I thought that it would be useful to post something about the boats that are the basis of this blog. This post is an excerpt of a document that I wrote a few years ago soon after I bought my MacGregor 19 powersailer. It's a pretty rare boat; most of the Mac powersailers that your see and read about are the "grown up" 26 footers. After I bought my boat I spent some time and effort to find out as much as I could about the history and design of the MacGregor powersailers -- that the Mac 19 was the "prototype" for the rest of the line. And if the Mac 19 model had not sold as well as it did in a declining sailboat market, the history of MacGregor -- and its powersailers -- could have turned out very differently. It now appears that information on the little MacGregor 19 powersailer is slowly disappearing from the internet, and some of my best sources from just a few years ago are now "404 Not Found." Hopefully I'll be able to corral enough before it all evaporates. So here goes...
Yessssssiree, another boat. The story began during the winter months of 2015/2016 when a sailing buddy and I started brainstorming about "newer and bigger-sized trailer sailboats." After camp-cruising on the Potter for a couple of years, it seemed like a little more room -- and less crawling around -- would be a very desirable attribute in a “new” boat. I made a list of what I thought are neat boats with a small cabin -- boats that we could either buy or build. We had looked at a 19-foot Sanibel parked on a street in Havre de Grace at one point, and a Peep Hen had shown up on the Sailing Texas listings. The MacGregor 19 powersailer -- the predecessor and little brother to the MacGregor 26M and 26X planing motor-sailboats -- was on my list, as well as Compac Suncats, Bayhens, and Potter 19s.
Spring came, the Chesapeake warmed up, and we went sailing and forgot all about bigger, better boats. Fast forward to late October 2017 when a MacGregor 19 showed up for sale on that Sailing Texas website. Compared to the bigger MacGregor 26X and 26M powersailers, the M19 is so rare that I had never seen one on the Chesapeake Bay. To my complete amazement the ad indicated that the boat was located only a couple of hours away. What???? Hoping my sailing buddy would be interested in the boat, or at least a road trip to take a look, I quickly forwarded the info and link to him. He declined interest, but I sent the owner an email to find out more, and see if it was still available. The quick response back was, yes, still unsold. Mainly out of curiosity, having unearthed such a rare boat that was only two hours away, I made an appointment to check out the “barn find” the following Saturday.
After building literally thousands of trailerable sailboats since MacGregor started his company in 1967 (the first ten years as Venture), and as the traditional sailboat markets cooled off in the late 1980s, Roger MacGregor decided that there might be a market for a family-oriented “hybrid” sailboat-powerboat that could be comfortably sailed, and might also keep the kids (at least theoretically…) from becoming bored -- drop the sails, fire up the outboard, and go water skiing or tubing. The M19, sporting a 40-hp outboard and introduced in 1992, was his "proof-of-concept" boat.
It's well-known boatbuilder lore that Roger MacGregor got the idea for a successful company based on his Stanford University MBA project, and he was a marketer as well as designer and manufacturer. Here's a link to a longish video that MacGregor put together to sell his new boat, www.YouTube.com/watch?v=hemNdJmzQBo.
The high point of trailer-sailer boat building happened well before 1992 and the market was in steep decline, but there was no competition for MacGregor's new boat, and the hybrid “powersailer” concept apparently resonated on the West Coast and the boats sold well. A few apparently even managed to make it to MacGregor dealers in the Midwest and on the East Coast. And after three years of M19 production, a sleeker, more spacious 26-foot MacGregor 26X powersailer, powered by a 50- to 70-hp outboard, was introduced in 1995. Since the MacGregor factory was based on building only one model at a time, to maximize the economies of scale, the bigger, more profitable model displaced the little M19. By 2003, eight years after it was introduced, more than 3,000 of Mac 26Xs had been built and shipped to customers in the US and around the world, testifying to MacGregor's astute analysis of the boating market after the disastrous gas crises and resin shortages of the late 1970s and 80s. In 2003 the 26-foot powersailer was redesigned -- not just freshened. The new version, rebadged 26M, was then produced for another ten years until 2013, when Roger MacGregor retired. The original factory in Costa Mesa, CA, shut down and sold the molds to Tattoo Yachts (which used them to build the 26-foot powersailers for a few more years, and may or may not produce more powersailers some day). If you are interested in details, here's a dated MacGregor Sailboat website that still works, https://macgregorsailboats.com/.
The MacGregor powersailors sold well enough that established sailboat builder Hunter tried to "one (foot) up" MacGregor with their design -- the "thinking outside of the box" 27-foot Edge (see https://sailingmagazine.net/article-706-hunter-edge.html for a review). The Edge, introduced around 2009, looked like no other Hunter, carried a 70-hp outboard instead of an inboard diesel, and was produced for only three or four years before being canned. Very few are ever seen on the used boat listings (Sailing Texas' Photo Gallery shows a grand total of two at last count). Similar to that ill-fated Hunter model, only a few hundred M19 powersailers were built over its three year production (I’ve seen estimates of a thousand, tops) before the 26-foot powersailers began their nearly 20-year production run. Because so few M19s were built, they have now attained a bit of a cult following, and unmolested M19s are exceedingly rare, especially on the East Coast. In comparison, the 26-foot Mac powersailers are fairly common seen out on the water and still for sale.
In their marketing videos MacGregor emphasizes the family-fun aspects and safety of their powersailers, but when you sail on the Upper Chesapeake, there are other more powerful (so to speak) advantages. Years ago I kept my Hunter 25.5 on the Sassafras River, and we had a seven mile, hour-and-a-half, motor out to the Bay. Narrow and winding, there usually wasn’t enough wind to sail in the river, and there were always plenty of powerboat wakes on any summer weekend, just in case you did happen to find some breeze. I figure that a Mac 19 could easily make the same trip, laughing at the wakes, in about 15 or 20 minutes.
Although I was not the first to respond to the Sailing Texas ad, I was the first to show up and take a look. It was indeed a genuine Mac 19, built in 1993, in very good shape, which the owners had acquired earlier in the spring of 2017. The Mac was out of the water and resting on its custom trailer, all cleaned up, and the bottom had been freshly painted. One of the big selling points that the MacGregor sales brochures extolled was the amount of space: in the cockpit, in the cabin, and storage. And after camp-cruising on my Potter 15, a little more space was an appealing proposition.
I spent a couple of hours with the owner learning more about the boat and its history, took a bunch of photos of the inside, and we fired up the 40-hp Mercury outboard. We spread the sails out on the lawn -- main, jib, and genoa. The boat’s original owner had purchased the boat in Ohio, and for the next twenty or so years he sailed it out of the Chester River on the upper Chesapeake Bay. The boat had subsequently been donated to a maritime museum's fundraising program. After one season the second owners, who were admittedly not sailors but had bought the boat intending to learn, decided that a sailboat that could operate like a powerboat was NOT a very good powerboat. They used the Mac 19 for fishing, and for just tooling around, but found the cockpit and cabin too confining. And, standing in the cockpit, you are well above the water -- probably far from ideal for casting or landing a fish. So they were getting rid of the Mac 19 to buy a center console powerboat that would be much more appropriate.
The spars were stored up in the garage rafters. I asked the owner, How many times did you rig the boat? Answer: “Only once. And that was enough.” I replied, “That’s what I was afraid you were going to say,” and we both laughed. We left the spars up in the rafters; it was too late in the season to take the boat out on the water, anyhow.
I headed back home to think about what I had seen and heard. The asking price for the Mac was high, but the boat and the sails were in very good condition. The owners had taken good care of the boat over more than two decades, the gelcoat was shiny, and the outboard had been serviced by the local Mercury service guru over the summer, who gave it a clean bill of health. And the Mac was in mostly original, un-messed-up condition, although there was a bunch of “extra” stuff that the owner could not explain, and some of it even had me stumped. I tried to decipher as much as I could from my photos and by searching the internet. When I got home I checked the NADA prices and guesstimated what a replacement 40-hp outboard would cost (thinking worst case...eeks!). I also learned that one of the weak points of the early Mac powersailers is their centerboard pendant and pulley -- something I neglected to check by climbing underneath the boat during my inspection. I felt that, given the amount of money involved, another trip down to look would be worth the trouble. The owner let me know that other interested parties were planning to drive up to see the boat and close a deal. And after some reflection I made a low-ball offer, contingent on an inspection of the centerboard well and gear.
The owner countered my bid by raising the ante just a bit, and proposing that he hang on to the GPS that he had bought for the boat. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was so close to a deal. Fortunately I had just purchased a new vehicle, but as yet untested in tow mode. So this would be a grand experiment once we wrapped up the final inspection, finances, and paperwork; and I took a day off and met again with the owner to complete the process. Everything looked good, we signed a sales agreement, I wrote out a check, and we loaded up the sails and anything else I could fit into my van. I would return with a set of new wheels and tires that we would mount onto the trailer to make sure that the boat got safely home. The check cleared, the weather cooperated, and the MacGregor 19 powersailer was soon parked in a recently cleared-out garage, waiting for warmer sailing weather in the spring.
To be continued...
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