Soverel sailboats: one family yard, two very different eras
Soverel Marine was a single Florida boatbuilder — a yard in North Palm Beach that Bill Soverel built and put his own name on — but "Soverel" on a hull can point to either of two designers depending on when it was built. Bill Soverel drew his own cruising and MORC-racing designs through the company's early decades; his son Mark Soverel later became a race-boat designer in his own right, credited with a faster, lighter generation of boats headlined by the Soverel 33. The two men's work shouldn't be crossed: Bill's boats and Mark's boats come from different design hands and different eras of the same family company.
Origins and ownership
Bill Soverel — a former Navy commander who spent World War II chasing submarines and retired from the service at 43 after 23 years as a flier — built his sailboats in a white concrete-block plant on a quiet inlet in North Palm Beach, Florida, affixing the Soverel name to everything that came out of it. By 1971 he had come to specialize in the production and sale of racing sailboats, treating race wins as central to the company's marketing; his wife ran the business's paperwork from an office decorated with nautical charts while he worked on design.
Mark Soverel, Bill's son, grew the company into a second generation as an accomplished raceboat designer, sailor, and boatbuilder in his own right. When the boatbuilding industry hit a recession in the 1980s, Mark transitioned into a career as a residential land developer; he died at 52 on January 3, 2002, from cancer.
The designers
Bill Soverel's own boats held their own on the racecourse: his Soverel 30 won Midget Ocean Racing Class honors at Block Island Week in 1971, duplicating the same model's 1969 victory in the same event. Because Florida's coastal water runs so shallow, he also designed a keel-centerboard boat for the 1971 manufacturers' One-Design race.
One outside naval architect contributed occasionally. Waltman Mayo Walters, born in 1926 to the Minnesota family that founded the Mayo Clinic, designed a few sailboats for his friend Bill Soverel. Walters was primarily a powerboat man — he studied aeronautical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before switching to mechanical engineering, relocated to Florida in 1956, and cut his teeth in the boatbuilding business at Bertram Yachts just as it was formed in the early 1960s, where Dick Bertram hired him as production engineer for the Bertram 31. Over a career that produced many dozens of boats for builders including Donzi, Chris-Craft, Luhrs, Starcraft, and Aquasport, and reached as far as Denmark and Uruguay, the handful of sailboats he drew for Bill Soverel were a side project set against a powerboat career; Walters died at 89.
Mark Soverel — "a world-class racer," in Practical Sailor's own description — became the yard's own race-boat designer, credited with the Soverel 26, a MORC winner, and the Soverel 33, an ultralight production-racer built as a successor to that winning 26-footer. His design credits ran beyond the production line too: the one-tonner Moody Blue, the 39-foot Volition, and — probably his most famous — the 43-foot Locura, which represented the United States at the 1983 Admiral's Cup. Several boats carried the Locura name, all built for owners George deGuurdiola and Ricardo Vadia. Sailor Peter Isler, who raced aboard Locura with Mark, called him "the best downwind driver" he'd ever met, as Sailing World's obituary of Mark recalled.
Construction through the eras
Bill Soverel's boats answered to their home water: shallow Florida coastal conditions were reason enough for him to design at least one keel-centerboard boat rather than a fixed-keel design for the 1971 manufacturers' One-Design race. Mark's signature boat took construction in a different direction. The Soverel 33 launched in 1983, was primarily intended as a one-design fleet — an ambition that never quite came to pass — and introduced an open stern and an unusual 15/16 fractional rig, a combination credited with ushering in the sport-boat genre. Production ran across four different builders, from Bill Soverel's own Florida plant to Republic Boats and George Olson's Pacific Yachts in California and, later, Tartan Yachts in North Carolina and then Ohio, with each yard varying its coring materials and finish level; built in four hull, liner, and deck modules, the roughly 90 completed hulls stand as the best-documented chapter of the entire Soverel story.
Lines and generations
Bill's era produced the yard's cruising and MORC-racing line: models such as the 28, 30, 36, 37, 38, 41, and 48. Mark's race-boat era arrived later and ran narrower and faster, headlined by the 26 and the 33. Across both eras, Soverel Marine's production run spans 1961 to 1990.
Who Soverel is for
A Soverel buyer is choosing between two different boats wearing one name. Bill Soverel's cruising and MORC-racing designs suit someone drawn to a self-taught yard founder's own hand and a company built around actual racecourse results. Mark Soverel's boats suit a different buyer entirely: his race boats produced an Admiral's Cup contender in Locura, and a driver — Mark himself — that Peter Isler rated among the best he'd ever raced against downwind.
