Pacemaker Yachts for Sale

John Leek Sr. fell out with his partner at Egg Harbor, sold his shares in 1948 and opened Pacemaker with his brother Cecil at Lower Bank early in 1949. The Leeks had been building on the Mullica River since the 1700s. The first boat was a carvel planked 29 footer, Jersey cedar on oak, and the line grew through 33, 36 and 40 footers, then took in Egg Harbor in the mid 1960s when that company ran short of money. Pacemaker tested fiberglass with a separate brand called Alglas before committing, and by the mid 1970s both names were glass, with a wide range from the middle twenties into the sixties, convertibles selling inland and sportfishermen on the coast. The company filed Chapter 11 in 1979 and stopped building in August 1980. From about 1984 Bob Seidelmann, who had been building sailboats at Berlin, New Jersey since 1977, acquired Pacemaker and turned his plant over to powerboats under that name, and the Pacemaker badge stayed in production there for several more years.

So there are two quite different boats wearing this badge and the year tells you which. Anything up to 1980 is a Leek family Pacemaker from New Jersey, either a wooden boat or 1970s fiberglass, and the fiberglass ones are heavily built with plywood cored decks, plywood stringers and a great deal of interior joinery. Anything from the mid 1980s onward is a Seidelmann built boat, a different company with a different workforce, and should be judged on its own rather than on the older reputation. Nobody has honored a Pacemaker warranty since 1980 and there has been no factory of any kind for decades, so there is no parts counter, no service network and no drawings to request. In practice that is manageable, because almost nothing on these boats is proprietary: hardware, glass, tanks and engines are all generic, and the owners' forums are where the model knowledge lives. Survey for water. On a wooden one you want a wood surveyor. On a glass one you want every bit of cored deck, the cabin sole, the stringers, the transom and the fuel tanks checked, because those are what put these boats ashore, not the hulls.