Lines That Last

This is a lovely deck saloon Northshore 36 with an Adams hull. Photo: Blair Harrison

This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine and forms part of our latest edition of boating features exploring the design legacy of yacht designer Joe Adams, fifty years on from the drawing of the Adams 10.

In late 1974, newly hired apprentice Graham Radford caught the ferry daily from Church Point to Towlers Bay and walked the bush track from the wharf to the modest kit home of prolific yacht designer Joe Adams. Overlooking Pittwater on the edge of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, inside, the 42-year-old Adams was quietly drawing boats that would help shape a generation of Australian sailing.

“When I started in 1974 we did everything on flat drafting tables,” Radford recalls. “All the output was done on a flat drafting table using splines and weights. That’s how you created the lines, plans and curves.”

Years earlier, Joe and his wife Anne had sailed around the world aboard Hoana, a yacht Radford notes is still sailing with the Sydney Amateur Sailing Club. On returning, Adams became involved in yacht design, developing what Radford describes as “a natural talent”.

By the time Radford arrived, Adams already had “a very impressive range of designs”.

Among Adams’s early successes was the 73-foot ferro-cement ocean racer Helsal, a project initially commissioned to Bob Miller (later Ben Lexcen) before the design work passed to Adams; Helsal took line honours in the 1973 Sydney to Hobart.

“I was extraordinarily fortunate to have the opportunity to work with and to be educated by the natural talent that Joe possessed,” Radford says.

Lines on paper

Unlike many designers who became known for a particular type of yacht, Adams produced a remarkable range: racing yachts, cruiser-racers, offshore passagemakers, trailer sailers and centreboard cruisers. The range extended, as Radford describes it, “from the naught 40 through to 22-foot trailer sailers, through to 14-foot skiffs, to 98-foot steel yachts”.

There was no single Adams design formula. Different boats solved different problems.

“There were so many boats that were done with so many different builders, for so many different reasons and different clients,” Radford says. “There was a variation in the approach between the style of boats depending on what they were used for … there wasn’t one formula. Each design evolved according to its purpose.”

The Adams 10 emerged from Adams’s exploration of lightweight, fast yachts with long waterlines in the years leading up to its drawing in 1976, 50 years ago from the time this article is written.

Some Adams yachts shared that philosophy, but Radford cautions against seeing them simply as scaled versions of one another. What they shared was an approach: relatively light displacement, narrow beam and easily driven hulls capable of combining speed with efficiency.

In the Adams 10, Adams paired a 31.5-foot waterline with a narrow 8-foot 8½-inch beam, light displacement and straight, clean hull lines. A short keel and transom-hung rudder contributed to a light helm, while swept-back spreaders removed the need for runners on the tall, three-quarter rig.

The result was a yacht that offered sailors the performance of a long waterline without the weight and volume of a broader, heavier hull. The Adams 10 was also designed with offshore racing in mind.

It was a period when Australian yacht building could turn ideas into boats in considerable numbers. “The industry supported innovation,” Radford says. “There were probably five major builders in Sydney at the time, and we knew all of them. Boats were being built everywhere.”

The numbers recorded in the Adams design book give some measure of that activity. By the time it was published, more than 60 Adams 10 Metres were racing and cruising around Australia, more than 100 Mottle 33s had been built, and 60 Adams 45s were already sailing.

Those three designs alone accounted for more than 220 yachts, before the many other production models, custom commissions and owner-built boats drawn by the office were counted.

Still performing

For Tasmanian sailor Tristan Gourlay, the Adams story began when he was about 11 years old and his father bought an Adams 13, XPT, from Lake Macquarie. Renamed Family Express in Tasmania, she became the family cruising boat. At one point, Gourlay recalls, six Adams 13s were racing on the Tamar River. His first Adams of his own was an 11.9, which he recorded at speeds of 22 knots.

“I always really enjoyed the way they just get up and surf waves, and then also how easy they are to handle when they’re up at speed and surfing,” Gourlay says. “They certainly are a delightful boat to sail downwind in a decent breeze.”

The Adams bluewater capability is embodied by Gourlay’s aluminium-hulled Blue Moon II. Gourlay tells me he reached over 20 knots in both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The Adams 16.4 Metre took the narrow, light-displacement philosophy of Adams’s “metre” yachts into a larger ocean cruiser. Its long waterline and narrow beam were intended to produce fast passage times, while a centreboard reduced draft and opened shallower cruising grounds. Owned by Tristan and his father, Ken, the yacht has cruised the Mediterranean, Caribbean, North Pacific and South Pacific, and competed in offshore races, including the Sydney Hobart and the 2025 Melbourne Osaka Cup.

In 2025 and 2026, Gourlay sailed Blue Moon II solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world, completing the 21,600-nautical-mile circumnavigation in 138 days, 16 hours and 30 minutes; Kevin Green reported in the feature entitled Around Alone in Afloat in May 2026.

The voyage demonstrated in practice what Adams had sought on the drawing board: a cruising yacht that remained easily driven, manageable and capable of making ocean passages.

“They are a really good all-round boat,” Gourlay says. “Once you do get the right offwind conditions, they really do get up and go… Especially for their age, they still are a very competitive boat.”

Adams 10

That longevity is also evident in the Adams 10. Adams 10 Class Association president Geoff Charters describes a boat that remains remarkably capable across a broad range of conditions.

“They’re very powerful boats, they sail incredibly well. They’re very well balanced,” he says. “They sail well in five knots of wind, and they sail well in 35 knots of wind. They really are quick boats.”

For Adams 10 owner Tracey Richardson, “They’re fantastic … great in high winds and really stable and fast and sporty, and I just loved it.”

Richardson’s introduction to Adams 10 was on a wild Thursday evening, with racing close to being called off, she walked past larger yachts with rails to an Adams 10 sitting low to the water without them.

“What have I got myself into?” she recalls thinking. Then they went sailing. Years later, Richardson owns an Adams 10 herself and was second in the Nationals for the Adams class racing in 2025. “In some ways, they’re kind of easy to sail, but … hard to sail well.”

A living fleet

At Lake Macquarie, the Adams legacy is less a history than a living fleet. Peter Rigby, now 85, was a long-time friend of Joe Adams and has owned 12 Adams yachts.

“The thing about the Adams boats,” he says, is that decades after they were designed, “they will win this afternoon at Lake Macquarie’s Wednesday race. They sail.”

For Rigby, Adams’s ability was not simply in producing fast yachts, but in understanding what sailors needed from a particular boat in a particular place. He points especially to Adams’s shoal-draft designs, well suited to Lake Macquarie’s shallows and bays.

“Joe designed a range of shoal-draft boats — the Adams 10 Queenslander, the Adams 11.9, the Adams 13, the Adams 15, the Adams 16.4, and he even did it with an Adams 20.”

“You can go places that 99% of everybody else can’t go.”

The boats that found their way to Lake Macquarie were not simply cruisers. Rigby remembers the Adams 13 as a cruising boat that “won everything”.

It is another expression of the principle Radford saw at the drawing board: the boat evolved according to what it was expected to do. That longevity is not confined to Lake Macquarie.

Middle Harbour Yacht Club was once an epicentre of the Adams 10, with Charters recalling a fleet of around 15 or 16 boats.

“There was a centre of gravity that had kept the class vibrant and alive,” he says.

Today, the boats are more dispersed, with fleets at Lake Macquarie and Port Phillip Bay and others scattered through Sydney, Queensland, Tasmania and even Western Australia. One has even been seen in the Mediterranean.

“The future of the class really lies in organised regattas, probably once or twice a year, to try and get a critical mass of them together, to race one-design,” Charters says.

The Nationals provide one gathering point. Another is the Waitangi Cup, alternating between Middle Harbour and Port Phillip Bay. Host owners provide the Adams 10s, visiting sailors borrow them and skippers draw lots, with no skipper permitted to race their own boat.

For Richardson, those events are as much about the people as the racing.

“It’s always fantastic to get together with everybody, especially at the Nationals,” she says, “because that’s our one event where we get to see each other and catch up with how all the Adams are doing.”

“We all know each other pretty well. We all often sail on different boats as well.”

Fifty years on

After thousands of miles alone aboard Blue Moon II, Gourlay reached a point where he no longer needed to look outside to know how the yacht was behaving.

“You do learn to feel the boat,” he says. “You can feel the motion of the boat.”

It is a long way from the flat drafting tables at Towlers Bay, where lines were once drawn onto paper with splines and weights. But those lines have travelled. Today, Adams yachts are still racing around Australia, gathering for Nationals, slipping into shallow anchorages and crossing oceans.

Joe once told Rigby: “The boats you’re building now will still be sailing after we’re all gone.”

Fifty years on, they still are.

This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine. To explore more stories like this, browse the AFLOAT Magazine archive or view the latest edition of AFLOAT Magazine.