Skills and Workforce

Fairlie Yachts. A spirit of traditional Sailing Yachts

News

Contact

: Designed for both cruising and racing, this magnificent yacht reflects the style and quality of a golden age of yachting Read more

: The Fairlie 66 is as responsive and easy to handle as her smaller but equally elegant sister. Read more

: A beautiful William Fife inspired yacht which is at one cruising extended oceans as she is competing in regattas. Read more

: The Fairlie 110 has been developed through our Design Evolution ethos using one of these ‘work in progress’ designs. Read more

: Custom design requests & examples of bespoke projects can be viewed on the Fairlie Design site. Read more

Design

Designed for both cruising and racing, these magnificent yachts reflect the style and quality of a golden age of yachting. This coupled with a modern underwater body and rig, creates a yacht which is as easy to handle as any modern yacht on the market today.

Our Green Credentials

At Fairlie Yachts we are concerned about the hardwoods and trees that go into building these yachts

The Fairlie Build

A substantial yacht is made up of a thousand details, and the whole may be far greater than the sum of these parts, yet without people, she is nothing

Design Concepts

The yacht designs showcased in these pages were conceived by a desire to make Fairlie’s unique quality, skills and knowledge available to a wider group of individuals

Fairlie Restorations of Fife classics began in 1985 with a rich history running through to the launch of a new range of classic Yachts.

Fairlie has a history of working with a skilled workforce, drawing on the history of traditional yacht building in the Southampton area

Restoration

From 1987, and starting with the Altair project, Fairlie have been restoring traditional sailing yachts of all sizes

Fife’s Legacy

With the first decade of the 21st Century run its course, a few thoughts on the reasons why the designs of a third generation Ayrshire born yacht designer remain so important 150 years after his birth

The Southampton area has boasted a number of yacht yards going back 150 years. The western side of the Itchen has had Fays, Summers & Payne and Camper & Nicholsons. Slowly as the twentieth century progressed C&N ended up owning all three yards.

The Southampton area has had the infrastructure for yacht building for generations. C&N was a major employer in the area, taking on fifty or so Apprentices every year. Our senior workforce were from the last generations of shipwrights to have undergone training with C&N. Their knowledge and experience is the basis of our workforce today.

Take for example our workshop supervisor, Nick Bowyer: apprenticed with C&N in 1968 and was on that site with C&N and then SYS until July 1990. He has worked on yachts such as Puritan, Shamrock 5, Aile Blanche, Altair Ticonderoga and Belle Aventure.

Fairlie has usually employed a couple of Apprentices, training the next generation in the rapidly dying art of working on wooden built yachts.

Our Apprentices work on the day release system, whereby they spend one day at college and four days in the work place. They typically study City and Guilds Yacht and boat building and level 3 NVQ in allied subjects.

As many employers find our junior staff are very flexible in their approach to employment and often go out to work on their own.This pool of experienced labour is always available for us to draw on in the busy times.

History

The roots of the Company started in 1985. Mr. Albert Obrist, a Swiss industrialist and owner of a large collection of Ferraris, restored under his supervision to original condition, bought the Fife designed schooner Altair. For a number of years Mr. Obrist had felt that a restoration of a classic yacht to the depth and [&hellip