Sydney sailboats: an Australian one-design and offshore-racing pedigree that outlasted its founder, a liquidation, and two changes of ownership
Sydney Yachts began as BH Boats, a company founded in the 1980s by Ian Bashford, a designer already known for J-24s and multihulls, which grew into Bashford International as it turned to building semi-custom offshore racers. The company launched its BH36 in 1995, and by the mid-1990s had grown to around 60 staff at a larger facility on Cumberland Avenue in South Nowra. Bashford's sudden death in 1996, at 37, could have ended the venture; instead his wife Louise, together with Martin "Tacka" Thompson and Mark Rowed, kept the company running, and by the end of that year it had been restructured around a new project that would become the Sydney 38. The Sydney name has since carried through changes of ownership, a 2009 liquidation, and a move to a Croatian shipyard, but the throughline across all of it is the racing pedigree Bashford started and the design partnership — chiefly the Australian firm of Murray, Burns & Dovell — that gave it form.
Origins and ownership
After Bashford's death, the reorganized company took the Sydney Yachts name, and the 36-footer he had launched lived on under it. Sydney Yachts became a division of Azzura Marine, itself born out of BH Boats and Bashford International. Iain Murray — in a role separate from any design credit — invested heavily in Azzura Marine in the years before 2009 to keep the company operating. That support wasn't enough: on 21 October 2009, Azzura Marine Nowra Pty Ltd went into voluntary liquidation, a casualty of the rising Australian dollar and the global economic downturn's effect on the luxury-yacht building industry. By then the group's three brands were Azzura Yachts, Marten Yachts, and SRC Yachts — Sydney Yachts under a new internal name. Deloitte was appointed liquidator and, to recoup funds, sold the Sydney Yachts brand in 2010 to a new owner, who contracted Mark Rowed's newly formed Innovation Composites, staffed by former Azzura builders, to keep building boats at the old Nowra site. Since 2013, Sydney Yachts has built its boats in Croatia at the facility of AD Boats, a company founded in 2002 in partnership with AD Plastik, whose composite-handling capability expanded further in 2007 when the Prevent Group linked into AD Boats' operation.
The designers
Murray, Burns & Dovell was Sydney Yachts' design partner across its Nowra-built era, credited on the 41, 36, 36CR, and 38. Iain Murray, the firm's principal, was a six-time world champion in 18-foot skiff racing before adding world titles in 12 Metre, Etchells, and maxi classes, campaigning in the Sydney-Hobart, and spending decades in the America's Cup. His partner Andy Dovell — designer of record for three consecutive Australian America's Cup challenges — was the firm's hands-on point man on the water: he led the Sydney 36 design and, in 1999, drew the hull of the Sydney 38, working from the firm's offices at the Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club at Newport. Bashford International's first Sydney 41, Raptor, was an MBD design that was announced overall winner of the 50th Sydney to Hobart within days of launching, sailing to the start "out of the box" from the factory. Years later, Sydney Yachts evaluated a collaboration with Ker Yacht Design at the 2009 Voiles de St Tropez, campaigning a Ker53; that partnership produced the Sydney GTS range, which Darren Williams said was built for southern-ocean conditions consistent with the brand's history.
Construction through the eras
The Sydney 38 — later described by the builder as probably the most successful Australian one-design ever produced — set the pattern that carried into a decade of Sydney models. Hull construction paired polyester and vinylester resins with a balsa-cored hull and PVC foam-cored deck, built to ISO 9002 standards, with an internal one-piece fiberglass grid tying the keel, mast, engine, and rudder together to stiffen the hull; the design carried an open transom for cockpit drainage, a swept-spreader rig with non-overlapping headsails, and a T-bulb keel, and, since carbon rigs were still pricey when the boat was drawn, kept an aluminium mast to control costs. Dovell had detuned the design from the larger Sydney 40, developed for the Admiral's Cup, giving the 38 a more forgiving keel, rudder, and rig at two feet shorter. At peak production the South Nowra factory employed around 110 staff, including apprentices, ultimately building around 65 hulls, with build time falling from roughly 4,500 labour hours for hull No. 1 to about 2,750 by hull No. 65 — a run whose one-design integrity was maintained by weighing and measuring every component and by independent class measurement.
Toward the end of 2005, Sydney Yachts asked Dovell to revisit the 36 design, giving it a modern swept-back double-spreader rig, a new deck, and a heavier keel to create the 36CR; the revision traded the earlier boat's closed transom for an open aft section, grew the interior, made the rig more efficient, and, most consequentially, dramatically increased stability with a modern bulbed keel. The 39CR, built on the Sydney 38's hull, keel, and rudder, carried forward a construction detail the builder called a Sydney Yachts trademark: carbon-fiber chainplates moulded directly into the hull rather than penetrating the deck, widening the shroud base and eliminating a common source of deck leaks. The Sydney 46 came from what one design review credited to the "Australian Iain Murray Group" — distinct from the Murray, Burns & Dovell credit used elsewhere in the lineup — with a tank-tested hull built in Kevlar, E-glass, PVC foam, and vinylester resin, vacuum-bagged throughout, with epoxy offered as an option.
Lines and generations
Sydney's lineup splits between one-design racers built to strict class rules and cruiser-racers built for shorthanded offshore work, spanning from the 1992-launched Sydney 41 through 2000s cruiser-racers like the 47CR and 39CR. The Sydney 32, designed like the 38 by Murray, Burns & Dovell, was built as its "little sister," with one-design rules already in place for the class. The 36, its 2005 36CR revision, and the 39CR extended that cruiser-racer thread, while the later GTS range, developed with Ker Yacht Design, carried the same racing intent into the brand's later chapter.
Who Sydney is for
A Sydney is, at its core, a raceboat with cruising concessions layered on afterward — a lineage of one-designs and offshore racers whose hull, keel, and rig choices trace to a specific design partnership rather than a broad cruising brief. Buyers drawn to a Sydney-to-Hobart-proven design pedigree, and comfortable with a brand whose builder and ownership have changed more than once across four decades, are the audience this lineup has built for since Bashford's first 41.
