Thomas sailboats: a designer's surname worn by two unrelated builders
Seven of the eight sailboats catalogued under the Thomas name were never built by any company called Thomas. They carry the surname of British naval architect David Thomas, credited as their designer while the boats themselves came off the production lines of Hunter Boats Ltd of Essex and, for the Sigma range, Marine Projects of Plymouth. Only one boat here, the Thomas 35, was built by an actual Thomas Marine - a small American yard with no connection to David Thomas or the British builders at all. A buyer weighing "Thomas" as a brand needs to know which of the two stories a given boat belongs to.
Thomas Marine and the Thomas 35
The genuine article starts with Lindy Thomas, one of the best known and most successful competitive sailors in the American Midwest, a winner of the Tartan 10 Nationals, the Heineken Cup, and numerous Chicago-Mackinac races. Wanting to go faster and better, Thomas formed Thomas Marine. Working in collaboration with naval architect Eric Schlageter, of the firm Graham & Schlageter, Thomas Marine designed the Thomas 35, and 42 were built under contract by Tartan Marine - one of which the family still owned and raced out of San Diego. It is the only boat in this catalog that can honestly be called a Thomas.
David Thomas, the name behind the rest
The David Thomas credited on the other seven boats was not a boatbuilder but a naval architect, whose early roles at Yachting World and the sailmaker Ratsey & Lapthorn helped hone his skills. As a young man he had worked for New Zealand's Union Steam Ship Company, and the whalers he sailed there inspired a Hunter design he later produced in twin-masted and single gaff-rigged versions, sold as the Liberty 22 and Minstrel 23. His larger reputation rests on the Impala, the Elizabethan, the Sonata, the Hunter 707, and the Sigma range. Hunter brought him on in 1975 to design a bilged GRP yacht that became the Sonata; when Peter Poland, running Hunter at the time, asked for a round-hulled version of Thomas's earlier multi-chine Quarto design, the result was the RYA National Sonata One Design, built from 1976 to 1990 with more than 400 completed. The following winter Thomas proposed a bigger Sonata sister, the Impala 28, which went on to win the small-size slot among the RORC's three Offshore One Design classes; Thomas described it himself as a light-displacement boat with a slim, easily driven underbody, high-pointing and capable of fast surfing and even planing, carried on a short, high-aspect-ratio keel with a rudder of minimum area. Across his Hunter designs, Thomas favored angled-in twin keels splayed to each model's typical heeling angle, and the aft chines he first drew for Quarto reappeared on the later Hunter Channel 27.
The Sigma range and the 1979 Fastnet
Thomas's most consequential design began as a rejection. He submitted a 33-foot boat to the Offshore One Design Council, which passed it over for three other designs; undeterred, he partnered with marine surveyor David Hopkins and took the boat to Marine Projects of Plymouth, builder of Moody Yachts, which agreed to produce it under a new subsidiary, Sigma Yachts. Thomas and Hopkins were themselves aboard a Sigma 33 entered in the 1979 Fastnet Race, riding out gusts of more than 80 mph and waves as high as 50 feet in a storm that battered 300 boats and killed 15 sailors; afterward, their boat went back to the Marine Projects factory to have several areas "beefed up." More than 400 Sigma 33s were built over the following fifteen years, and the 105-strong Sigma 33 fleet remains the largest one-design fleet in Round the Island Race history. Thomas went on designing the rest of the line for Marine Projects: the Sigma 36, offered with tiller or wheel steering; the Sigma 38, launched in 1987 as what many at the time considered a gamble at that size; and the Sigma 41, the largest Sigma built.
Hunter Boats, in brief
The yard behind Thomas's other British designs began as the Essex Boat Company, founded in 1969 by Michael Poland and run day to day by John Chardin and his son Derek; its first boat, the Hunter 19, was moulded from the hull and keel of the Oliver Lee-designed Squib, a dinghy that itself went on to national status with more than 800 built. By the mid-1970s the yard was building designs from both Steven Jones and David Thomas side by side. Accounts of what happened to the company next diverge: Peter Poland's own history says he sold it to Cornish Crabbers, which renamed itself Select Yachts and took over the Jones-designed Mystery 35; Darglow Engineering's history instead describes Hunter as bought in 2003 by the pre-existing Select Yachts Group, whose portfolio already included Cornish Crabbers, Red Fox Yachts, the Landau Launch Company, and Cornish Diva. Either way, Select Yachts went into administration by 2008, and in 2009 Lauren Marine of Southampton bought the rights, moulds, and tooling to build the range as British Hunter - a name chosen to distinguish it from the unrelated American builder Hunter Marine.
Who these boats are for
There is no single "Thomas" buyer, because there is no single Thomas product. Someone chasing the American Thomas 35 is buying a small-yard, contract-built racer-cruiser tied to one Midwest sailor's competitive career. Someone chasing a Sonata, an Impala 28, a 707, or a Sigma is really buying a David Thomas hull built by Hunter or Marine Projects - worth evaluating on the reputation of whichever of those two yards actually built it, with the designer's name a useful pointer to a particular style of hull rather than a guarantee of common construction or common ownership.
