Southerly sailboats: swing-keel cruisers built to dry out on their own bottoms
Northshore Yachts was formed in Itchenor, on England's Chichester Harbour, in 1971 by Bryan Moffatt, and the first boat to carry the Southerly name — a Bennett-designed 28 — launched in 1975. Northshore billed itself as "world leaders in swing-keel yachts" and said it had been building "variable-draft cruisers" since that year; Yachting World later described the Southerly brand itself as having "formed in 1978," the same year Northshore commissioned the American designer Dick Carter to refine the swing-keel concept. Whichever date marks the true start, the identity was set early and has held since: yachts whose keels swing up to reduce draft for shallow anchorages and drying moorings, and swing down again for genuine passage-making. What hasn't held is who builds them — the name has passed through several owners and multiple company collapses since Moffatt sold up, and which era produced a given hull matters almost as much as the model number.
Origins and ownership
Lester Abbott bought Northshore from Moffatt in 2003 and invested heavily in expanding the range, building two new factory buildings at Itchenor, the second opened by Princess Anne in 2010; at its peak the yard employed 165 people between the Itchenor shipyard and a moulding operation in Havant. Northshore Yachts went into voluntary liquidation in April 2013, citing a "dramatic decline in orders for delivery in 2013 and early 2014"; The Times reported substantial debts to suppliers, unpaid redundancy obligations, and money owed to its outside swing-keel supplier, Iron Brothers. The business re-emerged within weeks, trading as Southerly Yachts — a limited company that had, in fact, been incorporated more than a decade earlier — building on the same Itchenor site under two of the same three directors. It kept its intellectual property because the Southerly brand had always resided in a separate company from the rest of the business's assets; Abbott told The Times he had re-employed half of his 125 staff and would repay suppliers "over a long period of time."
The rescue didn't last. Southerly Yachts collapsed again in August 2014, just thirteen months after emerging from the first receivership still carrying substantial debt; the collapse cost 50 jobs. Once again, the land and buildings at Itchenor — owned separately by Sunchalk Ltd — and the moulds and intellectual property to the Southerly, Fisher and Vancouver brands (Northshore built all three) stayed out of the receiver's reach. That separation of brand from operating company is a large part of why "Southerly" kept surviving collapses that, on paper, looked terminal.
Discovery Yacht Group acquired the Southerly range in 2017; its managing director, Sean Langdon, said he had wanted to buy the brand for years and concluded the only way to restart it "was with another prominent brand," so he bought Discovery first and then Southerly. The deal covered the moulds and the name but not the Itchenor people or buildings, since the brand's assets reportedly had never been held in the company's own name; Northshore Yacht Services stayed on at Itchenor as an approved Southerly refit and repair centre and brokerage, while new Southerly models moved to Discovery's Marchwood yard, built to Discovery's own interior-finish standard. Discovery's shipyard went into voluntary liquidation in January 2022 — the pandemic, falling orders and supply-chain trouble were blamed — putting 77 people out of work. Ocean Shipyard, run by Discovery's former general manager Steve Edwards from Discovery's old Southampton yard, picked up exclusive rights to hand-build the Southerly 42, 48 and Bluewater 50 catamaran through the interim. Concept Yachts bought the brand in 2023 and moved construction to its own Marchwood facility; a year in, founder Kevin Viles said the operation was "fully up and running and onto our fourth customer within a year of taking over the company." Southerly planned to mark its 50th birthday in 2025 with an anniversary-edition flagship.
The designers
John Bennett designed the original 1975 Southerly 28. In 1978, Northshore commissioned Dick Carter — then one of the most sought-after racing-boat designers in the world — to refine the swing-keel concept; Carter went on to draw the 105, the 48-foot ketch flagship 145 of the early 1980s, and several other models, all sharing single, shallow-draft centerline rudders and hefty, wedge-shaped keels. When Abbott bought the company in 2003, Rob Humphreys took over the design brief, starting with a retrofit of the S135 that gave it a dual-rudder system; he also reworked the keel into a higher-lift, foil-like shape, thickened into a bulb at the bottom to carry more sail. Humphreys later said the change of ownership brought a change of philosophy — the boats had "used to be sort of motorsailers" — and the focus shifted toward performance. That shift continued with a later design pool of Ed Dubois, Humphreys and Stephen Jones: the 57 RS, Northshore's first design over 50 feet, was also its first collaboration with Dubois, and the newer Southerlys that followed became genuine performance cruisers, capable of holding their own against many fin-keelers while still able to be nudged onto a beach.
Construction through the eras
Construction has tracked ownership. Under Discovery from 2017, new Southerlys were built at Marchwood to Discovery's own higher interior-finish standard. Under Concept Yachts since 2023, the Marchwood build applies Concept's superyacht production standards, with more resin infusion in the lamination process, an in-house milling machine and 3D printer for millimetre-accurate fit-out, and a more modular approach to interior work. Across all of it, the swing keel itself has stayed the constant: combined with a twin-rudder arrangement on later boats, it lets a Southerly reach shallow anchorages and dry out on its own bottom in tidal water, and it can be trimmed underway to improve downwind performance on long passages.
Who Southerly is for
For a long time, the trade-off was real: Southerly's early "wedge-of-cheese" keels and shallow single rudders meant giving up speed and pointing for shallow-draft, creek-crawling convenience, and the boats found favour mainly among cruising sailors willing to make that trade. The later Dubois/Humphreys/Jones generation narrowed that gap without giving up the shoal-draft trick — the real pitch for anyone weighing a Southerly against a conventional fin-keeler: a boat that can cross an ocean and still poke into water a deep-keel yacht can't touch. Well over 750 had been built by the time Practical Sailor surveyed the range, and Yachting World counted more than 900 owners worldwide by 2017 — enough of a base that buyers aren't chasing a rare, one-off design.
