Standfast sailboats: a Breskens family yard renamed after a whisky brand
Standfast is the boatbuilding name a single Dutch family, the Maases of Breskens, gave their yard in 1973, midway through a father-to-son handover -- and the brand carries their whole story: a wartime rebuilding, one son's design talent, and a client's taste in whisky.
Origins and ownership
Jaap Maas worked in Breskens as a carpenter, boat builder, and designer; after the Second World War left the town heavily damaged, he resumed those trades there. In 1950, when timber dealer Schoenmaker left for Terneuzen, Jaap and his brother Krijn took over the harbor's timber shed and founded Jachtwerf Gebroeders Maas -- the Maas Brothers Shipyard. Jaap's son Frans, a Breskens native born in 1937, joined the family firm in the 1950s, and it was only once Frans's own designs began arriving that the yard broke through commercially. The business was renamed Jachtwerf Frans Maas N.V. in 1968, and in 1973 Jaap officially handed the reins to Frans. At that same moment the yard took the name Standfast Yachts, borrowed from a whisky brand belonging to Charley Gordon, a Scottish whisky distiller living in Brussels who bought yachts from the firm, chosen because it read as more international than the family name. Frans Maas also served as house designer for the separate Dutch builder Zaadnoordijk Yachtbuilders, credited with its Compromis and C-Yacht lines. Ownership passed to Breskens Yacht Service in 2008 after setbacks along the way.
Construction through the eras
Frans Maas began tank-testing his Standfast designs at Delft as early as 1971, when a hull he called the Standfast 43 was towed there; that model became the starting point of the systematic design series that underlay the IMS VPP. (This 1971 tank hull predates, and shouldn't be assumed identical to, any Standfast 43 later sold under that model name.) Standfast's early-1970s Standfast 40 was built with a fiberglass hull; by the late 1970s the Frans Maas-designed Standfast 33 paired a fiberglass hull and deck with a sandwich-cored deck meant to insulate against cold water and cut condensation in the cabin.
Lines and generations
Most of Frans Maas's output, by his own yard's account, consisted of one-off designs, but the Standfast line and its smaller sibling, the Loper -- built in roughly 120 examples -- stood out for being produced in real numbers, alongside some 700 yachts across about 150 designs built over the yard's prosperous years, often for international clients. Breskens' reputation as a building town drew outside talent too: American designers Ted Hood and Dick Carter both chose it to build their own boats. In 2002, Standfast published "Frans Maas One-off!," a retrospective with contributions from figures including Jacques Rogge, Jelle Gerritsma, Olin Stephens, Rob Zaadnoordijk, Wolter Huisman, Ted Hood, German Frers, and Piet Vroon.
Who Standfast is for
Frans Maas died in 2017 after his own sailing yacht capsized off Ostend, likely following a sudden keel failure. His yard's legacy is a Dutch family boatbuilding line that ran on his own design work practically start to finish -- a fit for buyers drawn to a small-yard, single-designer pedigree over a mass-production one, and for anyone who wants a boat with a documented, if occasionally setback-marked, ownership history behind it.
