Tayana sailboats: custom-built Taiwan cruisers carried across three designers
Tayana is the brand Ta Yang Yacht Building Co. put on the fiberglass cruising sailboats it built at its Taiwan yard, distinct from the parallel OEM contract work the company did for other builders. What holds the line together across three different designers and roughly four decades of production is a persistent commitment to custom and semicustom building -- individual owners configuring their own boats rather than choosing from a fixed catalog.
Origins and ownership
Ta Yang Yacht Building Co. began exporting boats from its yard in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 1973, eventually delivering more than 1,400 boats -- across both its OEM contract work and its own Tayana brand -- by 2016, according to Taiwan Business TOPICS. Its own domestic market barely existed by comparison: the company's first sale to a buyer within Taiwan did not come until the year before that trade profile ran. By the early 1980s, general manager Joy Huang recalled, the company's small-boat business -- previously its core sellers were all under 40 feet -- had become uncompetitive as European builders came to dominate that segment, pushing Ta Yang toward the larger cruising yachts that would come to define the Tayana name. By 2016, Huang was running a company specializing in 37- to 64-foot blue-water sailing yachts. Production in the 2000s, including the Tayana 64 program, ran through named personnel on both sides of the Pacific: Basil Lin served as Tayana's chief engineer and project manager for owner builds, while Robert Noyce worked as the U.S. East Coast dealer, liaising between owners, the designer, and the factory.
The designers
Three designers carried the Tayana name. Bob Perry, a Washington-based designer who had just hung out his own shingle, drew the Tayana 37 in the early 1970s after Ta Yang commissioned him -- by Perry's own account -- to answer the success of the Westsail 32. Practical Sailor later reported that Perry, who worked with many yards across Asia, considered Ta Yang one of the best, citing a yard that stayed responsive to input from both dealers and owners. Robert Harris designed the Vancouver line, including the Tayana Vancouver 42; Cruising World credited his Vancouver designs with reputations as reasonably performing, comfortable, and extremely seaworthy cutters for the serious cruiser, with the Vancouver 42 among the most successful of them, distinguished by a diamond stay at the upper spreaders -- braced by an aluminum arc some called the cowcatcher -- that eliminated the need for running backstays. Decades later, Robb Ladd designed the original Tayana 64 deck-saloon model and, working from that hull, drew a custom design for an individual owner that was displayed at the U.S. Sailboat Show as the Tayana Annapolis 64.
Construction through the eras
Every Tayana 37 was custom built, so there was never a standard interior. Practical Sailor noted that Taiwan-built boats of that era carried a mixed reputation among critics, who cited poor workmanship, overly heavy hulls, and hardware and spars far removed from designers' plans on some builders' output -- while singling out Ta Yang's own construction techniques as being among the best in the industry. The Vancouver 42, built in solid fiberglass and polyester laminate from 1979, used decks cored with resin-isolated wood-block squares and ballast cast as a single iron casting encapsulated inside the keel's thick walls. Ta Yang refined its hand-laid process twice as the line matured: switching to blister-resistant isophthalic gelcoat in 1985, then to vinylester resin for hull laminates in 1992. By the time Robb Ladd was drawing the Tayana 64 in the 2000s, that process had shifted again, toward a low-density, closed-cell core and knitted E-glass laminates in the topsides and deck, finished with a lightweight, high-tensile S-glass skin coat meant to improve the hull's finish and minimize print-through.
Lines and generations
The Tayana 37 anchors the brand. Practical Sailor called it one of the most successful products of the U.S.'s Taiwan-built-boat trend that began in the early 1970s, tracing its construction to the mid-1970s under the name CT 37; in 1979, Ta Yang renamed it the Tayana 37, for Ta Yang Yacht Building Co. itself, and by the designer's own account the CT 37 and the Tayana 37 were the same boat, built by the same people in the same yard. Around 600 were built in total, by differing published counts. Its stern borrows heavily from Aage Nielsen's ketch Holger Danske, winner of the 1980 Bermuda Race. From that founding model, the Vancouver line began with the 42 in 1979; the flagship end of the range grew from the 48 in 1992 through the 52 and 55 to the 64 in 2003, tracking the shift toward larger boats that Ta Yang's own leadership traced to the small-boat market's declining competitiveness in the early 1980s.
Who Tayana is for
Tayana suits buyers drawn to individually built, traditionally constructed offshore cruisers rather than production-line uniformity. Cruising World's description of the Vancouver line -- reasonably performing, comfortable, and extremely seaworthy cutters for the serious cruiser -- captures the brand's core appeal: boats built by a yard that, in Bob Perry's estimation, ranked among the best he worked with anywhere in Asia, at a company that kept its owners closely involved in how each hull was finished.
