Sundeer sailboats: the only Dashew design ever built as a true production run
By Steve and Linda Dashew's own account, the Sundeer name began with a 68-foot prototype ketch they found comfortable in every kind of sea state — so pleasant a ride that the production series that followed took her name. Where the Dashews' earlier Deerfoot yachts had been custom-built in fiberglass and aluminum at several yards on a sporadic basis, the Sundeer 56, 60, and 64 went into genuine series production: the only Dashew design line ever built that way.
Origins and ownership
Steve and Linda Dashew came to yacht design and building almost by accident. They sold their house and a construction business, bought a stoutly built Columbia 50 racer/cruiser, and set out on what was meant to be a nine-month Pacific voyage; it became a six-year circumnavigation. Before boats, Steve had run International Fiberglass, a business that turned out giant fiberglass "muffler men," roadside cowboys, and other advertising figures for Fortune 500 companies through the 1960s and '70s — an unlikely apprenticeship in mold-making that later underwrote his boatbuilding. Back from the circumnavigation and before they could build a boat for themselves, Steve's father — a separate figure, Stanley Dashew, who once said his son was probably conceived on a sailboat — and a family friend each asked Steve to build one for them first, and that is how the Dashews entered the boatbuilding business. Before Sundeer, they built two boats for their own use: the 72-foot flush-deck ketch Wakaroa, which logged roughly 100,000 nautical miles, and the 62-foot Intermezzo II, which weathered a Cape Hatteras storm of roughly 25-foot seas spaced less than three boat-lengths apart while regularly touching speeds in the high teens and low 20s, an experience that fed directly into the hull shape the Dashews carried forward into Sundeer. That shape had roots earlier still, in a New Zealand-built cruiser named Innismara that the Dashews sailed during their circumnavigation — 60 feet on the waterline, a 10-foot beam, virtually no overhangs — a proportion that became the template for Deerfoot and then Sundeer. Steve is credited as the designer of the Deerfoot, Sundeer, and Beowulf series; Linda is his equal partner in Dashew Offshore, the company behind them, and every one of their books carries both their names.
Construction through the eras
Dashew's underlying concept — a long, narrow, fast bluewater boat a couple could sail together — first took shape in the Deerfoot line, which introduced the first swim platform on a boat of its kind along with fore-and-aft watertight bulkheads and an aft engine room. Sundeer refined it: a full-roach mainsail, powerful but easy to reef, replaced Deerfoot's more modest rig, and the line kept the high-roached mains, swept-back spreaders, rounded bilge sections, and narrow beam that reduced pitching. Every Dashew hull, Sundeer included, was built with fore-and-aft watertight bulkheads and extra-heavy scantlings, simply enough rigged that an autopilot and a couple could manage it underway; because a long, narrow hull carries good directional stability without needing a tall rig to drive it, the keel could be kept short and shallow. Production ran from 1994 to 1999 at TPI — Tillotson Pearson Industrial Composites — in Rhode Island, where hull and deck were laid up in quadraxial and biaxial glass cloth set in vinylester resin, vacuum-bagged over a balsa core using TPI's proprietary SCRIMP resin-infusion process.
Lines and generations
The Sundeer line was tightly focused: just three models, the 64, 60, and 56 — the only Dashew designs ever built on a true production basis, where Deerfoot had been sporadic and spread across several locations. The cutter-rigged 60 and 56 shared an identical hull, the 60 differing only by four extra feet of lazarette space built onto the transom, and both were seen as truer expressions of Dashew's original design intent than the larger, ketch-rigged 64. Sailing writer Charles Doane put total Sundeer production at 27 boats, nine of them 60s. Dashew rated performance across his career in the same terms throughout: Deerfoots as roughly 200-mile-a-day boats, Sundeers at 230, and the later Beowulf — at the top of the same design arc that eventually led on to the Dashews' FPB power cruisers — at 300. The line went out of production after its short run, and the last hull built made her delivery trip from Rhode Island to Florida through two February gales.
Who Sundeer is for
A Sundeer buyer wants a boat built to one couple's own bluewater design philosophy rather than to a mass-market production line: a hull descended in a straight line from the Dashews' own ocean passages, built in numbers small enough that finding one at all is the first challenge, and engineered from the start to be short-handed by two people crossing an ocean rather than daysailed by a crowd.
