Pacific Seacraft Corporation is a Washington, North Carolina based sailboat manufacturer specializing in fiberglass monohull cruising boats. Pacific Seacraft is best known for producing the Crealock line of sailboats. These are heavy, overbuilt offshore cruising designs designed by William Crealock. Crealocks are distinctive due to their overhanging canoe sterns, traditional lines, and lack of bowsprit. Pacific Seacraft sailboats have been featured in both volumes of Ferenc Máté's The World's Best Sailboats and are considered to be among the highest quality sailing yachts still in production. Fortune Magazine twice selected Pacific Seacraft as a producer of America's 100 best products.
Pacific Seacraft built some Ericson sailboat models after Ericson filed for bankruptcy in 1990.
While headquartered in California, the company filed for chapter 11 protection from its creditors in May 2007. The company's assets, with the exception of the Dana 24 molds which went to Portland OR, were purchased at a bankruptcy auction September 2007 and moved in their entirety to Washington, N.C. where it will be continued under the new ownership of marine archeologist Stephen Brodie.
The Saga line of sailboats had been built at the yard in Fullerton but was not owned by Pacific Seacraft. Saga was not part of the bankruptcy and was acquired by Canada's oldest boat building company, J.J. Taylor and Sons Ltd. of Toronto in September 2007. In August, 2010, J.J. Taylor named Bruckmann Yachts of Mississauga as the builder of its line of bluewater performance cruising sailboats.
Brodie spent $85,000 at the auction to buy the company name, boat molds, tools and five sailboat hulls. The sailboats, which measure 31 feet to 44 feet, cost $250,000 to $1 million each.
It cost more to move Pacific Seacraft than it did to buy it, but Brodie used a Beaufort County company — Deep Water Transport of Washington — and got started right away.
Brodie once worked with the International Institute for Maritime Research on historic vessel restorations. He is a marine archaeologist that searches and documents shipwrecks. Some of that work includes recovery efforts on Queen Anne’s Revenge — better known as the pirate Blackbeard’s ship — and the Confederate ship CSS Alabama off the coast of France.
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1. Venture Yachts [1] 2. Flicka 20 Home Page [2] 3. Simmons, Tim; Bargain hunter buys boat business: Pacific Seacraft moves to Beaufort; The News & Observer; Volume MMVII; issue 1289; page 1D; October 16, 2007; http://www.newsobserver.com