Tanton sailboats: a designer's name, not a single yard's mark
A "Tanton" on the used market is a boat built to Yves-Marie Tanton's designs, not a boat that came off a Tanton-owned production line. Tanton's boats "get built one at a time," in his words, and they have gone up in 40 different countries — a design office's reach rather than a single manufacturer's output. That range includes numerous French civil servants who, posted to French overseas departments, have spent off-duty hours welding together and fitting out Tanton's steel, constant-angle hull designs as amateur projects.
Origins and ownership
Tanton was already something of a design prodigy in his native France before he emigrated to the United States, landing in New York on a wintry afternoon in March 1971 with next to nothing in his pocket and an interview appointment at the design office of Sparkman & Stephens. He did not take that path; instead he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where at the beginning of 1974 — after three and a half years as Design Director at Carter Offshore, in his words "one of the best Yacht Design firms in the world" — he set up his own design studio, Tanton Yacht Design. To generate cash for the fledgling business he also opened a yacht brokerage, hiring Joe Smith and Billy Rudkin to bring in clients, and took on a partner, George Brandariz, to qualify for a Small Business Administration loan incentive program. Business was slow at first; small commissions eventually arrived, among them an order for a One-Tonner. Tanton worked for years out of an office above the Newport post office, overlooking the harbor.
The designers
Tanton's fascination with yacht design, designers, and ocean racing took hold when he was 16. As a young sailor in Europe he crewed aboard a string of Illingworth & Primrose designs — Eider 2, Chin Blue, Maryka, Oryx, Monk of Malham, and Merle of Malham — racing from the Mediterranean to England, Holland, and Denmark; he became acquainted with designer John Illingworth that way, by sailing on his boats, rather than by working in his office. Racing sharpened his eye for where design was heading: skippering Maryka to 12th place in a 24-boat fleet, he recognized Dick Carter's designs as the coming wave, and at the 1966 One Ton Cup in Denmark he watched Carter's Tina beat every professional yacht designer in the fleet. He had already resolved, after reading the word "genius" attached to Britton Chance's work in a French magazine in the 1960s, to work for someone like that; while employed in André Mauric's office on the 12-Metre Challenge for Baron Bich's America's Cup campaign, he met Chance during construction of the trial horse Chancegger in Switzerland. Tanton later approached Chance about a design job in his U.S. office and applied to Sparkman & Stephens as well; his Green Card arrived sponsored by Chance, Olin Stephens, and Rod Stephens, but Chance was not yet ready to employ him, and though Sparkman & Stephens offered him a start the following Monday, Tanton did not want to work in New York City. Within days he was hired by Dick Carter instead, leading the design staff at Carter Offshore — based in a converted World War II submarine-spotting tower at Nahant, Massachusetts — while Carter flew around the world signing clients. The two kept working together after Tanton went independent: he later had the Admiral's Cup winner Frigate built for Carter at the same yard and in the same cold-molded construction as the Illingworth & Primrose design Outlaw.
Construction through the eras
Branton Yachts opened on East Main Road in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1976 and began building Tanton-designed IOR boats in the era's fashionable medium, the Gougeon Brothers' wood-and-epoxy WEST System. By 1979 a cat-ketch-rigged Tanton 43 carried carbon-fiber spars filament-wound on a machine otherwise used to make Department of Defense missile nose cones, work that has left Tanton remembered as a pioneer of carbon-fiber spar development and an expert in engineering efficient construction for builders worldwide. That commercial-yard work has run alongside a steady stream of owner-built steel hulls, including boats French civil servants have welded together and fitted out during postings in France's overseas departments — one more expression of a design practice built around one-off, small-yard, and owner construction rather than a single factory.
Lines and generations
Tanton's IOR-era portfolio produced several winning designs — Desperado, Special Edition, and Scaramouche — plus Love Machine, the subject of a widely circulated photo series from the 1975 Miami-Nassau Race; Cruising World noted that despite that record, no sailing-magazine writers or editors sought Tanton out for an interview at the time. The last boat built at Branton Yachts' East Main Road shop was Circus Maximus, Tanton's take on the IOR sled concept, launched about six months after Bill Lee's West Coast sled Merlin; she went on to take line honors in the 1978 Newport-Bermuda Race and set a Marblehead-to-Halifax Race record that stood for ten years. Outside the raceboat line, Tanton designed the 68-foot cat schooner Magie Noire, which spent years quietly crossing the Atlantic each charter season, diversified into T-boats — commercial passenger vessels — including the aluminum, chine-built Sightsailer daysailer built for simplicity by a Louisiana commercial yard, and backed up his sailing catalog with a line of lobster yachts drawn from both his own hulls and the work of Maine boatbuilding masters.
Who Tanton is for
A Tanton suits a buyer drawn to a single designer's pedigree rather than a shipyard's brand name — someone weighing an IOR-era raceboat with a documented record like Circus Maximus's Newport-Bermuda line honors, a cat-ketch cruiser carrying an early carbon-fiber rig, or an owner-built steel one-off against its individual construction history rather than a factory standard. Because Tanton's boats have been built by dozens of different yards and owner-builders across 40 countries, the design behind a given hull matters more than assuming any two examples were finished the same way.
