COLVIC CRAFT boats for sale

All about Colvic Craft brand

Colin (Charles Burns) and Victor (James Pascoe), two childhood friends, defied the saying about never going into business with a freind to found the Ardleigh Laminated Plastic Co, on the estuary of the River Blackwater, in the south-east of Britain in 1964. The name COLVIC, which their shipyard would later take, came from the combination of their two first names! Colvic produced, until the year of its disappearance in 2000, sailboats and motorboats that reflected the founders' spirit.

They both wanted very strong, seaworthy, and safe boats. It was a time when you had to have very solid experience if you wanted to go sailing, something which not a lot of people had which thus led the shipyards to design boats for knowledgeable amateurs... Even though at the time the fibreglass layers were laid and resin-covered on the moulds by roller, and this technique can generate osmosis if you don't maintain the hull's watertightness regularly, these well-maintained hulls are among the strongest ever built from this material. Colvic hulls used no less than 6 cm of composite in the planking! That's plenty if you want to heel without taking any risks.

Colvic Watsons are very decent motor sailors, or fifties, with a long keel, comparable to the sturdy Finnish Nauticats. In terms of sailing, the ketch rig for maximum sail adaptation, was favoured by a clientele of genuine sailors. Colvic Victors are superb travel ketches, with a pilot house and central cockpit, and the Colvic Countess and Sailor are two-masted sloops. The Colvic Trawler, if reintroduced, could be a big hit with the current craze for these boats. Can't wait for the "Colvic revival"!