09-25-2007
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Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: Annapolis, Md
Posts: 5,478
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The Tanton 44's were built for a company called something like Offshore Marine. Offshore Marine was one of the many 1970's and early 1980's small firms that contracted with Asian yards to produce boats of various designs. The Tanton's were designed by Yves Tanton who is a respected and who used to participate on this forum. Yves has a website http://www.tantonyachts.com/images5.htm He and I have exchanged emails and I found him to be a very thoughtful, and very innovative designer.
The Offshore 44's as they were called came as free standing cat- ketches and the one that I knew best was a ketch rather than a cutter. They seemed to suffer from a host of build quality issues typical of Asian yards and CT in particular. During that period, CT had a really poor reputation of banging out poorly built boats that looked good when new. This is not a completely deserved reputation because CT was involved in a lot of building under contract to boat importers and it was the boat importers themselves who seemed to set and enforce the quality standard. Left to its own devices, my sense is that CT built junk, but some of the designs that they built on contract such as the Warwick designed boats were quality designs executed with a reasonable standard of care. The Offshore 44 that I looked at was somewhere between junk and a reasonable level of care. One thing to bear in mind, the boat that I looked at had teak deck problems within the first 10-15 years of its life and the owner said that when he removed the decks he found really poor workmanship and materials leading to going back with pained glass decks. The other big compromises were knock off hardware and poor systems design and execution.
Jeff
Jeff
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Anyone familiar with a Tanton 44 cutter?
