Cherubini Yachts for Sale

Cherubini was an accident. In 1975 John and Frit Cherubini built a 44 foot ketch called Diana for themselves in a backyard in the Philadelphia suburbs, buyers came knocking, and a boat company at Delran, New Jersey followed. John Cherubini had drawn the 44 in 1971, taking the proportions of the Herreshoff Ticonderoga as his starting point, and the first customer boat was finished in 1977. He died in 1983. Over the company's life it built 32 of the 44 foot ketches and nine of the 48 foot staysail schooners, at 10,000 to 12,000 man hours apiece, which is why they cost what they cost and look how they look. The 44 is 44 feet 2 inches on deck with a 40 foot waterline, 11 feet 6 inches of beam, 28,000 pounds and a centerboard drawing 4 feet 10 inches up and close to 9 feet down. In 2000 Lee Cherubini brought in investors and the renamed Independence-Cherubini Corp turned toward trawlers and jet runabouts, built one more schooner, and filed for bankruptcy reorganization in late 2003, leaving the Delran plant. Dave Cherubini pulled the wooden templates and jigs out of a dumpster at the closing yard, started Cherubini Yachts LLC, and holds the rights to the runabouts and the hull molds for the ketches and schooners. That company is still at Delran, building classic styled runabouts and sport cruisers such as the Classic 20, Classic 24 and 255 Sport Cruiser, and doing restoration work.

Anything under this name is a hand built boat in a run of a few dozen, so identify which era you are looking at. A 44 ketch or 48 schooner from 1977 to the 1990s is the original Delran boat: fiberglass hull, and above that plywood decks and mahogany cabin sides sealed in epoxy, which is what makes them beautiful and what makes the survey matter. Look hard at the deck and cabin structure, the bedding of everything through it, the teak, the bronze, the centerboard and its pennant and trunk, the rudder, the chainplates and the tanks. A 2007 Mk II has a molded foam cored deck in vinylester and is a different and lower maintenance proposition. A small modern powerboat carrying the badge is a Cherubini Yachts LLC runabout with no connection to the sailboats other than the family. No warranty survives from the original company and there is no dealer network, but the situation is better than for most defunct builders: the family that drew and built these boats is still in Delran, still owns the molds, jigs and templates, and does restorations, so patterns for a missing part exist. That is worth a great deal on a boat where almost nothing is off the shelf.