Spindrift sailboats: three builders, one borrowed name
"Spindrift" is not a boatbuilder. It's a name that unrelated builders in three countries reused for entirely different boats across three decades, and a shopper who finds it in a listing needs to work out which lineage they're actually looking at: a 1960s Canadian plywood dinghy, an early-1980s Florida-built trailerable stamped from someone else's molds, or a larger Taiwanese cutter. The model number, not the name on the transom, is what separates them.
The Vandestadt & McGruer Spindrift 13
The name's best-documented origin is in Owen Sound, Ontario, where Hubert Vandestadt and Fraser McGruer began building the Spindrift 13, a marine-plywood dinghy, in 1963. They ultimately built 800 of them — a sales success that let the two quit their day jobs and, by their own account, put Owen Sound on the boatbuilding map through the 1960s. Vandestadt had naval-architecture training and was working for an engineering company in Oakville that sent him to Russel Brothers in Owen Sound, where he met McGruer, before the two set out on their own.
The dinghy's success carried the partnership forward: by 1968 they had outgrown their original workshop for a production plant at Balmy Beach and turned to fiberglass, starting with the 11-foot Skunk, followed by the Siren 17 in 1974 (about 3,200 built) and the 28-foot Sirius, the yard's largest boat, in 1982. A 1984 fire and the high interest rates of the early 1980s wore the company down; Hubert Vandestadt said that by 1988 the firm was working without the bank, in what he called the toughest period in its history, and Vandestadt & McGruer declared bankruptcy before the year was out.
The Rebel Industries Spindrift line
A different, unrelated company put the same name on a different family of boats nearly two decades later, a country away. Florida-based Rebel Industries bought the molds for the Spectrum 22 and also acquired Wellcraft, builder of the Starwind line. Designer Jim Taylor, whose Spectrum 22 became the basis for one of these boats, said Rebel "bought existing tooling from Spectrum and Wellcraft, and produced a confusing variety of boats under both the Spindrift and Starwind trade names." Rebel re-tooled the Spectrum 22's interior and sold the result as the Spindrift 22; its hull, deck, and appendages were unchanged from the Spectrum tooling, and probably fewer than 50 were built. Taylor said Rebel never paid him for the rights to use his design. A related Taylor design, the Starwind/Spindrift 19, sold better, numbering more than 400 boats. Taylor later said his Precision Boatworks line, beginning with the P-18, was a direct evolution of the Spectrum 22 and Starwind 19 designs Rebel had sold as Spindrift and Starwind, and that the Spindrift 22 looks very much like the later Precision 21 and 23.
Rebel also put the Spindrift name on a boat with no Taylor connection at all. In 1980 the company began building "Spindrift One Design" boats on the O'Day Mariner's own molds, starting with Hull No. 4000, and completed 78 of them. The episode that defines this line, per the Mariner Class Association: Spindrift's president, John Barnett, brought a new factory boat, No. 4037, to the 1981 Mariner Nationals. Reputed to be about 40 percent lighter than the boats O'Day built, it won the regatta — and the class's officers retroactively revoked its measurement certificate and re-scored the results.
Other boats named Spindrift
The name turns up elsewhere in the catalog with less certainty behind it. Larger Spindrift cutters built in Taiwan carry a designer credit that no authority-tier source could corroborate. And a Spindrift 15 is credited in the catalog to fiberglass-boatbuilding pioneer Ray Greene — a credit no available source confirms.
What the Spindrift name doesn't tell you
Because three unrelated builders share the name, a prospective owner has to identify which lineage a given boat comes from before judging it by reputation. A Spindrift 13 is a simple, small plywood daysailer from a Canadian yard that no longer exists. A Spindrift 22 or 19 is a low-volume Florida trailerable built on tooling designed for other boats entirely. A Spindrift Mariner is a boat whose class legitimacy was disputed the year it debuted. None of the branches share parts, a class association, or a support network — the name is the only thing they have in common.
