Taswell sailboats: Taiwan-built luxury cruisers from a single design partnership
Taswell is a line of luxury cruising sailboats built by Ta Shing Yacht Building Ltd, the Taiwanese yard based in Tainan, and designed in full by the British naval architect Bill Dixon. A center cockpit became a Taswell signature across the range, paired with the builder's upscale detailing — rich teak decks, a plush interior, and premium gear, as Cruising World described it.
Builder and design
Ta Shing also built or builds the Mason, Panda, and Tashiba lines alongside Taswell, Practical Sailor noted in its review of the Baba 30, another line from the same Taiwanese yard. That same review quoted Bob Berg, the importer who had commissioned Ta Shing's Baba line, regarding the yard's boatbuilders as among the best in the world and the best in Taiwan — testimony to a reputation Ta Shing carried across its several marques, Taswell included. Dixon designed the whole Taswell range: the 43 and 49, the earliest models (the 43 was first built in 1987), and the larger 56 and 58 All-Season that followed. On the 58, Dixon's hull form paired a fine entry forward with a longish, externally mounted Scheel keel, gently rounded sections aft, and a large skeg-hung rudder, Cruising World reported.
Construction
Cruising World's review of the 58 All-Season, the line's flagship, documented Taswell's construction standard: built to Lloyd's Register specifications, with an ABS ticket available for an extra charge; a solid GRP hull laid up by hand and reinforced with 10 foam-filled longitudinal stringers and 10 PVC-foam-cored transverse floors; vinylester resin in the outer three laminate layers for resistance to osmotic blistering; end-grain balsa coring in the deck and cabin structure, swapped for marine plywood wherever hardware is through-bolted; and a deck bonded to the hull's inturned flange with 3M 5200 and stainless steel thru-bolts. Those specifications describe the largest boat in the range, but Cruising World presented them as characteristic of the line's construction as a whole, not a one-off upgrade reserved for the flagship.
Who Taswell is for
Taswell suits buyers drawn to a single, consistent design partnership — one yard, one naval architect — built to class-society specification rather than production-line shortcuts, across a range that grew from the 43-foot original to the 58-foot flagship. The center cockpit, rich teak decks, plush interior, and premium gear that Cruising World named as the builder's signature run through that same span, tying the smallest and largest Taswells to one consistent brief.
