest rates of the early 1980s, put the company under; Vandestadt and McGruer declared bankruptcy by the end of 1988.
The designers
Heribert Streuer designed the original Sirius line for the German yard, starting with the 1971 boat that replaced the Waran. His most personal contribution came later: the Sirius 31, whose lines he drew in 1975 and which, according to Sirius boss Torsten Schmidt, Streuer designed as his own dream boat at the end of his career, then brought to Schmidt's father to build and add to the yard's programme. Naval architect Georg Nissen later designed the Sirius 36, which evolved into the 38 DS. On the Canadian side, Hubert Vandestadt designed the 21, its restyled successor the 22, and the larger 28. One clarification worth stating plainly, since the near-identical names invite confusion: Hubert Vandestadt is the nephew of the well-known Dutch designer E.G. van de Stadt, credited with the 72-foot South African ketch Stormvogel among many other works — a family relationship, not the same person.
Construction through the eras
Sirius-Werft's early boats, including the 26 and the 31, were solid hand-laid fibreglass hulls with balsa-cored decks. The 31 carried a distinctive whale-inspired hump in its underwater lines just ahead of the skeg on its first three hulls, meant to improve stall behavior; its production paused after the 1979 oil shock and resumed from the early 1980s through 1991, when the hull was extended into a deck-saloon version. Around 170 boats were built in that hull shape, 70 of them in the original, non-deck-saloon form. Schmidt developed the deck-saloon concept itself in 1988 — an idea his own boatbuilders reportedly nicknamed the "Kanickelstall," or rabbit hutch, at first — and the yard built its last conventional sailing yacht in 1991. The modern deck-saloon range traces to the 35 DS, launched in 2010 and built, like later Sirius yachts, in hand-laid GRP with a vacuum-adhered sandwich above the waterline in a one-piece mould using vinylester resin and gelcoat.
The Canadian boats followed a separate, shorter construction story: fibreglass hulls built at the Balmy Beach plant from 1968 onward, culminating in the Sirius 28, which could be ordered with an optional winged keel designed by John Hemingway — a naval architect with a background in keel research for the True North America's Cup campaign — aimed at shallow-draft markets like Long Island Sound.
Who Sirius is for
Buyers drawn to Sirius are effectively choosing between two very different boats that happen to share a name. The German yard's deck-saloon cruisers, built by one family business across five decades, appeal to owners who want a still-supported, purpose-built bluewater and coastal cruiser — the kind of boat Yachting Monthly's Chris Beeson asked of the 35 DS, "Is this the best boat ever built?" The Canadian Sirius 21, 22, and 28 are a different proposition entirely: smaller, simpler production keelboats from a yard that stopped building boats in 1988, better suited to buyers focused on an individual well-kept hull than on ongoing manufacturer support.
