Jill Burley
CIRRUS, a 1939 Sparkman & Stephens Voyager sloop, has been stored in a Lake Champlain boathouse in New York for many years.
For legendary 1930s boatbuilders such as George F. Lawley & Son, building several boats to the same design brought the unit cost down and, in theory, boosted sales, which helped the yards recover from the Great Depression. Another sign of the changing times, besides such “standardized” offerings in both power and sail, was the push toward family cruising; instead of shouldering the salary of a paid hand, the owner and his family took on their boat’s entire operation and in some cases the maintenance as well.
The Sparkman & Stephens Voyager design, despite being a step up in size and comfort from her builder’s smaller standardized sloop called the Weekender, never achieved widespread popularity. It was a bit large for coastal cruising, and its galley was forward of the mast and adjacent to a forecastle laid out for a paid hand’s residence—the old-school layout. Nevertheless, as the Burley family demonstrated over a half century of use, CIRRUS and her sister Voyager-class sloops and yawls with their comfortable, aft-placed owner’s staterooms and separate entrances still made fine family cruisers and racers. Drawings should be available from Mystic Seaport Museum.