Waarschip sailboats: a Dutch yard built on hand-finished, owner-completed construction
Waarschip is a single Dutch builder whose identity has stayed remarkably consistent across six decades: hand-built, plywood-and-epoxy hulls, often finished in part by their owners, produced in small numbers from one yard in the country's north. The marque has passed through a founding partnership, a period of contested ownership, and a modern custodian, but the construction philosophy that opened the story is still what closes it.
Origins and ownership
Willem J. Akkerman and Klaas T. Kremer founded the yard in 1963 in 't Waar, a village in Groningen that gave the marque its name. Both had worked at E.G. van de Stadt's design bureau in Zaandam before setting out on their own, and their first wooden yacht slid into the Termunterzijldiep that year. At its peak in the 1980s, the yard employed sixty people and built Waarschips at multiple locations in the region.
According to current owner Roelof Niezen, speaking to RTV Noord, the original yard went bankrupt in 1996; he bought what remained of it a year later, in 1997. From 1998 the marque continued as Waarschip Werf Delfzijl, though other companies also attempted to build boats under the well-known name during those years, leaving ownership unsettled until the European trademark office in Alicante granted the rights definitively to Waarschip Werf Delfzijl in 2008. Over Niezen's subsequent decades running the yard, roughly forty new Waarschips have been built, with production consolidated at Nautisch Centrum Delfzijl in Farmsum since 2005. Nautisch Centrum Delfzijl owns the brand, its logo, and all the original drawings and molds, and says it is the only yard in the Netherlands working in wood, plywood, and carbon; it builds catamarans and trimarans there alongside monohull Waarschips. Roughly seven thousand Waarschips are still sailing.
The designers
Within the founding partnership, Akkerman was the stylist and draftsman while Kremer, a Delft-trained naval architect, worked more as the engineer. Years after the two split, Akkerman returned to the Van de Stadt bureau where they had both trained; both men died in 2000. The tauter models that followed the early Akkerman-styled series carried Kremer's own signature, beginning with the 570 "Minitonner." With Kremer at the helm, a Waarschip placed second in the 1969 Quarter Ton Cup's IOR class V and first at Cowes Week in 1971.
Designer Arthur Peltzer later took on newer Waarschip projects for the yard: an advanced fifth-generation Class 40 offshore racer built under the "Made in Holland" project, and an 11-meter Waarschip-36, built with red cedar hull strips covered in glass-fiber and epoxy for the 2018 World Championships and optimized for IRC and ORC handicaps. Peltzer has said the brand's flexibility comes from being able to change a boat's cabin and layout without commissioning a new mold.
Construction through the eras
Early Waarschips were sold mainly as build kits, with the hull as the base and the rest of the boat left for owners to finish themselves — an approach the yard kept alive: boats could still be bought semi-finished for completion at home. Hulls are shaped using the "overnaadse," or clinker/lapstrake, technique, gluing thin layers of wood over one another to achieve a strong, curved hull. Original construction relied on Bruynzeel marine plywood; more recent and custom builds use wood-epoxy composite, and some models under 36 feet, including the 700 LD and 1010 LD, use a wood-core bottom for less resistance and lower maintenance. Building one Waarschip takes roughly a year to a year and a half in total, according to shipwright Egbert Bekkema. Four and a half decades after the yard's founding, it still held to the founders' original principle: offering a boat that a broad range of buyers could largely finish themselves.
Lines and generations
At least three generations of Waarschips have been built. The line's early identity was set by its quarter-tonners: the 725, developed by Akkerman and Kremer at the end of the 1960s following the 600, 600 SV, and 710, was itself a further development of the 710 from 1966, of which around 125 had already been built by about 1969. It came in several variants, including a low-profile race version and three keel options — 100cm and 125cm bulb keels and a 150cm IOR keel. The half-tonner 870 was built alongside the 600 and 725 between 1971 and 1977, taking its "Half Tonner" nickname from the IOR class it was designed for; relatively few were built, just under a hundred. The 740 replaced the 725 in 1980, its five-plank construction giving it a more rounded hull than its predecessor; a lighter "Ocean" version followed, developed by Kremer, and roughly two hundred 740s were built in total. Klaas T. Kremer also designed the 900, built mainly in plywood with teak or epoxy options and some later GRP versions, in production numbers described as dozens of hulls rather than hundreds. The 1076 was developed to be adaptable to individual requirements, serving as the basis for custom-built ocean-going yachts. Waarschip's newer lineup spans 36 to 43 feet across full-cabin cruiser-racer, shorthanded, and cruising variants, with a foiling model in planning.
Who Waarschip is for
Waarschip suits sailors drawn to a boat's build process as much as its sailing performance — owners willing to take on part of the finishing work themselves, or buyers of custom and small-series craft rather than production boats. The marque's quarter- and half-ton racing pedigree also appeals to sailors chasing handicap-class performance in a hand-built hull.
