Young Sun sailboats: a Taiwanese cutter builder whose flagship crossed the Pacific under someone else's name
Young Sun built cutters in Taiwan in the late 1970s, and its story is inseparable from a single episode: its flagship design left the yard's own badge behind and re-emerged for the US market wearing someone else's name.
Origins and ownership
Little is documented about Young Sun's founding. A 2011 review characterized the company's history as rumor rather than record, dating the first boats to 1978 in Taiwan. Those early boats were sold into both the US and Australian markets under different names from the start, a naming pattern that would define the yard's better-known model as well.
The designers
Naval architect Ron Amy designed the 43, Young Sun's flagship, once dubbed the "all weather yacht" on one of its early brochures. Its smaller sibling, the 35, is sometimes described as a Perry design, but a Little Cunning Plan review corrects that misconception: Bob Perry did not design the boat.
Construction through the eras
The 43 came in two configurations, a center cockpit cutter and a pilothouse cutter, with four interior layouts offered initially and a solid FRP layup. Both configurations share a canoe stern and a substantial bowsprit that carries the staysail attachment to within a couple feet of the stem, a companionway offset to starboard with curved steps rather than a straight ladder below, and cockpit and mast winches supplied by Custom Yacht and Cathay Industrial. Because the "foreign sounding name didn't really fly with the US market," as one 2011 review put it, the Ron Amy-designed 43 was rebadged as the Spindrift 43 and carried on production at the Formosa Boat Builders yard - one of several related hulls built under other names, alongside a Formosa 44 and, later, a Chinese-built Hampton 43.
Who Young Sun is for
A buyer drawn to Young Sun is buying into a rare, thinly documented Taiwanese cutter line whose flagship design outlived the company's own name - worth confirming which badge, and which yard, actually built a given hull before assuming a "Young Sun" nameplate tells the whole story.
