Don’t Call Him a Disruptor

A Conversation with Jerry Montgomery

His creations dominated this year’s Cruiser Challenge in Monterey, which was all the excuse we needed to catch up with the legendary small-boat designer and past Cruiser Challenge winner. Now 85, Jerry Montgomery has quit sailing and relocated from California back to his native Oregon. Still, he remains relevant on topics ranging from the virtues of carbon fiber to headwinds facing the sailboat industry today.

Looking back, Jerry remembers mentors, colleagues and competitors. Looking forward, he shares his thoughts on (among other things) the future of the Potter Yachters. He spoke by telephone with the club’s vice-commodore, George Wehrfritz. Excerpts:

You must be pleased by Tyler Backman’s performance with Goshawk at this year’s Cruiser Challenge.

Sure. It’s a very fast boat, and Tyler is an excellent sailor. Very pleased, but I almost expected it.

Of all the boats you’ve designed, where does the Sage 17 rank in your mind?

I would say it’s a close second behind the Sage Cat. I designed the Montgomery 15 and Lyle Hess is the designer of record for the 17. He basically designed it off a million sketches from me. I wasn’t confident drawing the lines at that point so I asked him to do it. Since those two boats I’ve learned an awful lot, so I would expect myself to improve.

Jerry at the helm of his Sage 17 design

You used a lot of carbon in the Sage boats. Why not fiberglass?

It’s lighter and stronger. Just about all the high-tech boats now are made of carbon or mostly carbon. I’d say that with no other changes you could take off 30 percent of the weight. For the Sage 17, the only carbon in it is on the deck, and I chose that because any weight above the waterline is anti-ballast. So, taking a couple of hundred pounds out of the deck saved more than that in ballast because of the lever arm involved. That’s why the Sage 17 is noticeably stiffer than the Montgomery 17, despite [being] less beamy.

I imagine carbon costs more, too.

Much more. It added a couple of thousand dollars to the price of the boat. Using it in the hull would have cost several thousand more.

Who was your target buyer?

It’s kind of a specialty boat, not for the same guy who buys Ventures or MacGregors or Catalinas. For demanding sailors.

You met Lyle Hess while he was building the Balboa 20 having entered the industry making wooden boats. Is that also how you started?

Not really, although I made a lot of wooden plugs, mock-ups, which we used to take a mold from for fiberglass boats. Fiberglass was so much cheaper. Lyle and I made the plugs for the Balboa 20 together, which was how I got to know him. Lucky me!

Looking back at the profusion of fiberglass boat-makers that started in the 1960s, today we’d say they utilized new technologies to disrupt a traditional industry. Did you think of yourselves that way back then?

I wouldn’t call us disruptors. The wooden boat industry was very small compared to fiberglass. Look at Roger MacGregor, one of the pioneers in fiberglass sailboats, the Ventures. I won’t knock ’em but they’re ‘price boats,’ and they introduced so many people to sailing. When he came out with the Venture 21 you could buy one for $1,995. Big enough to sleep the whole family. I mean, that caused a lot of the boom in fiberglass sailboats. In a way, we’re all copiers of Roger MacGregor.

That’s interesting.

I knew Roger, not real well but I had lunch with him occasionally and he was a bright guy. He was well-educated in the business end of the sailboat industry and so smart in those things that sometimes he made me feel stupid.

If Ventures were price boats, what were the Montgomery 17s and 15s when you started?

I developed the M-17 specifically to be a better boat than the Balboa 20, to do the same things in a somewhat smaller package.

But I started with the dinghies. I bought the molds for them from Richard Arthur, the guy who developed the Balboa 20 and 26. He got so busy with the Balboa 20 that he abandoned [making] the dinghies. The dinghies needed some improvements in construction; they were very good in design. Do you know who Larry Pardey was?

Yes, he sailed around the world-

A couple of times. Yeah, I knew Larry and [his spouse] Lin fairly well. Larry actually made the plugs and designed one of Richard Arthur’s boats, the little 6.8 dinghy. It’s a neat boat, a 6’8” pram. I sold, gosh, well over a thousand of them. And I sold over two thousand of the Montgomery 10s, which supposedly was an old Frances Herreschoff design. I designed the [sail] rig for it, and I took the prototype to some trials held by One Design and Offshore Yachtsman magazine. I won the only perfect score [among] 49 entries in quality in those trials, and I won all my races, including the rowing race. When the article on that came out my phone rang off the hook. I was a one-man shop until then. In a year I had close to 12 employees making the 10s at a rate of two per day.

Who was your target buyer when you started making the Montgomery 17?

Discerning people. People with knowledge and money. It was simply a better boat, and I went after that market.

How much more did it cost than a Venture 17?

If I remember correctly, pretty close to twice as much. Maybe that’s why at one time Richard was making 12 [Venture] 21s per day, and I was making one Monty 17 a week!

So there was a premium market back then.

Oh definitely, yeah. C&C, a Canadian company, was going crazy, and they sold almost as many boats as Catalina did, and they were twice the price.

I sail a Sparrow 16 designed by Ron Holder-

He was a very good friend, and I remember the Sparrow well.

You manufactured one of his designs, right?

The Panther. It was a high-performance boat designed with an emphasis on planing ability. On a brisk day, reaching back and forth in Newport bay’s turning basin, I could keep up with Hobie 14s. The Panther was very light for its size; mostly foam core and quite a bit of Kevlar. If I knew then what I know today about making boats light, it would have been even lighter, and more durable.

The news in the small boat community has been bleak of late. Huchin’s Marine, the maker of Com-Pac sailboats, ceased operations a few months back-

There’s just not enough of a market to make a living.

Also, Duckworks, the one-stop shop for wooden boatbuilders, has gone out of business.

That’s a shame. They did some neat things.

It makes one worry about the future. What are your thoughts on this?

The industry peaked out in 1974, the year of the first gas crisis. Most of the good builders prior to 1975 had sold out for the season, including me. And then [sales] went down a little bit each year. Ron and I were close friends. We had lunch all the time and sailed together and knew each other’s families. We would go to lunch and commiserate about how business had dropped off in the current year. We did that for several years before we realized it was a trend, one that has tapered but is still going on.

We talked about the explosion of fiberglass boats. Suddenly, people who had never dreamt of sailing could afford a boat. And powerboats too. In sailboats, there was kind of a joke back in those days that after people bought an entry-level boat, within a year they either got out of sailing or caught big-boat-itis. By the early 1970s there were so many small sailboats on the market, cheap, that it had a huge effect on new boat sales. And we had incredible inflation. New boat sales just died and a lot of it was from sticker-shock, I’m sure.

It’s analogous to the situation today. There are a lot of used trailer boats coming out of garages and some great deals to be made.

I just heard about a Sage Cat, which I consider the best boat that I designed, that sold for $1,800—and Tyler, apparently, has bought it. Good for him.

I look forward to seeing it.

Yeah. That’s a neat boat. It’s about as fast as a Montgomery 17. I had the prototype for close to a year and did a lot of races with it and surprised a lot of people.

Our club is having discussions about the future. We know that, historically, International Marine and other small-boat makers were instrumental in educating people about small-boats sailing. With no major manufacturers left standing, it follows that if groups like the Potter Yachters don’t pick up this educational component it will disappear. Does that sound logical to you?

Good question—I don’t know. There’s been a lot of talk within the sailing industry since the 1970s about promoting and educating, and I’m sure it does some good but not earth-shattering good. I’ve always looked at it as sailing is something I really like, both cruising and particularly racing, and it’s great to have somebody to race against and cruise with. Other than that, I’ve never been much of a promoter, which is a flaw in terms of being a businessman admittedly. I would predict—if you want a prediction —that things are probably pretty stable. I’m not saying that the industry has bottomed out, but it’s close, I think.

I grew up on a farm in Oregon. I remember we all had fishing boats but sailboats were almost unheard-of. We used to waterski at Fern Ridge Reservoir, which had a sailing club. They’d be out racing—now this was before the days of fiberglass—and I remember telling my dad, “Those sailboats, they look really neat.” He said “Ah, those are for rich people at the yacht club. They’re the only ones who can afford ‘em” And we went from that to where anyone who could afford a second car could afford a sailboat.

We had the best turnout for the Cruiser Challenge this year since Covid. One of the disappointments is that we didn’t get any Potter 15s in the race.

Oh, you didn’t? Very surprising.

In the Small Boat category we had three boats – all Montgomery 15s.

So they took the first three places. That’s great!

One thought we have is to do more one-day events or sail/camp trips. Also, we’re trying every way we can to not present ourselves as a West Wight Potter-specific club.

I’ve noticed that. You’re not sailing a Potter. Neither is Tyler.

Our former commodore, Jon Barber, sails Ol’ 44, a Montgomery 17. We are a club that is open to all trailer boats.

Did you know that 30-40 years ago, the Potter group disallowed Montgomery boats in their races for a short time?

I didn’t know that, but it’s not surprising because, historically, these clubs were manufacturer specific. We changed that before the turn of the last century but we’re still working to let people know. It seems to us that sailing groups need to get together because they’re all getting smaller.

It sounds like you’re doing about all that you can. I lived most of my early adult life in Newport Beach. There were races in the bay all the time and I probably went to fifty a year. In the summer, each club had an evening series.

Have you considered [restarting] that Havasu race? It was great, and I believe at least fifty boats [attended] the last few years it ran. It started out as a cruise for Montgomery boats but expanded quickly.

[In the 1970s] we started a fleet of Montgomery 10s in Newport. It took off partially because there were three sailmakers and I made them deals to trade each a boat for sails, so we had some expert sailors right from the start. I’d done a little bit of racing, but there were some who from the start got so far ahead of me I couldn’t see what they were doing right. After every race day I’d go home and crack my books and figure out what I did wrong. Before that season was over I was giving them a tough time, and the second year I was totally competitive with them, and the third year I was the guy to beat.

That is basically my interest in sailing—racing. I also used to haul a boat down to Mexico for a week or two, mainly with a group of sailors from Tucson. I’d catch fish down there that could feed the whole group.

I enjoy sailing with people who are better sailors than I am, because you learn so much.

There’s no substitute for reading. The technical end of things to make your boat go faster. I still have probably fifty books on sailing, a lot on design but many on performance. I learned design from Lyle Hess and Ron Holder, but I learned most of what I know from reading. Stewart Walker’s books—he has three—they’re terrific. He has one on tactics and his chapter on starts is special. You can read that and totally visualize starting a sailboat race [because] he talks you through the minutes before the start. When I was racing I’d reread that every two to three years. I met him at the trials I told you about. He’s long dead, he was in his sixties when I met him fifty years ago.

We’re in a conversation with the SoCal Potters about joining forces. Given the region’s huge population base, it could be an area of growth for the combined club.

SoCal is really a big boat area, but don’t let that stop you. My business was located there, but I usually sold more boats in any number of other states than California, believe it or not. The dinghies were the exception. But for the 15 and 17 and 23, almost all sales were out of state. All the Southern California marinas and storage lots were way too expensive for most people. And in many places, you couldn’t keep a boat on its trailer in your driveway.

We’re finding yacht clubs in the SF Bay Area that welcome us for weekend visits because we fill open slips and bring in revenue. Maybe the same is true in Southern California?

I wouldn’t know because I left in 1978. And being 85, most of my old friends are dead. That’s a problem with getting old!

Hopefully the two groups will come together. It’s fun to meet new people and sail in different waters on occasion.

Oh yeah. And I think it’s great that you’re doing that. Communicating with the sailors has got to be a problem for you-

Our Newsletter is a real gem. People read it for technical support, or to see where we go.

How do they find it?

On the website, but we need to make that easier.

I think that will be a real key to what you’re trying to do. •SCA•