Cruising Through the Years

Cruising yachts have been the lifeblood of Sabre Yachts since the company was founded in 1970. Sabre, based in Raymond, Maine, exclusively built sailing yachts until 1989, when it debuted the Sabreline 36 Fast Trawler, the first in a series of Downeast-style powerboats. In 2003, the company launched a sister brand, Back Cove Yachts, initially designed to meet customer demand for single-engine Downeast cruisers. In 2013, Sabre shifted its focus entirely to building powerboats.

Over the years, the two brands have evolved with advances in marine construction and propulsion technology: Today, Sabre builds express and flybridge cruisers from 38 to 58 feet powered by Volvo IPS pod drives; and Back Cove offers models sized from 35 to 41 feet, with outboards and diesel inboards. At the same time, both Sabre and Back Cove have remained true to their classic cruiser DNA.

“We haven’t tried to be everything to everyone. You’re not going see an image of a Sabre with rod holders on it, pretending that we’re a fishing boat,” said Aaron Crawford, CEO of Sabre and Back Cove. “We know who we are. And we focus on being the best at supporting our customers in the cruising lifestyle.”

Crawford has been with Sabre Yachts for 14 years. Prior to that, he worked for several other companies in the recreational marine sector including naval architecture firm Sparkman & Stephens. Today, Crawford works closely with Kevin Burns, vice president of design and product development and Sabre and Back Cove. Burns, whose earlier career included serving in the U.S. Coast Guard and running offshore supply vessels, has been with the company for 18 years. Here, we talk with the two industry veterans to get their perspective on the cruising segment and what makes for a great cruising boat.

Soundings: How has the pastime of cruising in powerboats changed over the years?

Kevin Burns: Historically, there was a clear use profile of the boat. And by that, I mean, when someone was looking to purchase a boat, they identified themselves as a particular niche of owner. If I were to describe the biggest change, that narrow focus of the boat owner has widened. Today, there are very few times you meet a customer who is saying, “It’s my wife and I, and the two of us are going do the Great Loop in this boat and that’s it. We don’t care about day boating; we don’t care about entertaining guests; we don’t care about sleeping extra people.” That’s very rare. What has changed from a big-picture standpoint is that people want more flexibility in the boat they’re investing in. And so, where the number of use profiles used to be maybe six kinds of boat buyer, now there are 6,000.

Aaron Crawford: I agree with Kevin. Every boater’s use profile is slightly different. What’s important to them is unique to them. But, going back to Sabre as a sailboat builder, the cruising lifestyle has changed significantly over the decades. A piece of that is just the constraint of available free time. With sailing, cruising was the journey. When you are running in a powerboat at 24 knots, your cruising circle is much greater than if you’re cruising at 9 or 10 knots. You can get more places and you can plan around that. This has impacted the use profile of the boat significantly.

Soundings: How are your brands responding to the demand for so many use profiles?

AC: On the Sabre side, we are a semi-custom builder. If there are small changes that can be made to fit that use profile—if someone has bikes or golf clubs or a coffee machine that’s important to them—it will be made to work in our boat. One of the differences we’ve seen over time is those little customizations are meaningful in the market.

Soundings: What impact has the Covid pandemic had on the cruising market?

KB: I think it reinforced the positive notions our customers already had about spending time aboard with their families as being meaningful. It did bring a lot of new people into boating who maybe had just been very casual boaters previously, and they had the means to get more serious about their boating.

Soundings: Are you seeing more demand for offices on board boats since Covid?

AC: If you look at the new Sabre 43, we have a lower lounge area that is convertible to an office or a berth, or you can sit there and have lunch. We’ve also converted what would be a stateroom to an office space in some of our boats. And connectivity definitely is something we are paying attention to. All the new Sabres have onboard WiFi connectivity, and combined with Sabre digital switching, we have remote connectively to all these boats as well. With Starlink and other companies coming online, I think you are going to see a lot more remote work on board. We saw that during the pandemic for sure. The cruising window for many owners certainly got larger, right? You don’t have to be back to work on Monday; you can keep going, which is great.

Soundings: What about Back Cove?

KB: We don’t see these owners looking for an office, but they want to be able to work around the boat. They’ll say, “I like sitting here on the boat, I want to make this my workspace. In order to do that, I’d really like a charging station here and an outlet there.” That we do routinely with both brands. When we’re designing spaces now, we’re also keeping in mind that people are going to want to tuck themselves in this corner, throw their laptop up on this little table and do some work here. We think about what we can do to enhance that experience to make it easier.

Soundings: Are you seeing a demand for greater onboard power usage?

AC: There’s a trend toward people wanting to anchor or be away from the dock without running a generator and yet still be able to run the systems on their boat—things like refrigeration, which they need when they’re cruising. Part of the allure of anchoring out is being closer to nature, and if you are running a generator, you and your neighbors are not enjoying that as much. It’s really an issue of power management. Cruisers need a networked electrical system to manage the loads on the boat and the battery capacity. That just continues to evolve and as battery technology improves, we’ll be able to support more demand without generator or shore power.

Soundings: Have you seen an increase in customers wanting to take your boats to destinations that are off the beaten path?

KB: We get a lot of pictures from the Pacific Northwest, from folks who are taking their boats up to Alaska for some glacier cruising. We also have a lot of folks who have done the same thing on the East Coast and up in Newfoundland. Then we have a lot of Sabre boats that have made it over to Europe.

AC: We have seen a big change in destination preference for owners of both brands. A large percentage of our customers are now north-south and year-round boaters. That has been a big shift, I would say, over the last 7 to 10 years. I think a lot of people are using the boat as a second home in the alternate location. So, if they are based in New England, they might be using the boat as a vacation home in the South.

Soundings: Have you had to expand your boats’ ranges or make other changes to your boats to accommodate these cruising trends?

KB: Generally, the infrastructure is such with marina fuel stations that (range) hasn’t really (had to) change. We look very closely at the 300- to 350-mile range at high cruise speed as being our target for each new model. And the Back Cove 41 and 372 were specifically designed with Looping in mind. Both of those boats could have ranges over a thousand miles if you slow down to 10 knots. But that magic number is usually around that 300-mile range at high speed.

Soundings: Back Cove introduced outboard-powered models 10 years ago. Are you still seeing growing demand for this power?

KB: Yes, of course. Outboard technology and the engineering around these machines—the output, the power density, all of that—has just improved dramatically since 2005. They’ve gotten much more reliable. That’s one of the reasons for this insurgence of outboard power.

The other thing is, for both Sabre and Back Cove, we cut our teeth on the segment of the market that grew up sailing. These owners learned to sail in summer camp or sailed competitively on the weekends and then cruised with their family a couple weeks a year. And when they got to the point of buying boats for themselves, they bought a Sabre sailboat. Then, maybe sailing got to be too much, so they were looking for a powerboat. Well, they went to the folks that they knew and trusted, and that was Sabre. And same thing with Back Cove. In the early days, we were getting a lot of folks who were retiring from sailing and looking for a powerboat they wouldn’t be embarrassed to own. And so, they came to us.

Now, we have this new generation of buyers. Instead of growing up sailing, we have this group of folks who grew up powerboating. They grew up with center consoles. That’s what they’re comfortable with. And so, as they’re buying bigger and more capable boats, they’re like, “Well, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. I know how outboards work; I know I’ve got an outboard guy in my marina; I get it.”

Soundings: How are you planning to keep the new boaters you gained during the pandemic?

KB: We keep them the way we’ve kept all of our owners over the years—by listening to what they have to say and how they see themselves and their families using these investments. I think it has to do with being open to new ideas that are out there. And as Aaron said, it’s very important that we continue to filter things through the lens of knowing ourselves and not trying to play the game of, “So and so is doing this, so we have to do this too.” 

This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue.