The designer whose roomy, race-capable yachts took a generation of New Zealand families away for the weekend has been recognised at the Barfoot & Thompson Yachting Excellence Awards. Fifty years after he drew the Marauder, the class held its championship on the Hauraki Gulf this year.
Alan Wright has won the 2026 Kiwi Yachting & Baltic Lifejackets Cruising Award, one of the honours announced at the Barfoot & Thompson Yachting Excellence Awards at Royal Akarana Yacht Club in Auckland on Friday, 6 November.
Under Yachting New Zealand’s award criteria, the cruising award can recognise either an outstanding non-competitive voyage under power or sail, or outstanding services to cruising. Recent recipients include Bruce Maunsell of Island Cruising NZ, who received it last year, Island Cruising New Zealand itself, Don Salthouse, and Jim and Karin Lott.
Wright is a designer, boatbuilder and former boatbuilding tutor, and the Variant, Tasman, Nova, Tracker, Marauder and Lotus all came off his drawing board. Family cruising shaped much of how he drew them.
From tutor to designer
Yachting New Zealand’s 2013 notice of his autobiography, Wrighty: my world, my boats, and eighty years, traces a boatbuilding apprenticeship at the Naval Dockyard, time in Australia and Papua New Guinea, and a boatbuilding partnership with Max Carter. With a young family to support, Wright trained as a technical teacher and took a boatbuilding tutoring position at Auckland Technical Institute.
It was there that a trainee asked how many boats his tutor had actually designed. As Wright has told the story, the question stung enough that he set out to answer it. He studied the subject, taught himself to draw plans and sold his first design to an amateur builder. Yachting New Zealand dates his first keelboat design to 1966. Two years later came the 6.85m Variant, of which more than 260 were built in timber and GRP.
Designing for families
In a 2019 Boating New Zealand feature that paired him with Emirates Team New Zealand design head Dan Bernasconi, Wright explained that while many of his early-1970s contemporaries leaned towards outright racing, he saw a growing market among amateur builders and families who wanted to cruise and take part in club racing. So he concentrated on the cruiser/racer.
His galleys became part of the boat’s design rather than a basic fitting tucked into a tight corner. Cockpits had room for people to sit and talk, and the berths grew. He brought the centre of buoyancy and the keel position aft to allow for a crew sitting in the cockpit rather than perched on the rail, and used extra beam for stability and cabin space. He accepted that his designs gave away some speed, but reasoned that a moderate-displacement boat could carry a week or two of provisions with little penalty, where a lighter racing boat felt the extra weight more.
He couldn’t give away too much, though. Auckland families often faced a beat home into the prevailing south-westerly after a weekend away, with work waiting on Monday. “Boats had to perform, so my boats were also very race-capable,” he said.
Des Townson was among the doubters. John Morris’s 2022 account of the first Alan Wright Day records that Townson questioned whether Wright’s early beamy, high-freeboard boats would go to windward. “I wanted a boat you could stand up in,” Wright recalled, adding that he also wanted more room around the galley so that women joining their families on cruises would feel at home.
His first keeler with real beam aft, RiteOff, was conceived as a larger version of the Tasman 20 trailer yacht. Wright thought she had too much beam and worried she would be a handful on the wind. Her owner persuaded him to leave the design as drawn, and according to Morris, RiteOff proved strong to windward in a fresh breeze. The same owner raced her for 37 years.
Wright joined several Auckland yacht clubs so he could listen to the people buying and sailing boats, and kept in regular contact with builders and other designers.
The boom years
From the late 1960s into the mid-1980s, Morris recalled, it wasn’t unusual to see 25 to 30 one-design yachts on club start lines, among them Variants, Trackers, Lotus 9.2s and 10.6s, Wright 10s and Marauders. Around 200 Trackers were built. In about 1981, more than 100 Wright yachts gathered by the Auckland Harbour Bridge for the start of Richmond Yacht Club’s inaugural Alan Wright Day, which the club went on to hold every year for two decades.
Many of those boats came out of backyards and small yards. Wright’s business began by selling plans to home builders, and some professionals built their careers around his drawings. Boating New Zealand’s 2017 profile of boatbuilder Philip Wilson reported that 142 of the more than 160 boats Wilson had built were Wright designs, and that the pair gifted two Wright 650 Sports yachts to Gulf Harbour Yacht Club for youth training.
The boom slowed after 1979, when a 20 per cent tax on new boats was imposed. Morris describes how it stalled domestic sales and pushed many builders into repair and refit work.
Wright boats at sea
Master mariner John Mansell bought plans for a Nova 28 and had her built in Nelson, raising the topsides, adding a flush deck and fitting extra ballast, all with Wright’s approval. “I wanted something very rugged that could withstand a knockdown,” Mansell told Boating New Zealand’s John Macfarlane. Renamed Innovator of Mana, she carried him through the 1976 Observer Singlehanded Trans-Atlantic Race. Wright later redrew a design Mansell had commissioned from him, and it became the 11.6m Navigator, which Mansell used for his navigation training school.
John Faire, a former president of what is now Yachting New Zealand and later a High Court judge, moved into trailer yachting in the early 1980s with a Wright Tasman 20. The Marauder Wisecrack, built on a Tauranga front lawn, completed the 1990 New Plymouth to Mooloolaba solo trans-Tasman race under Bob Wise.
Wright drew powerboats as well. Yachting New Zealand’s 2013 notice says his power catamarans were chosen as camera platforms for the America’s Cup. Kelvin Kay bought the moulds for one of those designs, a 15m powercat, in 2007, and with his son Amos at K2 Marine later returned it to production, buying the rights to use Wright’s name. Their 14m Wright 46S was launched in 2021.
Still sailing
Wright designed the Marauder 8.4 in 1976 as a fast but practical family yacht for Hauraki Gulf conditions. This year’s class championship at Weiti Boating Club lost Saturday to easterlies gusting above 30 knots, but seven of the eight entries were on the line on Sunday for four windward-leeward races. Manawa, skippered by Keith Bekker, took overall honours in the spinnaker division. Dave Hunt’s Long John Silver was first across the line in every Division 2 race and won the fleet handicap prize for the day.
The Marauder 8.4 Owners Association, formed in 1979, keeps the fleet together with social events, sailing and a newsletter. Its website estimates that more than 200 GRP hulls and decks were produced and says it knows of about 80 yachts. Most sail around the Hauraki Gulf, with others in the Bay of Islands, Tauranga, Wellington, Waikawa Bay and Nelson, and a handful in Australia and the Pacific.
Chris Woodhams (Jnr), 18, owns the Wright 10 Group Therapy. His father, Boating New Zealand digital editor Chris Woodhams, describes her as solid and well designed for her size, a boat that travels well and is easily sailed by two.
Later years
In 2021 Boating New Zealand’s Mark Seabrook found Wright developing the Sea Lark, a 2.7m plywood paddling boat that doubles as its own trailer and can be towed behind a mobility scooter. Wright hoped it would get grandparents and grandchildren working together in the shed, concerned that the practical woodworking skills people once picked up as a matter of course were fading. It had always been, he said, “a great thrill for me to put people in boats” through his designs.
In November 2024 Gulf Harbour Yacht Club held an Alan Wright Tribute weekend. Yachting New Zealand reported that more than 100 people gathered on the Friday night to hear friends and family share stories from his life, and more than 60 sailors raced Wright-designed boats on the Saturday while he watched from the launch Fremar. On the Sunday, boats dressed with flags sailed past in salute. Wright described the weekend as a “high point” of his life.
