Westsail sailboats: a Costa Mesa cutter that became the face of the 1970s cruising boom
Westsail built heavy-displacement, full-keel cruising sailboats in Costa Mesa, California, through the 1970s -- boats descended from a lineage of double-ended offshore designs Practical Sailor traces to the North Sea rescue boats of Norwegian naval architect Colin Archer. The flagship Westsail 32 became one of the defining images of the era's cruising boom, even as the company behind it built, expanded, and collapsed within less than a decade.
Origins and ownership
Around 1968 in Costa Mesa, boatwright Larry Kendall and four or five fellow boatbuilders set out to build, for themselves, what they considered the ultimate offshore sailboat rather than continue building in wood. They settled on William Atkin's Thistle, a heavy-displacement, 32-foot, flush-decked cutter with low freeboard and a full keel that Atkin had drawn for wood construction, and brought in naval architect Bill Crealock to modify the lines and adapt it for fiberglass. Kendall's workshop was too small to hold an entire hull, so the earliest examples were built in two halves. When a small ad Kendall placed in Yachting Magazine drew an unexpectedly large response, he began building extra hulls for outside buyers off the shared mold, and the Kendall 32 was born.
That side business did not survive. By 1971, worsening management and escalating costs pushed Kendall Yachts into bankruptcy, forcing Kendall to declare it after the bank and federal authorities closed in. Snider and Lynne Vick, who had been watching Kendall build boats and judged the market ready for a true ocean-going sailboat, struck a deal that if they won the mold at auction, they would hire Kendall to finish at least two boats he already had orders for. Snider Vick won the mold with a token bid, and Westsail Corporation was born. Accounts differ on what came next for Kendall: Good Old Boat's history has the Vicks enticing him to join as production manager, while Bud Taplin's own telling -- as the man who later ran Westsail's production floor -- has Kendall instead leaving after a falling-out with Snider Vick, which is how Taplin, recommended through Lynne Vick's advertising contacts, came to be hired within weeks.
Taplin had earlier revamped MacGregor Yachts' line, lifting output from five boats a day to twenty; at Westsail he ran the shop from roughly June 1971 to March 1974 with about fifteen boatbuilders, a secretary, and himself. By mid-1973 Westsail was building hull #100 with a backlog of roughly another hundred orders, and negotiating a second, East Coast plant in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, which -- by Taplin's account -- opened that fall (Good Old Boat instead dates it to 1974). The 1973-74 oil embargo choked off the resin supply and halted lamination company-wide. Taplin left in mid-1974 with a full order book still on account, and Hans Weerman took over without broader restructuring.
Rising resin and material costs from 1970s inflation and the oil embargoes meant contracts signed at one price often lost money by delivery a year later, and in spring 1977 Westsail Corporation filed for bankruptcy, owing suppliers, employees, the government, and its own customers. A Chapter 11 reorganization handed ownership to Weerman, who, financed by relatives, renamed the company Westsail International and ran it two more years before closing it in 1979 for lack of profit. At that closure auction, Ed Parker of the Perris, California shop P&M Worldwide bought the 32 and 39 molds, and Don Jones of the Santa Ana builder Jomarco bought the 42 and 43 molds; a couple more hulls emerged under the new owners before the lineage ended by early 1980.
The designers
Colin Archer's North Sea rescue boats sit at the root of a family of double-ended cruising designs -- Atkin's Thistle among them, along with the Union 36 and Bob Perry's later Tayana 37 and Valiant 40 -- though Practical Sailor considers Perry's boats a separate branch. Crealock, a British-born Southern California resident who had cruised offshore during the 1950s, adapted Atkin's Thistle for fiberglass; Practical Sailor called the result "a thinly veiled copy of Atkin's designs" that nonetheless "earned its place as the boat that launched 1,000 dreams." Crealock later drew the larger 42-foot-11-inch, 32,000-pound hull behind the 42 and 43, offering two deck arrangements: a center-cockpit version with a raised house and aft cabin, and a trunk-cabin version with an aft cockpit. Westsail let buyers settle the choice at a sales meeting more than a hundred people attended; the vote ran roughly ten to four for the center-cockpit layout, and Westsail built both from the same hull mold, naming the center-cockpit boat the 42 and the aft-cockpit boat the 43, both in production by end of 1974. Herb David designed the smaller 28, and Robert Perry drew the company's last new model, a 39-footer that entered production only around 1979, just as Westsail was running out of road.
Construction through the eras
Westsail contracted its fiberglass lamination to Crystaliner Corporation, a Costa Mesa builder better known for Harbor Patrol and lifeguard powerboats -- a decision that, by the Westsail Owners Association's own account, paid off: the hulls have avoided the blistering that dogged much of the era's polyester-resin construction. Each hull was hand-laid in twelve alternating layers of woven roving and chopped-strand mat, with decks cored in half-inch marine plywood sheathed in fiberglass. Two Westsail boatbuilders devised an improved hull-to-deck flange in the early-to-mid 1970s that became a signature raised-bulwark joint, except on the earliest 32s, still finished on Kendall's original flush-deck molds; other builders copied it too.
Who Westsail is for
Roughly half of the approximately 830 Westsail 32s built left the factory as bare hulls for owners to finish themselves, a path popularized by owner Ferenc Mate's 1975 book "From a Bare Hull," which inspired other buyers to complete their own kits. That cottage-industry image collided with real celebrity during the cruising boom: a well-known actor's Westsail 32 got a full-page photo in Time, the July 1976 Playboy ran a piece titled "The Playboy Boat Stable" featuring a 32, and newsman Walter Cronkite bought a 42. The most enduring emblem is Satori, a Westsail 32 abandoned in the storm behind "The Perfect Storm" -- it washed ashore weeks later essentially undamaged and kept sailing. Production across the lineage settled at roughly 120 42s, about 60 43s, roughly 78 28s, and a handful of 39s alongside the 830 32s: boats for buyers who wanted an overbuilt, go-anywhere cutter first, and who accepted a company whose own fortunes never matched its boats' reputation for endurance.
