Grand Banks – An Icon from Malaysia

Grand Banks

Grand Banks – long an icon in the Pacific region – is winning over more and more European customers with its trawler yachts for the whole family. The story behind the shipyard is remarkable.

There are not many shipyards on our Blue Planet that can claim outright to be something like an icon. Sure, Riva, Chris Craft and all the other big names became famous thanks to the stars and starlets who lounged on their beautifully shaped boats. But there are also boats – or rather yachts – for owners looking for that certain “something else”. Boats and yachts that practically suggest themselves as trawlers for long-distance cruising in a comfortable atmosphere, and that are not about top speeds on the way to the destination, but rather about the journey there.

The Grand Banks shipyard builds exactly these kinds of boats. The fact that it is not quite so well known here in Europe is due to its base and production site: Malaysia is a long way away in many respects – Grand Banks' most important sales regions are the Asian and Pacific waters. Yet the very special Grand Banks style has meanwhile won plenty of friends in Europe too, as the large selection on Boat24 shows.

Icon and legend

The beginning of the Grand Banks legend, however, lies in Hong Kong. In the 1950s, the American expatriate Robert Newton lived there and, together with his long since grown-up sons, “wanted to do something different.” And so it came about that, instead of their previous activities in the soft drink business, the Newtons invested money in a small shipyard, where from the very start they successfully built wooden powerboats and sailboats.

The foundation for a flourishing company with an outstanding reputation for craftsmanship was soon laid, and the Newtons skilfully expanded it by bringing a great deal of industry know-how “on board”. For years, the crème de la crème of boat design worked for Grand Banks: Sparkman and Stevens, William Garden, Nat Herreshoff and Ray Hunt.

In the early 1960s, the company reached a milestone in its development with the "Chantyman": the 35-foot, diesel-powered boat had a raised pilothouse, high bulwarks and softer hull lines. Although this boat bore little resemblance to the elegant lines of a current Grand Banks, it was undoubtedly the design that introduced the world to the concept of a production-built trawler. Its success led to a fundamental change in the company's strategy. In 1963, the "Spray", designed by Kenneth Smith, was launched and became the prototype of a category that would take the boating world by storm – the 8-knot trawler.

Trawler as the model

The certain elegance and the hint of "utility boat" – after all, trawlers are normally fishing boats – of the 36-foot diesel-powered cruiser prompted the Newtons to give up building custom yachts and to concentrate on series production, which eventually became Grand Banks. Since 1965, when the first models were launched, more than 1,200 GB36s have been built – an enormous figure for that era.

In 1968, the factory was relocated from Hong Kong to Singapore, and five years later the company made one of those landmark decisions that many shipyards faced at the time, although they reacted at very different speeds: from then on, all hulls of Grand Banks yachts were
no longer to be made of wood, but of fiberglass.
The twist: fearing skepticism from traditional yachties, the company informed neither dealers nor buyers nor the public. Yet as history proves, this decision more than paid off in terms of strength, weight, durability and ease of maintenance. The GB42, for instance, developed shortly after the GB36, was only taken out of the range in 2005, after 1,560 boats had been produced.

The following decades at Grand Banks were exceptionally successful. Grand Banks grew into one of the largest powerboat yards in Asia.
In 2014, however, perhaps the most significant change at Grand Banks took place, when it acquired the Australia-based company Palm Beach Motor Yachts. The icing on the cake: the takeover also brought in the extremely successful offshore sailor Mark Richards (among other things skipper of the successful 100-foot maxi Wild Oats) as a designer. He in turn modified the design of the Grand Banks boats and gave it a fresh "touch", while retaining fundamental design elements at least in essence.

The new range of Grand Banks motor yachts retains all the virtues of its heritage – style, luxury and the ability to take family and friends along on extended cruises.

As early as 1995, the Grand Banks production facility was moved to Malaysia. Where modern, sturdy, comfortable and – last but not least – economical motor yachts are still built today.
Grand Banks can quite plainly be counted among the most successful and economically stable shipyards in the world.