Tripp sailboats: one name, two generations of the same family
"Tripp" is not one designer's mark but two, father and son, separated by more than a decade. William H. Tripp, Jr. drew the sloops, yawls, and fast cruisers that made his name in the 1950s and 60s, including the Bermuda 40 and Block Island 40; his son, Bill Tripp III, spent his own childhood racing his father's boats before founding an entirely separate firm, Tripp Design Naval Architecture, in 1984. The production sailboats carrying the Tripp name split cleanly along that generational line - built years apart, by different yards, for different markets.
Origins and ownership
William H. Tripp, Jr. was born in Queens, New York, and was sketching boat designs before his teens. He joined the Coast Guard in World War II, assigned to the Offshore Patrol out of Greenport, Long Island, then worked for a time at Sparkman & Stephens after the war, designing PT boats. In 1952 he formed the William H. Tripp Company, turning out blueprints for sloops, fast cruisers, and racing yawls with his associates. He died in an automobile accident in North Haven, Connecticut, on October 14, 1971, in his early fifties, survived by his wife Shelly, his son William Jr. - the man who would become known as Bill Tripp III - and his brother Arthur.
That son grew up sailing and racing the boats his father designed, then earned a naval architecture degree (M.E. and B.E.) at the University of Michigan and went straight to work for California designer Doug Peterson, eventually becoming his chief designer. He served as a construction engineer on the maxi yachts Kialoa and Condor, and did further stints at Derecktor Shipyards, working on powerboats and U.S. Coast Guard cutters, and, by his own firm's account, at Baltic Yachts. In 1984 he founded Tripp Design Naval Architecture, now based in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Amsterdam - a new company, not a continuation of his father's.
One clarification worth making plain: some accounts, including a Maine Boats & Harbors feature on the Bermuda 40, loosely call the elder Tripp "Bill Tripp, Sr.," though no third-generation Tripp yacht designer exists to make that useful, so this page follows the New York Times and Tripp Design's own site in calling him William H. Tripp, Jr. throughout.
The designers
The elder Tripp's signature work came in the 1950s: the Block Island 40, which Maine Boats & Harbors credits among the first fiberglass ocean racers to make a name for itself; the 1957 Touche II, which the New York Times credited with starting a design trend of twin midship cockpits, a pivoting steering pedestal, and an off-center diesel; and the Katinga, built for the 1956 Bermuda race with a quadrilateral mizzen staysail. He also produced the Columbia 50, and built Ondine III and Blackfin at the German yard Abeking & Rasmussen. His most famous boat, the Bermuda 40, was designed in 1958 as a refinement of the Block Island 40.
Bill Tripp III's design career, by contrast, has run toward large yachts. After Doug Peterson and the maxi programs, his firm's largest yacht to date is the 282-foot Aquijo, built with Oceanco and Vitters and launched in 2016. He also built Alithia at Abeking & Rasmussen - the same German yard where his father had built Ondine III and Blackfin, a full-circle detail across the two careers.
Construction through the eras
Henry R. Hinckley & Co. built the Bermuda 40; accounts differ on whether production began in 1959 or the first boat launched in 1960, but Hinckley eventually built more than 200 of them. The design evolved under Hinckley's hand: around 1968 the original flat-plate centerboard was replaced with an airfoil shape and the mast raised slightly, adding roughly 20 square feet of sail area, and in 1972 the Mark III introduced a main mast more than four feet taller, moved nearly two feet aft.
The smaller classic-era boats were largely a Dutch affair: the Javelin 38, built from 1960 to 1966 by the Amsterdam yard G. de Vries Lentsch in fiberglass with wood trim, of which roughly 25 were completed and most imported into the United States by Seafarer Yachts, and the smaller Lentsch 29 from the same Dutch builder. The modern-era catalog moved production to Rhode Island's Carroll Marine, which built the fiberglass-composite racer-cruiser 36 in 1991 and the 47 in the early 1990s.
Lines and generations
The two eras don't overlap. William H. Tripp, Jr.'s production boats run from 1960 to 1969 - the Javelin 38, Lentsch 29, Oceanic 48, Paceship 32, Polaris 26, Santander 30, and the Invicta and Invicta II - built at Dutch and other yards well before his 1971 death. Bill Tripp III's production line runs from 1984 to 1997 - the 26, 33, 36, 37, 38, 40 and 40 MH, 47, and the Freedom 24 - designed at his own firm and built at yards including Carroll Marine, more than a decade after his father's death and unconnected to the earlier boats beyond the shared name.
Who Tripp is for
A buyer drawn to the Tripp name should know first which generation, and which builder, a given boat belongs to. The elder Tripp's classic-era designs, epitomized by the Hinckley-built Bermuda 40, reward sailors after a proven, long-production cruiser with real racing pedigree behind it. The younger Tripp's modern-era boats, built through Carroll Marine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, suit sailors after a more contemporary racer-cruiser from a firm whose reputation was later built on some of the world's largest sailing superyachts.
