Warrior sailboats: two unrelated lineages sharing one name
"Warrior" names two sailboats that share nothing but the word on their transoms. One is a British monohull cruiser line -- the Warrior 35, 38, and 40 -- built by Trident Marine Ltd and drawn by Angus Primrose and Bill Dixon. The other is an American performance catamaran, the Warrior 29, launched a continent and an ocean away by Southern California sailmaker-designer John Conser. Making sense of the Warrior name means first sorting out which Warrior a given hull actually is.
Origins and ownership
The UK line came from Trident Marine, whose story spans several model families and lives on its own page; within it, the Warrior 35 was the earliest, centre-cockpit member of a three-boat family that later produced the aft-cockpit Challenger 35 and the wheelhouse Voyager 35, and about 300 of the 35-footers were built in total, many for export. Primrose and Dixon later drew the larger Warrior 40, which followed in 1988.
The US Warrior traces to John Conser, who started his sailmaking business, Windward Custom Sails, in 1970 after years apprenticing as a sailmaker. His first design, a 1964 board-and-trampoline craft called the Surf Cat, is credited with inspiring the Hobie Cat. Catamarans became his focus, and in 1972 he launched his first performance cat, the Warrior 29, to strong reviews. In 1985, his Warrior-class catamaran Avenger won the Newport to Ensenada Race outright, beating Dennis Conner. Over the next two decades, Conser evolved the design into dozens of eponymous racing and cruising catamarans, culminating in the Conser 47.
Construction through the eras
The Warrior 40 was built with a fiberglass hull, a fin keel, and a skeg-hung rudder, and registered a heavy 14.83 tons -- rising to 16 tons in cruising trim -- which Yachting Monthly found let her carry more sail than a similarly sized Hallberg-Rassy. That heft was a family trait: Yachting Monthly judged the Warrior and Challenger models excellent in heavy weather, their long keel and modest rig trading excitement for predictability in calmer conditions. The family's middle boat, the Warrior 38, ran from 1985 to 1987.
Who Warrior is for
A buyer chasing a UK Warrior wants a heavy, sea-kindly bluewater cruiser built for weather rather than speed. A buyer chasing a US Warrior wants a piece of John Conser's catamaran lineage, a line that ran from its 1972 debut through Avenger's race win to the later Conser-branded boats. The two have no more in common than the name.
