Pretty boat! What is she?’ I asked fellow sailing instructor Jane Sudlow-Arthur when she uploaded a photo of her new yacht. It was fine-lined with a distinctly British look and uncannily familiar. I was immediately intrigued. Like me you might not have heard of the Dawn Class 39, but you will know her little sister the Contessa 32, and the family resemblance is striking. These two siblings had dramatically different fates, however. Over 700 Contessa 32s were built and continue to be built in the Rogers yard in Lymington. The Sadler-designed 1972 cruiser-racer achieved cult status thanks to its impressive seakeeping abilities and indisputably pretty hull. Meanwhile only a handful of the larger version ever left the mould and they soon slipped into obscurity.
As with all great family sagas, the founding and floundering happened within a wider context. Following on from the popularity of the 32 and its resilience in the 1979 Fastnet, an enthusiastic owner commissioned a larger version and funded the production of the mould. David Allan Williams, who also designed the Whitbread Ocean 80s and Peter Blake’s , was one of Contessa’s in-house designers at the time. He drew the lines for the Contessa 38 making them exactly 6-foot longer to accommodate an aft cabin. In the early 1980s a few dozen
